Building Bridges Between Humanistic and Positive Psychology

Abstract

The relationship between positive psychology and humanistic psychology has been a strained one. Humanistic psychology shares with positive psychology the key aims of identifying and investigating positive experiences, traits, and institutions, which is how positive psychology was defined broadly. By adopting a humanistic approach to positive psychology, it may be possible for positive psychology to resolve what may be internally incoherent positions, such as the inherent discord between positivist epistemology and Aristotle's virtue theory. A humanistic approach to positive psychology would would draw upon the theoretical roots of humanistic psychology, including phenomenology, personalism, and existentialism. It would tend to endorse a eudaimonic rather than a hedonistic approach to well-being. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches to positive psychology, informed by humanistic psychology's phenomenological epistemology, have the potential to provide internally coherent and integral approaches to investigating virtue theory and eudaimonia as the basis for a humanistic positive psychology.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 44 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.