In 1998, Martin Seligman was elected President of the American Psychological Association.

And when he announced positive psychology as the theme of his term,

the movement came into prominence among research, even being called the next wave in psychology.

Positive psychology is called the science of human flourishing or well-being,

and it is an intentional effort to escape a particular problem that had afflicted earlier forms of clinical and theoretical psychology.

Earlier forms of psychology focused on pathology and diagnosis,

as embodied in various editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

The question of how to understand and treat abnormality was at the fore.

Already with the so-called humanistic psychologists of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow,

the call was made to shift focus from abnormality and pathology to psychological health and flourishing.

The humanistic psychologists had already paved a way out of the previous

behavioristic approaches that effectively denied that human beings have free will and

conscious intentions. And the humanistic psychologist started to develop accounts

based on the affirmation that human beings are conscious,

intentional, and free agents who live by choice.

What was needed, Maslow affirmed, was an account of human flourishing

and full actualization. Positive psychology

begins here, where Rogers and Maslow left off, and it aims to give us a scientifically

verified account of flourishing. In his 2002 book, Authentic Happiness, and in subsequent publications,

Seligman and others have no difficulty in speaking of happiness, Eudaimenea, the good life,

character strength, and virtues, all as part of a larger attempt to give an account

of human potential, fully actualized, and flourishing.

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