At the Crossroads of Humanistic Psychology and Positive Psychology

There were many disturbing errors in Alan Waterman's lead article in the April 2013 issue of the American Psychologist—“The Humanistic-Positive Psychology Divide: Contrasts in Philosophical Foundations” (Waterman, 2013). Fortunately, there was a robust response in the January 2014 issue from humanistic psychologists (Churchill & Mruk, 2014; Friedman, 2014; Morley, 2014; Serlin, 2014; Schneider, 2014) that hopefully begins to set the record straight for readers of the original article. But the misrepresentations of our field in the flagship journal of the APA were unfortunately left to fester in the minds of readers long after the article first appeared and our responses were written; thus, I am not so sure that a handful of commentaries on the article appearing almost a year later will do much to effectively offset the prevailing misconceptions that colleagues continue to harbor with regard to our field.

It was encouraging that multiple respondents picking up on some of the same misconceptions served to reinforce our criticisms of Waterman. Most egregious was Waterman's contention that for humanistic psychologists, communication poses a problem because of our allegedly solipsistic philosophical base, with Waterman citing the writings of Camus and Sartre as justification for such an attribution. There is of course much in Camus and Sartre that humanists can embrace, but certainly not the pervasive sense of despair and isolation that Waterman attributes to these writers. (As one measure, there have been no articles published in our journal in recent years that even mention Camus, and only two that discuss Sartre's ontology.) It was encouraging to have James Morley, the newly appointed editor of the Journal of Phenomenological Psychology join in the collective response to Waterman, as he was able to underline some of the philosophical issues that Waterman got wrong. We welcome him into our midst as a new consulting editor for our journal, as well as a candidate for our executive board. Ilene Serlin, Harris Friedman, and Kirk Schneider also weighed in with their well-conceived counter-arguments to Waterman, as did my former Duquesne roommate and current associate editor Chris Mruk together with myself in our joint response. (I am proud to note that all six authors of the commentaries selected for the American Psychologist are currently on the masthead of The Humanistic Psychologist. See also Brent Robbins’ [in press] forthcoming response.)

Composing my reply to Waterman afforded me the opportunity to conduct, with the help of my former journal assistant Angela Howey, an assessment of the content of all issues of THPsince I became editor. With the 60-day deadline for a reply looming over our heads, we literally hunkered down on the floor of my office with all the issues pulled from my bookshelf (on a nice summer day, no less), sifting through each article to identify its focus and method. The statistics are worth repeating here: First of all, a respectable 10% of our article content, including two special issues (36,2; 37,1), has been devoted to the interface between humanistic and positive psychologies. Beyond this documentation of interest on the part of humanistic psychologists to engage with positive psychology, we also noted that there has been a noticeable shift towards a research emphasis in the work of contemporary humanistic psychologists, with 49 articles (42%) representing empirical research and another 18 (or 15%) on research methodology, with eight special issues being devoted to “methods.” Let it be noted that of our research articles in the aforementioned sample, 69.3% were qualitative, 16.3% were purely quantitative, and 14.3% represented mixed-methods. Thus with over 30% of our research articles representing quantitative methods, it is not fair to say that humanistic psychologists are too tied to their philosophical foundations to show interest in the “nomological” objectives of positive psychology. Indeed, one of the benefits of the merger in 2004 of The Humanistic Psychologist with Methods: A Journal for Human Science was the engendering of a more dedicated commitment to the publication of research-based articles and methodology. In his lead article in The American Psychologist, Waterman made reference to just one single article in the entire history of our Society's journal as a foundation for his argument. Ironically, he borrowed heavily from that paper's structure in the organization of his own, while drawing conclusions diametrically opposed to those of our contributor (Friedman, 2008).

When published articles in the leading journal of our field can pass through the editorial review process without being questioned for having failed to demonstrate due diligence in reviewing the relevant literature, it shows that not only are the authors of such articles able to get away with being aloof to historical fact, but that the very colleagues to whom we entrust the peer review process can also be aloof to historical fact. And when such a state of affairs exists, then how do we maintain any control over the impressions people have of us?

One of the areas that continues to be a bone of contention between humanistic and positive psychologists, exemplified here by Waterman (who is on the editorial board of the Journal of Positive Psychology) is in our different conceptions of the place of happiness. Sometimes when one represents a view that embraces a phenomenon in its ambiguity—such as humanistic psychologists affirming that happiness and despair lie on two ends of a continuum (and perhaps even as dialectical alternatives)—then it is likely that those who see this ambiguity “ambivalently” (Merleau-Ponty, 1960/1964, pp. 100–108) will tend to “totalize” (Erikson, 1968, pp. 74–90) one side of the dialectic over the other, and will accuse those representing the phenomenon in its full ambiguity of only taking up the “side” of the dialectic that is “opposite” to their own totalization. This may be the case with Waterman's totalization of humanistic psychology as negative, pessimistic, and preoccupied with a tragic sense of despair. But what we have been trying to emphasize all along is that we recognize this full spectrum that embraces both the happiness of the individual and the individual's despair, “both sides” of the dialectic. Perhaps from his own position on the “happiness” side, Waterman can only see what he calls the “divide” between us (which may in turn be seen as ironic from “our” perspective). In his excellent earlier treatment of eudaimonia, Waterman (2008) observed:

