Positive Psychology, what's not to like

Imagine a psychology that can tell you how to live a happy fulfilled life, and to do this not on the basis of the received wisdom of religion or politics but to do it on the basis of science.

This is a psychology that would stand in contrast to negative psychology, the psychology of distress and illness, but rather it would be a psychology that would help to create scientific understanding and well founded interventions that would allow individuals, their families and communities to thrive.
The labeling of the rest of psychology as negative has been dropped, but the notion that positive psychology is something apart from the rest of the discipline has remained.  In order to replace the DSM positive psychology has come up with its own set of Character Strengths and Virtues (Peterson and Seligman, 2004).

I intend to look at these in some depth as time goes by, but right now I just want to get my  initial thoughts down, before I do too much reading of both Positive Psychology and the small body of critical work around it.

• Positive Psychology is as much a moral project as it is a scientific project
• Positive Psychology is deliberately ahistorical
• Positive Psychology mistakenly claims that the character strengths described are (or should be) universal

I will also look at each of the character strengths, probably starting with Transcendence as that is the one that contains Spirituality.

• Wisdom and Knowledge
• Courage
• Humanity
• Justice
• Temperance
• Transcendence

So at the moment this is just immediate reaction stuff.

I am a little perturbed by the claims that it is necessary to be spiritual to be authentically happy and thanks to David Webster I am more than a little skeptical of some of the claims made in the name of spirituality, http://dispirited.org/.


I dislike the trumpeting of positive psychology being some shiny new thing.

"For the last half century psychology has been consumed with a single topic only—mental illness—and has done fairly well with it” (Seligman, 2002 p. xi)

I don't think that claim will hold up, but the other thing that a move like this does is to deliberately underplay possible contributions from elsewhere in psychology.

Other authors, but particularly Held (2002) have pointed out the relationships between Positive Psychology and Humanistic Psychology. As far as I can tell, and it is too early to be really sure, it looks like Positive Psychology is doing to Humanistic Psychology what psychology as a whole has done to Freud. Rip off various appealing concepts, repackage them in a scientific framework, and then rule out the earlier contributions as none scientific nonsense that we are better off without.

Kurt Danziger (1997) writing about the attempt to create a psychology of motivation based on universal human needs suggested that:

"Elevating one set of historically contingent conventions to the status of universal human needs not only emphasized their importance for the society in which they originated but provided a rationale for proselytizing efforts elsewhere." (Danziger, 1997 p123).

Well that is enough for a Sunday evening.

References
Danziger, K. (1997). Naming the mind: How psychology found its language. London: Sage.
Held, B. (2005). The “Virtues” of Positive Psychology. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 25:1 p1-34
Peterson, C. & Seligman, M.E.P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues A Handbook and Classification. Washington, D.C.: APA Press and Oxford University Press.
Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Authentic happiness: Using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment. NY: The Free Press.