How does one know that the ending to Invitation to a Beheading is actually positive rather than negative? One could always think that if they want, but I found the book too abstract for Nabokov to intend a negative ending. What would be the point? Typically when a book ends with a downturn, there's a specific reason for this. But there is none in Invitation to a Beheading, instead there's too much momentum in Cincinnatus' internal development to view is as anything but personal growth and triumph.

With that said, there's an interesting article in the September edition of Harper's, The War on Unhappiness: Goodbye Freud, Hello Positive Thinking, which advises of a new trend in therapeutic psychology that downplays the theories of the subconscious and instead focuses upon conscious restructuring of patients' thinking processes. Its an approach that some claim is working wonders in the "particularly challenging glitch" of PTSD sufferers and will begin to really progress psychology forward in its rate of success and efficiency:

Aaron Beck discoverd that the dreams of depressed patients, contrary to Freud's theories about dreams and depression, were not filled with images of repressed anger. Instead, they contained themes of the dreamers' conscious lives: loss, defeat, rejection, and abondonment. It appeared, Beck said, that there wasn't as much of a gap between conscious and unconscious as Freud claimed, and, even more revolutionary, that the conscious mind, especially our thoughts, shaped our experience. Our lives, in other words, are neither good nor bad but thinking makes them so.

Beck concluded that Freud got us wrong. We aren't hopelessly complex or helplessly in thrall to the chaotic forces of the unconscious, nor do we need to settle for unhappiness, common or otherwise. In keeping with emergent congnitive scince that likended the mind to a computer, [cognitive behavioral therapy] attributed our misery to faulty information processing. We possess the potential to see the world as it is, to master ou experience, and to triumph over setback, if only we learn to think right. Identify and repair the glitches in our operating system-- dysfunctinal thoughts that arise automatically from our unduly negative core beliefs-- and we will find no adversity we cannot meet with resilience.

While cognitive behavioral therapy has been around for some time, its movement to "positive psychology" is the innovation:

Martin Seligman, past president of the American Psychological Association and the inventor of positive psychology, is giving us the good news..... At the beginning he was content to reorient psychology away from Freud's focus on pathology and towards a "science of happiness", but he recently decided that his goals were too modest. "I had thought that positive psychology was about happiness, but it is not," he says. "Positive psychology is about well-being," which is "what people choose to do when they are not oppressed, when they choose freely," Well-being comprises not only the the positive emotion we call happiness, but also meaning ("using what's best inside you to belong to and serve something bigger than you are"), positive relationships, and "achievment, mastery, and competence." Well-being on a wide scale results in a state Seligman calls "human flourishing". (emphasis added)