ABSTRACT
The need for and development of positive psychology comes from a wish to explore and articulate the positive aspects of human life and existence, in contrast to the apparent research priority of mainstream psychology to focus on problem-based questions (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). However, acts of refocusing or re-orientation have been occurring in psychology for decades in different forms. For example, Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1986) and Gilligan (1982, 2011) have contributed to a substantial shift in the understanding of the place of women and the psychological knowledge of women in psychology. Arguably, this occurred within a larger and broader-based development of feminist psychology and qualitative research methods that grew from the early 1980s. The emergence of critical psychology as a discipline in the 1980s, and positive psychology in the late 1990s, are each a form of redressing a balance in perspective from what may be described as mainstream psychology.
