Self-Esteem Research, Theory, and Practice Toward a Positive ...

Self-Esteem and Positive Psychology 229present is more empirical in the traditional sense and is based on logicalpositivism as the foundation of science. This form of positive psychologyis also just emerging. Hence, it may be referred to as the “new” or “positivistic”positive psychology. The other type of positive psychology ismuch older and is connected to the humanistic tradition, which takesissue with logical positivism and its approach to science. Therefore, wemay refer to this form of positive psychology as the “original” or“humanistic” positive psychology. As we shall see, both psychologiesshare a concern with understanding positive human phenomena andusing that knowledge to help people, but they go about those activitiesvery differently. This paradigmatic possibility was discussed in Chapter 2,so it should not be a surprise to find ourselves talking about self-esteemin relation to both approaches to positive psychology, which we shall dothroughout this chapter.SELF-ESTEEM AND THE ORIGINAL, HUMANISTICPOSITIVE PSYCHOLOGYMore than half a century ago, psychiatrists realized that the social scienceswere failing to live up to an important aspect of their commitmentto study human behavior, particularly its richer and higher dimensions.Initially, several individuals were concerned with the failure of the sciencesof human behavior to study such things as positive subjective experience,human strengths and virtues, and positive social institutionsthat would foster such experiences and characteristics, all of which wehave just seen to be the earmarks of positivistic positive psychology.Occasionally, individuals such as Adler (1927) or Horney (1937) struggledwith this issue independently. Later, several psychologists, such asGordon Allport and Gardner Murphy, addressed similar themes (Taylor,2001). However, the first organized positive response was offered byhumanistic psychology.Like most movements, humanistic psychology began as a core ofideas around which an identity forms. The most central idea for humanisticpsychology was general disagreement with the reductionistic philosophicalfoundations of the psychological perspectives that weredominant at the time, especially the psychodynamic and behavioralpoints of view. Both of these mainstream positions were based on the logicalpositivism of psychology practiced as a natural science, which wasseen as too limiting to understand the full richness of human experience,especially its higher or more positive possibilities. Thus, humanistic psychologybegan as a protest, one that was “directed against the entire orientationof psychology since Hobbes and Locke, against its Newtonian