Is It Appropriate To Set Happiness As A Therapeutic Objective In Psychology?
It is clear that happiness is a central concept in the way many people decide how they want to live their daily lives. At certain moments, thinking about what is usually understood as happiness can help us decide what to do in order to get more involved in a life project that makes us feel fulfilled, that connects with our concerns, interests and values.
Now, the fact that the idea of ​​”happiness” is important in popular culture does not have to mean that it should be used to set therapeutic goals when going to the psychologist. That is to say… When we attend psychotherapy, is the final goal really to be happy, as is? It sounds good, but… Is it effective and useful to consider this in the context of mental health, couples therapy or family therapy?
As with virtually all terms in popular use that refer to abstract ideas, there are several definitions of what happiness is. What’s more: putting it into words has given rise, in recent decades, to one of the most interesting discussions in the field of Psychology and Philosophy.
It is not surprising that this is so. Ultimately, happiness is not simply an idea that can or should be studied scientifically; also It is a concept with a high cultural load, and specifically moral. Depending on what we consider to be good or bad, we will see happiness as one form or another: there is no objective way to define it, because its very existence already implies that we conceive it from certain values, beliefs and cultural practices.
The analytical approach and the holistic approach to happiness
But beyond these distinctions that have to do with the culture to which we belong, there are also other criteria that lead us to see happiness in one way or another. For example, the fact that we understand it as a sum of smaller parts, or, on the contrary, as a whole.
So, Many times we choose to talk about a type of happiness that is the sum of pleasant moments , situations that satisfy us either sensory or intellectually: climbing mountain peaks, cooking, painting pictures, exercising, etc. This was, for example, the point of view about happiness of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, one of the greatest representatives of the utilitarian school of thought in the 18th and 19th centuries. For this author, happiness could be estimated through what he became known as the “happiness calculus”, in which different variants of pleasure faced different types of displeasure (or physical or emotional pain): the result of this clash of positive and negative elements (in which variables such as intensity, duration, etc. were taken into account) would express the degree to which we are or are not happy.
Another way of understanding happiness that is further removed from Bentham’s hedonistic approach is that it understands happiness as a mental state that can only be understood in its entirety , without stopping to analyze each of its parts separately. In this way it is easier to understand aspects that go beyond short-termism and sensations linked to the “here and now”, something on which the definition we have seen before focused.
If we understand that we are happy when we are doing something with our lives that has important meaning for us, perhaps even something that will outlive us, we are not talking about how pleasant it is to do a task at a certain time and place, but about a happiness that goes beyond space and time. Obviously, we cannot feel happy or unhappy outside of the present moment in which our mental processes take place, but This type of happiness would remain latent in us , to make us feel good the moment we direct our consciousness towards it. For example, for some people it is a great source of happiness to know that they have raised, educated and loved children who live well and feel supported and loved by the family, and this is not a specific activity. Today, there are resources designed in the field of Psychology to study and record this type of happiness as much as possible, such as the Life Satisfaction Scale created by Emmons, Diener, Larser and Griffin.
As we have seen, There is a way to understand happiness that consists of adding or subtracting moments that make us happy or that make us unhappy. This way of approaching the topic of what makes us happy tends to put emphasis on specific events, and especially on the great achievements that bring us pleasure, as well as on the crises that cause everything we took for granted to shake around us. around.
This way of seeing things would imply that to be happy we must try to actively engage in actions that give us hedonic enjoyment; However, scientific research reveals that this type of behavior, although it can bring a lot of satisfaction in the short and medium term, in the long term it fatigues us a lot and even leads us to become obsessed with finding new goals that make us feel as much or more than the previous ones. that we have already achieved.
And everything seems to indicate that happiness has more to do with our way of evaluating our existence in its entirety, and specifically, with the possibility of doing so thanks to the fact that we have emotional stability. If we do not become slaves to the constant pursuit of new moments of great pleasure or very exciting situations, we will be better able to see our lives in perspective and let the feelings about who we are and what we have been doing wash over us completely, without having to put much effort into it.
Now that we have briefly reviewed the concept of happiness, it is time to return to the key question: is it appropriate for psychologists to offer their services with the aim of making patients happy at the end of the process?
The truth is that it should not be the goal to achieve, for several reasons.
First, because Happiness is a basically subjective phenomenon and promising it through the service sector would imply taking absolute control of the patient’s subjectivity, something that, in addition to being impossible, would go against the deontological code of psychologists.
Secondly, because Happiness is not a state of mind that people can “take away” after going to a place : It has a lot to do with context and what is done in the here and now, and no one is happy uninterruptedly for several days in a row.
And thirdly, because happiness is, deep down, the consequence of a set of psychological phenomena over which one can have a significant level of control : These are the ones that should constitute the goal of psychotherapy, and those that are raised in the first sessions with the psychologist. Setting objective goals that can be explained in words is the way to control and detect progress or possible failures in the course of psychotherapy, while limiting ourselves to setting “being happy” as the goal would leave us without references to know if we are doing it well. or not.
