The Era of Positive Psychology

I am absolutely fascinated by psychology.  How about you?  A common misconception about psychology is that it is only deals with the bad stuff.  That is to say, a lot of people think it only deals with things unhealthy.  So, if you're schizophrenic you should see a psychologist.  If there's a serial killer on the loose, we call in experts to give us a profile of deviant behavior.  Remedying that which ails us is certainly one of the functions of psychology (and a good and decent one at that.) But it is far from the only thing psychologists now do.

I would venture a guess that the world's best known psychologist is Sigmund Freud (or Pavlov.)  Freud talked a lot about the unconscious mind and believed the way to access the unconscious mind is through dreams.  He wrote a book called The Interpretation of Dreams and, to this day, people are constantly talking about the meaning of their dreams.  Speculating about mystical things like the subconscious mind can be a lot of fun.  But the downside is this, Freud died in 1939!  As you might imagine, much has happened in the intervening 70+ years. And a lot of it is really good.

Just over ten years ago two gentlemen got together and founded a new field which they called Positive Psychology.  The name can be a little misleading and a lot of people don't properly understand it.  This isn't that popular psychology (pop-psych) stuff.  The pop-psych gurus are the ones who tell us to use such things as affirmations.  They instruct us to remember, "You're the best, you can do it!"  That whole movement stems from something called Humanistic Psychology.  The main humanistic psychologists were Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers.  While I have tremendous respect for these two men, the truth is that humanistic psychology wasn't totally based in hard data. Translation, a lot of it is less than completely accurate.  Don't get me wrong, there is always a time and a place for, "psych-ing yourself up."  The problem is, it's unstructured and very unpredictable.  Ever try to rally yourself and your spirit by chanting aphorisms?  It often doesn't work.

Along came Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  These two gents have ushered in a new and exciting era of psychology.  The reason they felt compelled to do this is because ever since World War II psychology has, "become a science about healing.  It concentrates on repairing damage within a disease model of human functioning.  This almost exclusive attention to pathology neglects the fulfilled individual and the thriving community.  The aim of positive psychology is to begin to catalyze a change in the focus of psychology from preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building positive qualities."

Simply put the question they're trying to answer is, "What makes life worth living?"  I'm sure you would agree this is a good and worthy question.  And, it's something I will explore often in this blog because scientists are making tremendous headway.  What they are now doing is utilizing the various instruments available to get a quantitative understanding of human happiness.  An example would be Csikszentmihalyi's pioneering ESM (electronic sampling method.)  Some call this new field the science of happiness while others prefer to think of it as the science of human flourishing.  However it is conceived, it's very exciting and holds out much hope for the future.  As I mentioned, this is an area I will speak to often.