Customer Reviews

Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived

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Some day somebody's going to write a "Flourishing For Dummies" version of this book and they'll sell a zillion of them. In the meantime, it is a very thorough look at the tenets and possibilities of the positive psychology movement. The premise is that the field of psychology has focused mostly on prevention and illness and that it needs to move in the direction of potential and good mental health. The notion that the absence of mental illness is not the same as good mental health is well developed as are some of the behaviors attitudes and beliefs associated with good mental health.

This newest positive psychology handbook is an edited volume, with contributing authors including Czikszentmihalyi, Emmons, and more.
When Dr. Haidt teaches a senior-level college course on flourishing, he assigns this text as well as Martin Seligman's (2002) Authentic happiness, Ben Franklin's autobiography, Buddha's Dhammapada, Burns' (1999) Feeling good: The new mood therapy, and finally his own (2006) The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding modern truth in ancient wisdom.

Lay readers interested in the topic but daunted by the jargon of modern experimental psychology will be happy with Authentic Happiness or The Happiness Hypothesis -- both written by major researchers but intended-for-the-public.

I approached this book from a lay perspective (perhaps naively) and therefore was disappointed since it is much more for the professional person,and of course it is well written and very informative. I heard the author speaking on radio and was most impressed.