The human being is so complex that there is no single way to study it through psychology. Given that there are various methodologies, work philosophies and ways of conceiving what the objective of psychologists should be, there are also different currents of psychology. Some of them are practically opposite, and others are complementary; In any case, knowing them helps a lot to understand human nature.
In this article we will review the principles of positive psychology one of the most important currents, heir to humanistic psychology developed decades ago by researchers such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.
As its name suggests, positive psychology takes a view of the human experience that places emphasis not on deficits in health and well-being, but on the potential for development; that is, in that which can be improved even though it already exists in some form or another in the individual. This way of seeing things has been disseminated above all by psychologists Martin Seligman and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, and in the following lines you will find a summary of the key ideas on which it is based.
1. Personal development is a dynamic process
One of the central concepts of positive psychology is personal development, which allows us to give meaning to our lives through projects that connect with our values and they are important to us beyond the pleasure they produce when doing them. Now, personal development is not a transition that goes from initial stages with little value to other stages that bring us a lot of happiness; It is a dynamic process, in the sense that there is no moment that by itself is much more important than the rest. If these types of experiences give us anything, it is their ability to place us in the present moment and know how to appreciate it beyond our expectations for what is to come.
There are those who assume that well-being is simply the lack of things that go wrong; For example, the absence of diseases that damage our organs or our cells, of stressful stimuli coming from the environment, etc. From this perspective, there would be a natural and “default” way of being in the world, and unless things go wrong, we will be fine.
Positive psychology provides a very different way of understanding the experience of living as a human being: in this, It is totally arbitrary to assume that it is natural that there are no accidents, setbacks and events that sabotage our well-being Problems are as much a part of life as the lack of them, and any emotional management and personal development project should consider them. The point is not to try to suppress these types of elements at all costs, because it would be a totally impossible mission; The important thing is to adapt to the circumstances without assuming that we cannot improve our situation once the events that have harmed us have occurred.
3. Subjectivity itself is an important source of information
Another of the principles of positive psychology has to do with the information from which we should start to manage our emotions, thoughts and behavioral patterns. While some psychological currents propose focusing only on objective information that can be verified by third parties (for example, our way of communicating with others), in positive psychology emphasis is placed on subjective and private psychological processes, those that can only be studied through introspection because they take place “in our heads”
Here you can see the way in which humanist philosophy gave way to positive psychology in the second half of the 20th century; In the same way that humanist thinkers focused on the unique and unrepeatable nature of each individual, this way of understanding psychology leads us not to underestimate private mental events for the simple fact that they do not have an immediate objective expression, and to assume that addressing the problems and individual needs of a human being involves helping them explore their own subjectivity.
4. Happiness is linked to self-knowledge
There is no formula for happiness, since there are as many ways to be happy as there are human beings in the world, or even more, since each individual changes as time goes by. That is why establishing a way of life that provides us with the ability to be happy can only be developed by knowing our real values and interests, fleeing prejudices and social pressure to achieve a certain form of “success”
5. Learning has value in itself
Finally, another of the principles of positive psychology is that learning should not be understood as a process of technical improvement or accumulation of information; Learning is a way of being in the world, of getting involved in motivating and exciting activities capable of showing us facets of ourselves that we did not know.
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