Greatness: The Aspiration and Goal of Psychology
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happiness
flourishing
goal
Psychology
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Abstract
Historically, clinical psychology focused on understanding and alleviating mental and emotional dysfunction through drugs or therapy. Positive psychology focuses instead on positive outcomes and healthy behavior. Germaine to both these foci is a comprehensive goal of psychology. What does psychology hope to accomplish? Recently positive psychology has offered multiple foci as the goals of a psychologically healthy person, including happiness, optimal functioning, flourishing, and subjective well-being. Yet these goals are incomplete in some aspect. This paper explores the stated and assumed goals of both mainstream and positive psychology and exposes some of their challenges. The concept of greatness as a unifying framework is explored.