But I was really disillusioned about psychology here because it was the heyday of behaviorism and it was all about what you could learn from rats running in mazes and that was a long shot from Carl Jung and I didn't see how I could really -- I was looking frankly for some other work to do.
By the way, during that period I took a course in English as a second language at the university, actually it's called the rhetoric one or something and it was essentially what now would be ESL course. And the end of the term assignment was that you choose one American periodical from a list of five and then read them carefully, several issues and then try to describe what the magazine was about. It's a literary magazine so it was the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Paris Review and a couple other things like. And I chose the New Yorker and a couple other things like that and then I asked the professor if I could, instead of writing the assignment, whether I could send a story to the New Yorker and see if they'd publish it and the teacher, of course, laughed at me and said well okay, that's kind of crazy, but why don't you do that. . So I did it and, low and behold they accepted it for a publication. And that was before I knew English really. I mean all I knew before coming here was what I learned from comic strips that were published in the American Daily in Rome, in Italy, which was an American Newspaper and they had the comic strips, mostly Pogo strips and they were very interesting and I loved that strip, but again that was kind of a disillusionment because it turned out that nobody spoke like those critters from the swamp.
Rob: So what is the article about that you got in?
MC: Oh, it was a short story, just a few pages, based on my experience of the end of the World War. And it was autobiographical, kind of, but it wasn't a raw account. it was more of like a dramatic description of how it felt like and so forth. So it was . So it was over fifty years ago, I re-read it. it wasn't bad. And after that I wrote another one a couple of years later for the the New Yorker, which they published, but -- so I thought I could have other directions than psychology. I took courses in design at the University of Illinois with a very nice guy who was a very good artist. He has work at the Museum of Modern Art , MOMA, in New York and so forth. And I always liked to draw, so I worked on design things with him, but it didn't feel as good as psychology in many ways. And I did psychology that I liked.
So after moving to the University of Chicago, I got some teachers there who were much more broad minded than the ones I encountered earlier at Illinois and who kind of helped me to work on issues that I was interested in. And so I worked and I did my dissertation on creativity, the artist and, by studying students at the Art Institute of Chicago and trying to see what was different about them and compare to normal so-called normal students. But, there was one thing that I really kind of -- now in retrospect, I knew that it was a big issues, although at that time I couldn't put my finger on it very clearly, but it was that all of psychology, at the time, was focused on essentially pathological issues and nobody was interested in the kind of thing that simply make life worthwhile. And creativity was one of those and that's why I liked to do my dissertation, but most people who studied creativity were interested in the cognitive aspects, not in how it made it people feel and how it contributed to a sense of meaning and mission in life and so forth. And that's why I was interested because that's what was missing, at the end of the war from people an internal compass or a feeling that despite everything life had purpose of meaning and significance and so forth.
So, anyway, when I then finished my degree then I started teaching in a college, Lake Forest College] as you mentioned before, and then I talked to the department of sociology and anthropology because they were really interesting people. One of my classmates from Chicago had been teaching there in that department and I thought that would be a more interesting place than the psychology department, and so in fact I became chairman of that department after three years at Lake Forest, but I didn't know anything. I never took a course in sociology and anthropology, but I figured I could learn and I was always one step ahead of the students in learning the book so I could teach it and it was fun and so forth.
But, at the end, after five years at Lake Forest -- I was teaching a senior seminar for the students and I gave them two or three topics that interested me to choose from and that's what we would be holding the seminar on and one of the topics was play among adults, not children, but adults, and that's the one that the students chose. So we started the seminar and there each of the students to go and studied some people -- adults -- who were doing something that they didn't have to do but that they did it simply for the pleasure of doing it. And so one student studied a hockey team, one student looked at a soccer team, another one looked at a musical group and so forth. So they looked at people -- adults -- and interviewed and put it all down-- a similar set of questions. And when they came back we put their findings on a blackboard, it took several hours to put it all down, and then we looked at it and we tried to see what's common to them. And we were very surprised, I more than any of the kids, but I was surprised how similar the accounts of people who were doing very different things, essentially, how they described how it felt-- music, hockey, swimming, soccer, whatever. They all mentioned more or less the same things about how it felt like focused attention and forgetting your troubles and forgetting yourself and they mentioned that what was making all this possible is that they have a challenge, a clear goal, and they got feedback as they proceeded and so -- and as I was looking at that, I remembered that, gee, that's what I -- when I was a kid during the end of world war, one of the things that helped me a lot was that one of my uncles taught me to play chess. I was nine years old and I loved to play chess. And when the war really came close and the buildings collapsed around us and there were fire bombs and this and that, that if I played chess I wouldn't actually notice that; or if I noticed it, I wouldn't care about it.
