There is perhaps no better way to introduce the concept of positive psychology, than to quote a seemingly small, but very profound, incident in the life of Martin Seligman, who, as President of the American Psychology Association during the late 1990s, set in motion what has now become a powerful movement, the positive psychology movement.
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The story of roses
Although not an experiment, the story of Seligman and his rose garden has become a folk legend in the discipline of positive psychology. By his own account, positive psychology started from an epiphany he experienced while attending to his rose garden.
His daughter, who was 5 at the time, had been trying to get her father’s attention. Seligman turned to her and snapped. Unhappy with this response, his daughter asked him whether or not he remembered how she used to whine when she was 3 and 4?
She told him that when she turned 5 she decided to stop – and if she was able to stop whining, then he was able to stop being a grouch!
This revelation of developing what was right, rather than fixating on what was wrong, sparked what Seligman would go on to promote during his career as APA president: that we should be teaching our children and ourselves to look at our strengths rather than weaknesses (Seligman M & Csikszentmihalyi, M, 2000).
Positive psychology, as the name suggests, is psychology with a positive orientation. It does not imply that the rest of psychology is all negative and useless. In fact, the term “psychology as usual” has been coined to denote the rest of psychology.
Positive psychology can be viewed as the “fourth wave” in the evolution of psychology, the first 3 waves being, respectively, the disease model, behaviorism and humanistic psychology.
This approach contrasts with how , in its early years* (* the second half the 19th century, and the first half of the 20th), the practice of psychology focused mainly on curing psychic ailments, a negative focus.
This orientation was undoubtedly important and useful, and was associated with some of great names in psychology : Sigmund Freud, Adler and Carl Jung. However, over time, psychology began to acquire a negative outlook and character, with its focus on the dark chambers of the human mind, to the near total exclusion of its sunlit uplands.
The Four Waves
The first wave: The disease model
During the second half of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th, psychology was concerned with curing mental disorders, such as schizophrenia and complexes of various kinds ( inferiority, power, electra, oedipus, other). And why not ? There has always been, and will perhaps always be, a significant incidence of mental illness in all communities, irrespective of race or religion, caste or creed.
The attempt of psychologists to cure these ailments was quite natural and laudable, and the work of early psychologists, such as Sigmund Freud, Adler, and Carl Jung was indeed very useful. (Note : It must be added here that of these 3 pioneers, the big 3 of Vienna as they were called, Carl Jung was perhaps the earliest to recognize, and be troubled by, psychology’s negative focus).
Over time, this negative focus pushed psychology into the dark recesses of the human mind and away from the deeper well-springs of human energy and potential. As highlighted by Martin Seligman, in his 2008 TED talk on Positive Psychology in 2008, this negative focus of psychology resulted in three major drawbacks:
- Firstly, psychologists became victimologists and pathologizers (they forgot that people make choices, that they have responsibility).
- Secondly, they forgot about improving normal lives and high talent (the mission to make relatively untroubled people happier, more fulfilled, more productive), and,
- Thirdly, in their rush to repair damage, it never occurred to them to develop interventions to make people happier.
The second wave: Behaviorism
B. F. Skinner of the Harvard University, was the originator, along with John B. Watson and Ivan Pavlov, of this important approach to psychology. Skinner believed that free will was an illusion, and human behavior was largely dependent on the consequences of previous actions.
If a particular behavior attracted the right type of rewards, it had a high probability of being repeated, and if, on the other hand, the behavior attracted punishment, it had a good chance of not being repeated (Schacter, Daniel L., and Gilbert Daniel, 2011).
Skinner believed that, given the right structure of rewards and punishments, human behavior can be totally modified, in almost a mechanical sense.
This theory undoubtedly has much merit, particularly the idea of positive reinforcement, and has relevance to the workplace and the home, in terms of influencing behavior, through a well-conceived reward system. But Skinner’s total rejection of free will is disturbing.
It goes against all that human history stands for – the ultimate, and enduring, triumph of the human spirit against overwhelming odds. Also, his idea of behavior modification, meaning the manipulation of behavior through properly structured rewards, is open to gross abuse by autocrats and dictators, in terms of oppressing their subjects. And not just in society at large, but in the workplace as well. J E R Staddon and Noam Choksy were among Skinner’s major critics (Staddon, J., 1995; Chomsky, Noam 1959).
Criticisms of his theory notwithstanding, Skinner stands tall — a brilliant Harvard psychologist and prolific writer, with 21 books and 180 articles to his credit, and who in a 2002 survey, was voted the most influential psychologist of the twentieth century (Haggbloom, Steven J. et. al, 2002).
The third wave: Humanistic Psychology
This wave is known for two major strands of thought – existentialist psychology (Soren Kierkegaard, Jean Paul Sartre) and humanistic psychology (Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers).
According to Sartre, every human being is responsible for working out his identity and his life’s meaning, through the interaction between himself and his surroundings. No one else can do it for him, least of all a non-existent God. . For this reason, meaning is something truly unique to each person – separate and independent (Jean-Paul Sartre, 1946).
