On The Potential Crisis Of Positive Psychology And It’s Transcend

Positive psychology is an important new emerging force in psychology. It is a scientific study of "human’s strengths and virtues", and its goal is make human flourishing. Positive psychology has made great achievements in its field until now. The positive psychology movement received an enthusiastic response in and out of psychology. But at the same time, there’re a lot of questions and critiques about positive psychology.This paper analyzed the positive psychology in a methodological level and argued that the questions and critiques which positive psychology faced is stem from its psychological methodology of scientism. Positive psychology studied human’s strengths and virtues under the psychological methodology of scientism. The subjects of positive psychology actually are the subjects of the humanistic psychology’s subjects, what include two missions:one is the mission of knowledge that is to reveal quality and the law objective of the subjects, another is the mission of values that is to reveal their values to our life. The potential crisis of positive psychology is it can’t complete all the missions of its subjects.The potential crisis of positive psychology reflect that its unsecure philosophical basis, its disordered conception system and it can not construct integrated human image. At the beginning of the positive psychology movement, it looking for philosophical basis for its theory, for example:the theory of ethical value and the theory of "the majority’s biggest happiness " from utilitarianism; the approaches and methods to reach happiness and the describe of the status of happiness form Buddhist philosophy; the views from mild social constructivism to response the challenge form postmodernism. Because of the insecure philosophical basis, its conception system is disordered. At the researches of positive psychology, there is confusion between the describe of "good" things and the standard of "good" things. And in the researches of happiness, there are hedonism, desire theory and objective list theory about happiness, thus, there are three understanding and methods about happiness. The methodology of positive psychology is scientism methodology. Because of this methodology neglects the difference between human and the nature, so positive psychology can’t construct the integral human image. If positive psychology want to transcend these potential crisis, it should take the psychological integrated viewpoint firstly. Secondly, it should borrow ideas from humanistic psychology about research methods. Thirdly, it should construct rigorous conception system.