COMMENTARIES When the Negative Becomes Positive and the Reverse: Comments on Lazarus’s Critique of Positive Psychology

One of the greatest dramas in the English-language literature of the 20th century is Edward Albee’s (1963) play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The play is gripping to most but repugnant to some. It is funny, but it is also scathing. It is a love story, but hardly Romeo and Juliet (2002). It is a highly creative play, its creativity coming from its extreme irony. That irony has much relevance to the points made by Lazarus (this issue) in his critique of positive psychology in the target article. The dramatic tension in the play comes from the interactions of a young, newly married couple, who are invited for a late-night drink by the middle-aged wife of a stagnant, worn-out college professor. The former pair is polite, sociable, gracious, and cheerful; the latter is grouchy, cantankerous, combative, and full of what we have been told is the poison of marriage—mutual scorn and contempt. The play is peppered with repartee that, on a superficial level, appears to involve the older couple demeaning and insulting themselves, whereas the younger couple shows social niceties both to their hosts and to one another. However, as the play unfolds, the dramatic and profoundly impactful irony becomes evident: The vicious scorn shown by the apparently dysfuntional older couple takes on a meaning that transcends its superficial destructiveness. Indeed, far from being damaging to the relationship, the scornful repartee is revealed to be a surprising source of intense and enduring love. The climax of the play comes when the older woman reveals that no one understands her better than her husband, and that their apparently bitter exchanges are really part of a complex game that gives the emotional expression of one to the other a sense of fulfillment and engagement. The older couple’s behavior is like teasing, which involves negative emotional interaction in the interest of the positive outcomes of playfulness and affiliation. However, it is more intense than teasing and creates love, not just friendship. The play ends with a wonderfully moving scene of the older couple gently touching each other in a thoroughly endearing way. As for the young couple, they exit bickering with each other with the audience fully aware that their social niceties are a sham. The relevance of this drama to the evaluation of positive psychology is its lesson that we must go beyond the appearances created by apparently negative emotional interaction and understand how those appearances can be given a totally different valence by the meaning the couple gives to it. In turn, the meaning emerges from the manner with which the older couple assimilates into their goals the specifics of their interaction. The goal of the older couple, which was to make their put-downs and insults into a paralinguistic chess match of one-upmanship, changed the scorn and contempt of the verbal interactions into an expression of deep intimacy and engagement. The scorn became bonding, not divisive. The emotional interaction of the older couple clearly is not typical, but it creates deep love nonetheless as is evident by the touching final scene. The dramatist’s message? Negative exchanges can in actuality reflect positive affective valence. The dramatist’s creativity? The challenge to the audience to go beyond the manifest emotion it witnesses to a deeper and latent personal meaning. Thus, we can learn several lessons about the nature of emotion from this drama: