Misery—like disappointment—has different cultural causes, meanings, and traditions.

A new book on reducing misery looks at neuroscientific research on comparison-making and self-destructiveness.

"How to Be Miserable" urges greater tolerance for discordance, detachment, and self-acceptance.

More than a half-century ago, in 1952, when positive psychology set off a wave of religiously inspired self-help in the U.S. with the release of Norman Vincent Peale’s popular bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich asked in war-torn Austria, in a now-famous exchange with his colleague Kurt Eissler, “Where does the misery come from?”

The timing in each case was not a coincidence. Frustrated by Freud’s argument that psychical suffering was mostly due to internal warfare—a despotic and implacable superego, ruled by unappeasable death instinct—Reich wanted the focus turned outward, “out where the people were,” to take more of the war into account and somehow to treat social dynamics and oppression, tied to the poverty that was then regionwide.

Rethinking the causes of misery appeared necessary in war-torn Europe. However, Reich’s spin on one of Freud’s last best models for our “discontents” oversimplified the type of internal divisiveness that was said to remain, leaving the superego more like a guardian to societal values than, per Freud’s late work, the vehicle for an almost insurmountable hostility, redirected at us without filter or mercy, making us far more miserable than is necessary or useful.

As relevant for the path taken: While Freudian psychoanalysis struggled to calibrate misery’s internal and external causes, the religiously inspired self-belief that Peale marketed across North America eventually hit a roadblock with self-doubt, failure, and self-sabotage, as Freud predicted. By 1957, Peale made the pressure for self-affirmation so unrelenting that he began to view a low opinion of oneself as “an affront to God.” “Never entertain a failure thought,” he admonished fellow Americans, cheering presumptions of their........

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