Alan Waterman On Positive Psychology

Positive psychology's development into its own unique field of study under the umbrella term of "psychology" was not without its obstacles. As Alan S. Waterman (2013) discusses in his paper entitled "The Humanistic Psychology-Positive Psychology Divide: Contrasts in Philosophical Foundations," humanists, and positivists both view their perspective as more insightful. With this, the tension between the two perspectives, along with them having different concerns and no commonality, causes debate, which, in turn, creates philosophical problems and confusion among other researchers and psychologists. Waterman (2013) elaborates on these two psychological perspectives and their views on positive psychology. Here, his ideas about the humanist-positivists …show more content…
With the development of positive psychology, his paper also touches on the importance of both perspectives, as well as their philosophical grounding and implications. Waterman (2013) examines the implications of both the humanistic and the positivist perspective in terms of empirical research strategies of the two, their goals and strategies with therapeutic conditions and counselling interventions, and conceptualized human nature. This is observed in part, in regards to relative importance of one perspective to the other. He argues how these trivial different aspects of positive psychology will ultimately end in narrow research success and would ultimately be fundamentally be difficult to achieve based on their differences in most aspects of …show more content…
He demonstrated awareness of both and pointed out how different they were, and why these differences would make it difficult to combine the two into the field of positive psychology because it would end in narrow, contrasting research. While his points were a little biased, because he is a positivist, and used negative terms and arguments towards humanistic approaches like "unfortunately" or showing the little things that humanist psychologists may focus on, I agree with his overall statement that philosophical differences between the two are at superficial levels, and because of this, their limited cooperation to combine into the field of positive psychology will be met with limited success. I believe this because, based on what Waterman (2013) wrote, historically, both perspectives have always been vastly different, and to believe that they can, as a whole, come to agreement on all, or at least most, aspects of philosophy, is unreasonable and unlikely. This is considering not only that they both use different research and therapy methods, and have entirely different views on human nature, they both belittle each other's perspective's