The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures

Abstract

Contemporary therapeutic ethos is tightly associated with the culture and industry of happiness. Positive psychology, presented as a revolutionary, scientific, and universal―and therefore ultimate―understanding of what human happiness is and how it can be achieved, has played an essential role in this in the last two decades. Nevertheless, despite its popular and academic influence on a global scale, the field seems to have neither fulfilled its scientific ambitions nor offered something substantially new from its cultural and popular predecessors. On the contrary, the field should be seen as the latest and most influential manifestation of a North American spiritual tradition long convinced that happiness and misery, health and illness, are individual mind productions. In this regard, the purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, to raise epistemological concerns related to positive psychology’s presentation of old, spiritualistic, and ethnocentric ideas as new, scientific, and universal truths about human happiness. Second, to show the strong continuity of positive psychology’s assumptions and therapeutic techniques with New Thought metaphysics, a popular and religious movement that since the years of Phineas P. Quimby has been consecrated to bringing science and spirituality together in the understanding of human health and happiness.

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 — 49 citations exist upstream.