Excerpts from The New York Times article:
Dr. William Glasser, a psychiatrist who published more than two dozen books promoting his view that mental health is mostly a matter of personal choice, a precept that found a vast popular audience and influenced teachers, drug counselors and personal therapists, died on Aug. 23 in Los Angeles. He was 88.
Dr. Glasser’s first popular book, “Reality Therapy,” published in 1965, sold 1.5 million copies. It became the foundation for a series of how-to books about resolving emotional and mental problems by accepting responsibility for them. By avoiding the urge to blame others, or to relive past hurts, Dr. Glasser asserted, people could find happiness essentially by choosing behaviors that improved their relationships, and increased their chances for happiness.
“We choose everything we do, including the misery we feel,” he wrote in a 1998 book called “Choice Theory: A New Psychology of Personal Freedom.” “Other people can neither make us miserable nor make us happy.” He added, “Choice theory teaches that we are much more in control of our lives than we realize.”
But unlike some new therapies, Dr. Glasser’s was emphatically drug-free and built on traditions of self-reliance and some core principles, among them:
■ That the only person one controls in the world is oneself.
■ That the effort to change others is doomed and, worse, is the actual cause of most emotional problems.
■ That to meet the most profound human need — “to love and be loved,” as Dr. Glasser put it — people must repair strained relations with their family, friends and co-workers by adjusting the one variable within their control: their own behavior.
Dr. Glasser trained therapists and others mainly through the William Glasser Institute, a nonprofit organization he founded outside Chicago. In his book “Choice Theory,” he summarized its strategy as helping patients and schoolchildren to shift their view of reality fundamentally — from one where behavior is controlled externally by coercion, to one where individuals control their own behavior in an atmosphere of “love, friendship, negotiation and trust.”
Asked in a 2002 interview whether his theories were naïve, as some critics contended, Dr. Glasser said naïveté was no sin if the methods worked, and he insisted that they did.
“I am naïve,” he said, but added, “People listen to me.”
In a 1984 interview with The Los Angeles Times, Dr. Glasser said he formulated his basic ideas while serving his residency at the V.A. hospital.
“What they taught, in effect, was that you aren’t responsible for your miserable problems because you are the victim of factors and circumstances beyond your control,” he said. “I objected to that. My thrust was that patients have to be worked with as if they have choices to make. My question is always, ‘What are you going to do about your life, beginning today?’ ”
At the end of his residency, he added, “I was thrown off the staff.”
– The New York Times, William Glasser, 88, Doctor Who Said One Could Choose Happiness , Is Dead – September 4, 2013
