مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد ضرورت شادکامی در روانشناسی مثبت – الزویر 2024

Abstract

Positive Psychology has reconstructed how we understand happiness. The practices and discourses it presents to perform that reconceptualization appear as if free from political interest or intentionality. However, this article will show that its proposals define a subtle new form of government which we will call Psychopolitics. Instead of placing the population or the body of the citizen at the centre of political struggles, it focuses on the psyche. Through an extreme defence of positive emotions and happiness as the key to a good life, Positive Psychology promotes a type of friendly power relations, which instead of punishing motivates and empowers the individual’s creativity. To illustrate all of this, we conducted a case study with a Positive Psychology training course taught in a Spanish state university. Content analysis was used to explain the recurring themes and practices of this new discipline of positivity, showing how health is redefined around the happiness axis, and how happiness becomes an individual responsibility. We conclude that all these dimensions are simply a categorical definition of a new type of power relations which may characterise the 21st century.

Introduction: Happiness and positive psychology

As several authors (Arguís et al., 2010; Diener & Seligman, 2002; Fordyce, 1977) have remarked, happiness is one of the major goals regarded as exceptionally valuable in the sociocultural imaginary of our contemporary societies. It is a commonplace in academic literature to state that this is a construct which varies both diachronically – that is, over history, and synchronically – through culture and political axes. If we go back to Classical Greece, we quickly find that it was considered a greater good (Aristotle, 2009). On the other hand, in the Middle Ages, happiness appears as something we obtain in the next life (Aquinas, 2010; Augustine of Hippo, 2019). If we look at its definition in other cultures, past and present, but characterised by their distance from our own cultural coordinates, we find that happiness is included with values centred in the body or in collective well-being. All these examples show that its definition varies and multiplies depending on temporal, local, social, religious, and political coordinates (see Table 3, Table 4, Table 5, Table 6, Table 7).

More recently, and in our immediate context, in the Modern Age, with the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), happiness was proclaimed to be a right. Along these lines, a plethora of movements have emerged in the Contemporary Age which approach this right and feeling from a more practical perspective, based on scientific principles (Lyubomirsky, 2008; Seligman, 2002; Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2014). The most recent conception, considered to belong to the 21st century, suggests that happiness may not be governed only by rulings which control people’s lives through their bodies or their religious values, but also through the immediate and productive management of the psyche (Han, 2014; Stiegler, 2013). This notion should not be understood as a genetic, idiosyncratic and deep-rooted dimension of the individual which could be externalised through words or observation as it was in the 19th century, with the clearest examples being psychoanalysis or classic cognitive psychology, but more from an existential perspective of meaning in life, initially explored in the 20th century by the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (1959), whose experience of being a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp can be used to address today’s global psychological problem of suicidal behaviours (Costanza et al., 2020, Costanza et al., 2020) after the financial crisis (Economou et al., 2013) and the COVID-19 pandemic (Costanza et al., 2021). Nowadays, the psychic realm has received a new, much broader and more operational definition, which makes it a set of relationships between internal aspects of the human being (which pass through the body and cognition) and other external aspects which pass directly through knowledge and the technologies which have recently begun to dominate our everyday lives (apps focusing on health, mindfulness, balanced diets, etc.). This is the result, among other things, of the fact that although in recent years we have put much more emphasis on looking for the so-called society of wellbeing (Rose et al., 2006), which emphasises care for the somatic, at present being physically well is no longer enough, and we are required to go a step further. Thus, the transformation of different world organisations in relation to the concept of health is clear. While in 1948 the World Health Organization defined health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing, and not the mere absence of disease or infirmity” (WHO, 1946), by the end of the 20th century it was considered “a positive concept emphasizing social and personal resources, as well as physical capacities” (PAHO, 1986). In this new accepted sense, “personal” covers everything which was formerly called mental, but many more axes too, such as our relationship with the information generated by certain healthcare apps, the results we get from psychological or intelligence tests, or our interpersonal skills. In this pivot by the WHO we see health become an assumption, and the new goal of every citizen becomes achieving absolute and overall or comprehensive positive well-being. At this crossover of dimensions is when the so-called “psyche” acquires a new definition and value.

Conclusions

Positive Psychology has reconstructed how we must understand happiness. Its practices and discourses have spread to every action of our everyday life. Although it is presented as a discipline taking no part in the main mechanisms of power, we have found that it subtly reproduces a new modality of power and control, called Psychopolitics. Here, the arena of political struggle and conflict have moved from the notion of the bios to that of the psyche. This is what enables us to define a productive, active individual aligned with the requirements of the status quo, the practical consequences of which are spreading into the spheres of our everyday reality through the creation of more happiness programs in the field of education, well-being workshops to manage one’s emotional health at work, new positive applications to the “citizen science”, and obviously training in the field of psychology as well, where life coaching has become so important that it is now the new definition of Popular Psychology.

However, Positive Psychology does something more than just reproduce a power mechanism; it creates it to maintain itself and it has established a variant or nuance of Psychopolitics which we have called the Psychopolitics of Well-being. Here and now, the good life, the life worth living, is the life that is constantly seeking the well-being generated by positive thoughts and emotions.