Self research in educational psychology: a cautionary tale of positive psychology in action

Recent calls for a positive psychology that would deemphasize human pathology and dysfunction in favor of building an understanding of positive features of human life and human flourishing make two assumptions that the author questions in this article. First, he challenges the assumption that disciplinary psychology has been fixated on pathology and dysfunction by considering work in educational psychology that, both historically and currently, espouses the characteristics of positive psychology as articulated by its major advocates. Second, through a brief, critical consideration of research on the self in educational psychology, he contests the assumption that psychology has sufficient resources to develop into the positive psychology envisioned by its promoters. He argues that psychology's emphasis on the individual, whose core self resides in a deep, internal psyche, radically strips psychology of the historical and sociocultural resources that enable self-development, constrain self-understanding, and constitute the self.