I avoided psychology units as an undergraduate, because I felt that this field of study had too simplistic a paradigm of human existence. Being largely influenced by a medical model, people were often quickly labeled as “ill” mentally and slotted into various simplistic pathological categories. Even as a late teenager, I wondered where was the place in these models for the complexity of the human condition?

Over the last years, however, there have been shifts towards more holistic views of human psychology. As it has recently been stated, ” . . . we should move away from understanding human experience as being neatly dichotomized into positive and negative, well and ill, healthy and unhealthy, strength and weakness. These are false dichotomies, and ones that were rejected by our humanistic psychology ancestors, who instead proposed a more holistic approach to what it means to be human (Joseph and Worsley, 2005). The convergence of these perspectives around this uniting theme suggests that we might be seeing the beginning of a perspective shift in modern psychology. In time, positive psychology and coaching psychology might both be seen as forces that forged a more complete understanding of the human condition.” (Linley and Harrington, in Handbook of Counselling Psychology, 2007). Let’s hope that any future paradigms will take such a holistic approach!

References:

Joseph, S. and Worsley, R. (2005) A positive psychology of mental health: the person-centred perspective. In S. Joseph and R. Worsley (eds.) Person-centred Psychopathology: A positive psychology of mental health. (pp. 348-357). Ross-on-Wye, UK: PCCS Books.

Palmer, S. and Whybrow, A. (eds) 2007, Handbook of Coaching Psychology, East Sussex, UK: Routledge.