Humanistic psychology has been criticized for equating behaviorism with the formulations of
Watson and Skinner and thereby ignoring the work of other behaviorists who stressed the importance of mental events and goal-directed behavior, for failing to understand that psychology’s scientific efforts must first concentrate on the simpler aspects of humans before it can study the more complex aspects, for offering a description of humans more positive than the facts warrant, for minimizing or ignoring the positive contributions of behaviorism and psychoanalysis, for suggesting methods of inquiry that go back to psychology’s prescientific history, for having more in common with philosophy and religion than with psychology, for overlooking a valuable source of information by rejecting the validity of animal research, and for using terms and concepts so nebulous as to defy clear definition or verification. Humanistic psychology’s major contribution has been to expand psychology’s do- main by urging that all aspects of humans be investigated and that psychology’s conception of science be changed to allow objective study of uniquely human attributes. Recently the field of positive psychology has emerged, studying positive human attributes but doing so in a manner more scientifically rigorous and less self-centered than was often the case with traditional humanistic psychology. However, both traditional humanistic psychology and positive psychology insist that mental health is more than the absence of mental illness. Both describe the truly healthy person as living an exciting, meaningful life. Whereas positive psychologists re- fer to such a person as flourishing, traditional humanistic psychologists had referred to him or her as self-actualizing (Maslow) or as fully functioning (Rogers).