What is the Good Life? Positive Psychology and the Renaissance of Humanistic Psychology

Abstract

Positive and humanistic psychology overlap in thematic content and theoretical presuppositions, yet positive psychology explicitly distances itself as a new movement, despite the fact that its literature implicitly references its extensive historical grounding within humanistic psychology. Consequently, humanistic psychologists both celebrate diffusion of humanistic ideas furthered by positive psychology, and resent its disavowal of the humanistic tradition. The undeniably close alignment of these two schools of thought is demonstrated in the embracing of eudaimonic, in contrast to hedonic, conceptions of happiness by positive psychology. Eudaimonic happiness cannot be purely value-free, nor can it be completely studied without using both nomethetic and idiographic (i.e., quantitative and qualitative) methods in addressing problems of value, which identifies positive psychology clearly as a humanistic approach, despite its protestations.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This study was originally presented as part of a symposium at the 2007 Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, California. The symposium was titled, “Positive and Humanistic Psychology: Toward a Rapprochement.” I thank the members of that symposium for the stimulating conversation about our essays. Thank you in particular to Harris Friedman, Kirk Schneider, Laura King, Shane Lopez, and Christopher Peterson, who helped to make the symposium a success. Thank you to Harris Friedman for also helping with some editing and proofreading of this draft. Your good work is appreciated. In addition, I am very appreciative of Scott Churchill, who expressed, as Editor, our great obligation to set the right tone to genuinely foster the possibility of more conversation among humanistic and positive psychologists. I hope my article is received in that spirit.