It is certainly true that psychologists working with eudaimonic constructs place their work in the context of Aristotle's contributions regarding eudaimonia. However, the research being conducted today has greater connections with philosophical perspectives of contemporary eudaimonist philosophers than with Aristotle's original contributions. (p. 241)

He then enumerated four main differences between the Aristotelian and contemporary philosophical positions on eudaimonia. His second “bullet point” is revealing:

Whereas Aristotle viewed eudaimonia in terms of a person's life as a whole, I along with contemporary eudaimonist philosophers, have taken the position that the subjective experience of eudaimonia could be studied as a function of discrete aspects of one's life, rather than one's life as a whole. (p. 241)

It may be that precisely where we disagree with positive psychologists is in their examination of happiness outside of the context of the “whole” of a person's life, which would certainly include moments of despair and other such “negative” attunements that humanists, following Chinese Taoist philosophers, see as a part of the “yin and the yang” of life. Indeed, as Robbins (in press) will argue, it may be that humanistic psychologists are more faithful to the Aristotelian position than “positivistic” positive psychologists (Mruk 2008, 2013) who have modernized Aristotle and streamlined his thinking to fit their needs.

With regard to philosophical foundations, which the original article's title indicates as its central concern, Waterman significantly misrepresents both current and past incarnations of humanistic psychology's ontological and epistemological foundations. On the basis of all five responses, it seems safe to say that we believe he gets it wrong on two very important issues: his mischaracterizations of our ontological foundation as hopelessly individualist, and his implication that epistemologically we cannot really know (or even communicate effectively with) other people because of our existentialist “appreciation of individual isolation and aloneness” (p. 127). With regard to the first point, Waterman exaggerated the relationship of humanistic psychology to existentialist philosophers, in particular Sartre and Camus. The worst offense, however, is his mischaracterization of humanistic psychologists as hopelessly “individualist”:

Experience is viewed as something inherently individual and thus intersubjectivity is a problem that can only be partially resolved. Communication is, by necessity, unreliable.…For humanistic psychologists, establishing connections between people is seen as problematic, whether in normal social interaction or … psychotherapy (Waterman, 2013, p. 127).

As readers of this journal already know, nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, humanistic psychotherapies (see Cain & Seeman, 2002) are built upon a deeply felt philosophical understanding and appreciation of encounter and encounterings), both in our ontological commitments and in our epistemological outlook. We simply refer the reader here to the newly released second edition of the Handbook of Humanistic Psychology (Schneider, et al., 2014) for ample references to the communicative foundations of humanistic practice in a diverse array of theories and methodologies, to correct Waterman's rather misinformed claims.

The hallmark of phenomenology, which has increasingly served as one of the prominent philosophical foundations for humanistic psychology, is its fundamental emphasis on relationality (see Churchill & Wertz, 2014), beginning with Heidegger's (1921-1922/2001) early lectures on Aristotle, in which he argued vehemently against the Cartesian starting point taken by other philosophers (including positivists), in favor of a hermeneutically-clarified Aristotelian philosophy that would direct us toward the “always already” relational aspects of our experience. I want to reiterate this point from our (Churchill & Mruk, 2014) published commentary, because one of Waterman's claims is that positive psychologists have a foundation in Aristotle that gives them a higher moral ground on which to stand, than humanistic psychologists, who he sees as tethered to the French existentialists’ post-war concerns with individual isolation and loss of hope. We drew attention to Heidegger because of Heidegger's own intellectual foundation in a careful reading of Aristotle—a reading that taught him that we must think of our own being not in terms of “substance” [the traditional reading of Aristotle's concept of ousia]—namely, what positive psychologists would find “measurable” in the human being (e.g., “happiness” reduced to a variable to be measured and correlated with other variables). Rather, humanistic psychologists—following Heidegger's reading of Aristotle—understand the ousia that characterizes the human “kind” of being as referring to human beings or persons in the how of their being—which includes at its very heart, our being together with others. As we move forward, then, let us try to emphasize in our future publications that our philosophical foundations establish relationality as a fundamental tenet of humanistic psychology, and that our psychotherapies and other practices are founded in this understanding. Indeed, the interest on the part of humanistic psychologists over the past several years to engage in dialogue with positive psychologists is itself evidence of our commitment to dialogue and our comfort with communication.

In the final paragraph of Waterman's article, he excused positive psychology from reciprocating our interest in dialogue by suggesting that we have become irrelevant. After nailing the coffin shut on humanistic psychology, he then proceeded to wax poetic on positivistic psychology's “vibrant” future. But from our perspective, his assessment is perhaps more reflective of his having come to premature—and unfounded—foreclosure on the issue, than of any true “divide” that he would purport to exist. We in the humanistic tradition never stop believing in the power of dialogue.