One cannot quarrel with this strand of thought, particularly the responsibility of the individual for his own destiny, but the underlying atheism is disturbing. What about people who cannot, on their own, find their identity and their life’s meaning?
Uncontrollable anxiety would be their inevitable lot, particularly in the absence of faith in a supernatural being, an idea rejected by existentialism. This anxiety is recognized in psychotherapy, is labeled “existential anxiety” and has been a major therapeutic concern of some leading psychologists, particularly Victor Frankl, originator of logo-therapy.
There can be considerable divergence of views on the question “What is life’s meaning?” and , clearly, each one needs to work it out for himself, in his own unique experience and surroundings. Here is a very thoughtful quote from Kierkegaard, arguably the earliest exponent of existentialism,
“What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. (…) I certainly do not deny that I still accept an imperative of knowledge and that through it men may be influenced, but then it must come alive in me, and this is what I now recognize as the most important of all” (Kierkegaard, Soren, 1962).
Humanistic psychology rose to prominence in the mid-20th century in response to the limitations of the disease model discussed earlier (Benjafield, John G., 2010). This approach emphasizes the inherent human drive towards self-actualization, the process of realizing and expressing one’s own capabilities and creativity.
The 5 basic principles or postulates of humanistic psychology are:
- Human beings, as human, supersede the sum of their parts. They cannot be reduced to components.
- Human beings have their existence in a uniquely human context, as well as in a cosmic ecology.
- Human beings are aware and are aware of being aware – i.e., they are conscious. Human consciousness always includes an awareness of oneself in the context of other people.
- Human beings have the ability to make choices and therefore have responsibility.
- Human beings are intentional, aim at goals, are aware that they cause future events, and seek meaning, value, and creativity.
It is hard to miss the significant influence that the humanistic approach has had on positive psychology.
The fourth wave: Positive psychology
As already pointed out earlier in this article, positive psychology is psychology with a positive orientation. It is concerned with authentic happiness and the good life.
The term “positive psychology” first appeared in the last chapter of Abraham Maslow’s book “Motivation and Personality” (1954), the title of which was, “Toward a Positive Psychology.” In this chapter, Maslow maintains that psychology itself does not have an accurate understanding of human potential, and that the field tends not to raise the proverbial bar high enough with respect to maximum attainment.
He wrote,
“The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side; it has revealed to us much about man’s shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his full psychological height. It is as if psychology had voluntarily restricted itself to only half its rightful jurisdiction, and that the darker, meaner half” (Maslow, 1954, p. 354).
The old psychology focused on flaws, overcoming deficiencies, avoiding pain, and an escape from unhappiness. The new psychology, or positive psychology, as it has come to be known, focuses on wellbeing, contentment, excitement, cheerfulness, the pursuit of happiness and meaning in life.
If I may hazard a personal view here, psychology may at last be converging into the quintessence of the world’s great religions. It may be discovering that the key to human evolution lies in a fine blend of the mind and the spirit, or, in purely biological terms, the central nervous system. It may, at last , be moving away from the dark chambers of the human mind into its sunlit uplands.
References
Seligman M & Csikszentmihalyi, M (2000). Positive psychology: An introduction, American Psychologist, 55, 5-14. Also Chapter 1 of Positive Psychology, a publication of mheducation.co.uk
Schacter, Daniel L., and Gilbert Daniel. (2011). Psychology. (2 ed.). New York, 2011.
Staddon, J. (1995) On responsibility and punishment. The Atlantic Monthly, Feb., 88−94. Staddon, J. (1999) On responsibility in science and law. Social Philosophy and Policy, 16, 146-174. Reprinted in Responsibility. E. F. Paul, F. D. Miller, & J. Paul (eds.), 1999. Cambridge University Press, pp. 146−174.
Chomsky, Noam (1959). “Reviews: Verbal behavior by B. F. Skinner”. Language 35 (1): 26–58. JSTOR 411334.
Haggbloom, Steven J.; Warnick, Jason E.; Jones, Vinessa K.; Yarbrough, Gary L.; Russell, et al. (2002). “The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century”. Review of General Psychology 6 (2): 139–152.
Jean-Paul Sartre. “Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre 1946″ .
Kierkegaard, Soren. Works of Love. Harper & Row, Publishers. New York, N.Y. 1962.
Benjafield, John G. (2010). A History of Psychology: Third Edition. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press. pp. 357–362.
Bugental, J. (1964). The third force in psychology. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 4(1), 19-26.
Greening, T. (2006). Five basic postulates of humanistic psychology. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 46(3), 239-239.
Professor T.S. Srinivasan is currently Visiting Professor in three of India’s national institutes of management – at Lucknow, Kashipur, and Trichy. Formerly, Professor, International Management Institute, at Delhi, India, and at Kiev, Ukraine.
Professor Srinivasan has more than 30 years of experience in management education and training, including industrial experience of twelve years. He also attended the Indian Institute of Management, India’s top business school for nearly half a century.
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