And so I knew that there was this kind of experience that you could get when you're focused on something that had a clear goal and it was somewhat difficult to achieve and you have to use all of your capacities to achieve that goal and so forth. So that kind of seemed very familiar after awhile, and so at that point we called that the auto-telic experience, which meant -- the auto-telic is Greek word which means self contained or self goals- goal is inside what you're doing. And the Greek philosophers wrote about that and I -- so -- in a sense it was a rediscovery of what some of the Greek philosophers had noticed before, but they then let it go whereas I kept kept working at it And then after awhile, because somebody knew what an auto-telic experience was, I changed and said well let's call it Flow Experience because so many of the interviews we had described it as being carried away by a current, by being spontaneous, effortlessly moving with what's going on; even though it was n'tan effortless and it was difficult, but it felt kind of -- well like flow, so we called it flow experience.
And then everybody said oh yeah, flow sure, I have that experience, and it was really amazing how just switching that term made it suddenly accessible to almost everybody. And anyway, so that was -- I started writing this up with one or two of the students in that course, we wrote one the first article on flow was actually published in the American Anthropologist, which is the best anthropology journal,,because there we included examples from different play forums and different cultures and different ages and so forth. And that anthropologist was the first who picked it up and then slowly psychologists began to say hmm, that's maybe interesting. And then slowly became essentially one of the foundations of what since then has became positive psychology, which actually started only about seventeen years ago when Martin Seligman and I ran into each other on a beach in Hawaii and he stopped me and said are you Mike Csikszentmihalyi? I said yes, so he introduced himself and we walked back to the hotel and we had four days overlap there, and during those four days we decided to start positive psychology because he was just about ready to become the next president of the APA and the American Psychological Association. And he was thinking of leaving a legacy at the end of his -- not the end, but a combination of his career to make a difference for the future and he knew about my work and he thought that we could do something together and we wrote the first introductory article to positive psychology; which was published in the American Psychologist in 2000.. And after that, positive psychology became a big hit all over the world and it's growing -- almost too fast I think that it's growing. And -- so it's all a lot of coincidences in all of this from -
Rob: I think that you guys must have gotten together before that because he was some president of APA in 1998 and I know that there was a lot going on in the previous four or five years before that with the akumal conference and things like that.
MC: Yeah, that Akumal conference was something we organized together, yep and that was -- I think I had a hand in that. We thought we would bring together people what could be done and I insisted that if we did that we should invite people who were less than thirty years old because according to many studies, you -- new ideas are really being picked up by those who are not committed to old conceptual or theoretical methodological frameworks and who are still looking for something new and so forth. And so because Seligman was much better known than I, and he was already on the cusp of becoming president of APA. He wrote to fifty of the most established psychologists in the country and said, could you nominate young people that have worked with you whom you think would be interested in these ideas and he just summarized them in a few sentences, and who you think has a chance of becoming a chair of a psychology department by age fifty. And, so that was kind of an interesting recommendation, and that we worked out that out that kind of double-edged requirement together and low and behold, all of the people he wrote to answered and sent us names. So we then wrote to those young people who none of use really knew personally, but were recommended by the best in the country.
So we wrote to them and said well would you like to come to a place in Mexico where we could find -- we would give you food and lodging and we would have a week to talk together about this issue? And could you send us a a CV and kind of a declaration of where you want to go. So, okay, so after these fifty people who sent us recommendations, we chose twenty who seemed the most promising and we invited these twenty young people to a set of kind of villas that were on the seashore in Akumai, and this belonged to the Grateful Dead-- the band, you know the rock group and they didn't use it year round so they rented it for most of the year and we could get those at the end of -- generally of -- I guess it was 1999 . So they all came and we had a great, great week. We never put on a pair of shoes or a jacket or anything, which Jerry Garcia's -- a big room where in this house. and then whenever we got tired we would go into the Cenote, which is kind of a --
Rob: Underground cavern with an underground river. Cenote.
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