What is it about?
The article argues that linking existential and positive psychology requires examining their deeper philosophical assumptions. It reviews past integration efforts and shows, through examples of resilience, how an existential lens reveals deeper possibilities for meaning and growth within trauma and everyday challenges.
Featured Image
Photo by Jason Thompson on Unsplash
Why is it important?
To understand a positive psychology that is truly existential, and an existential psychology that is truly positive, we argue that life cannot be divided into separate “positive” and “negative” experiences that we simply choose to accept or reject. Instead, an existential perspective in particular recognizes that well-being emerges from how we navigate both joy and hardship. This view echoes Aristotle’s idea of eudaimonia, where living well depends on developing the capacity to respond constructively to life’s challenges.
Perspectives
I hope that this article provokes our thinking about the place of suffering, endurance, and resilience and their often overlooked inter-relatedness that existential approaches help to clarify.
Amy Fisher-Smith
Fielding Graduate University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Psychological resilience as striving to preserve oneself: on the possibility of a “positive” existential psychology, The Journal of Positive Psychology, June 2025, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/17439760.2025.2509984.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
