By Charles Hackney, PhD
In the 2004 Olympic Games, American shooter Matthew Emmons was competing in the fifty-meter three-positions rifle event. Many considered him the best shot in the world. Two days earlier he had already won a gold medal in another shooting event, and by the time of his last shot in this competition, Emmons held a commanding lead over his opponents. He was easily in first place, and only needed a moderately-good last shot to secure the gold medal. He took careful aim, put the shot into the center of the target… and was awarded zero points, dropping him from first to eighth place. He had done everything right, except for one thing. Emmons was in Lane 2, and he had fired at the target in Lane 3.
It was a great shot. But it was at the wrong target.
In today’s post, I want to say that much of the psychology that we rely on involves brilliant theoretical work, high-quality research, and helpful practical techniques. But aimed at the wrong target.
Targets are built into theories. When psychologists create theories of development, for example, they include ideas about the normative goal of maturity. Jane Loevinger’s theory of ego development directs us toward a goal of becoming an integrated, self-fulfilled, autonomous individual, as does Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, and Dan McAdam’s theory of the healthy narrative self.
Theories of counseling also have targets built into them, in the form of definitions of mental health. Such targets may take the form of self-actualization, as when Abraham Maslow said that our primary life task is “to find out what you are really like inside, deep down, as a member of the human species and as a particular individual.” It may be positive experiences, as when Albert Ellis encouraged the readers of his books to choose as the main purpose of their existence “short-range and long-range enjoyment,” a prescription which is contradicted by Viktor Frankl’s claim that enjoyment cannot be it’s own goal, but must be a pleasant side-effect of the pursuit of the true goal, which is meaning.
Whatever form it takes, these theories incorporate the theorist’s vision of the good life for humans, and how to go about pursuing it. As Gordon Allport put it, “All psychology rests on philosophical presuppositions of some sort”, and if a psychologist does not explicitly identify the philosophy that structures his or her ideas about the human condition, that simply means that the psychologist is being implicitly influenced by that philosophy. These presuppositions are the waters that we swim in, and the air that we breathe, and it is easy to take them as self-evident truths.
Philosopher Charles Taylor calls these presuppositions the “social imaginary,” that is, the way that we collectively imagine our lives and our interactions with others. It is a basic framework, operating by way of images, stories, experiences, and embodied social practices, and may not be explicitly articulated by the one who inhabits it.
In his examination of the social imaginary of the modern West, Taylor describes our current milieu as “the age of authenticity.” In this age, the good, the true, and the beautiful are grounded in the self, and decisions about human flourishing are wrapped up in self-definition. Relationships, careers, and religions are valid and good if and only if they serve the goal of self-fulfillment. Taylor calls this self-focused standard “expressive individualism.”
This expressive individualism can especially be found in my area of specialization: the positive psychology movement. Positive psychology is explicitly about happiness, flourishing, and the good life, and so positive psychologists are required to define these terms. In Authentic Happiness, Seligman presents his formula for the good life as “a life wrapped up in using your signature strengths to obtain abundant and authentic gratification”. Another prominent positive psychologist, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, claims that “Optimal experience is the ‘bottom line’ of existence. It is the subjective reality that justifies the actions and events of any life history”. Ed Diener, another towering figure in the movement, defines happiness in terms of subjective well-being, a combination of more positive emotions, fewer negative emotions, and the subjective evaluation of one’s life as a good life.
Taken together, these examples point to the importance of individual subjective gratification as the target toward which positive psychologists aim when they examine ways and means of living the good life. And they are not shy when it comes to prescribing this vision for everyone else. Diener and colleagues have spent years urging governments to reorient policy around maximization of subjective well-being scores. In a 2019 article in Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, Seligman presents his PERMA theory of happiness as a “grand and believable” point of moral orientation, grand enough, in his words, “to center politics and religion around”.
But what if these giants of positive psychology are aiming at the wrong target? Despite some positive psychologists’ claims to the contrary, this vision of the good life is not universal, but grounded in a particular cultural worldview and a particular point in history. Taylor points out that expressive individualism is a creature of the modern North Atlantic, and does not hold true when describing the rest of the world. Those who operate in a different cultural worldview may be pursuing happiness in ways that are incomprehensible to Western positive psychologists. As another philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, puts it: “[t]he good life, the fulfilled life, may be and often is unhappy by the standards of happiness studies” because these other persons are aiming at targets that are not considered legitimate by the adherents of expressive individualism.
As Christians, we ourselves endorse an alternative target for our pursuit of happiness, one that does not always align well with the goals of our secular colleagues. This is a vision of the good life in which the purpose of existence is not individual subjective gratification, but (to use the terms of the Westminster Shorter Catechism) “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” This definition of happiness involves the cultivation of a Christlike character, such that we come to live in right relationship with God, with each other, and with the created world, fulfilling the role for which we were made, as a royal priesthood in God’s service.
Pursuing this happiness involves cultivating virtuous habits such as gratitude, humility, penitence, and imitation of Christ’s self-sacrificial love. And when we say that the good life is about self-sacrifice and self-denial, let’s not make the mistake of saying that we sacrifice our happiness for the sake of another, because that formulation requires that we embrace the definition of happiness as gratification of the self. Self-giving love is not surrendering our happiness. Within a biblically-formed view of the world, self-giving love is happiness. Imitation of Jesus’ kenotic self-emptying is what we mean when say “happiness.”
If we wish to do psychology as Christians in a way that does justice to both, we have to ask ourselves, as psychologists, as counselors, as mental health professionals: what target are we aiming at? When we carry out research, do we use measures for our dependent variables that define well-being, successful marriages, and meaningful careers in terms of self-gratification? Are we pointing clients in the direction of happiness defined as self-gratification, or happiness defined as self-giving?
Like Matthew Emmons, we have to make sure that we are aiming at the right target.
*Note: An earlier version of this material was presented at the 2023 conference of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies*
Charles Hackney completed his PhD in Social and Personality Psychology at the University at Albany, SUNY. He currently serves as Chair of the Psychology Department at Briercrest College, where his scholarly interests include the positive psychology movement, terror management theory, and the relationship between psychology and Christianity. He is the author of Positive Psychology in Christian Perspective (2021, IVP Academic). Learn more about Charles at his faculty website and his Substack.
