This article explores the common ground between positive and humanistic psychology and responds to positive psychology’s challenges to humanistic psychology about research and a concern for social values. It begins with a brief review of the humanistic psychology movement and shows how its many developments in fact constitute a “positive psychology.” Next, the article moves into an exploration of the unique research approaches and areas of study dictated by the primacy in humanistic psychology of human experience. The article shows how positive psychology can gain from recognizing the merit of experiential, process-oriented research methodologies. The article concludes by highlighting the ways that the new emphasis on happiness and optimal experience promoted by research psychologists not only affirms humanistic psychology’s principles but also serves to reinforce some of the positive directions long practiced by experiential, existential, somatic, and spiritually oriented psychotherapies.

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ONE of the most difficult problems for psychology is the fact that the psychologist must regard himself as a participant in the process which he is studying. He is both object and subject. There are, therefore, two complementary psychologies, the heirs of physical science and philosophy, reflecting this double viewpoint. One of the principal values of Maslow's recent focus of attention upon the peak experience is that aspect of psychology that attempts to point the way to wisdom for the subjectfor a humanity whose only actual experience is immersion in time.From this point of view, the valuable peak experience can be seen as fulfilling on a personal Ievel a function that myths have historically performed for whole peoples. This is true regardless of whether the peak experience is felt to be specifically mythical or religious in origin.There is widespread realization of the importance of myth in organizing man's attitudes for survival in the face of the human condition, and this is an important function that is quite independent of the truth of posited mythical beings. As a psychologist who has concerned himself with the primitive mythology of the American Indians, Erikson conveys a profound sense of the importance of myth in the larger context of evolution, where truth is equivalent to racial survival. He vividly shows how the mythology of the Yurok is designed to enhance the meaning of waiting and fishing, while that of the Sioux is designed to enhance the meaning of the hunt. In Joseph Campbell's analysis of the ritual love death, it becomes clear that even so apparently revolting and useless a thing as human sacrifice can be of critical importance in positioning a people for continuation, in spite of the exaggerations and imperfect calculations of the demands of the universe that such sacrifice embodies. For the act of planting and waiting patiently for the harvest requires a kind of faith that must have been difficult for early man to muster, especially in the face of frequent failure and famine. What image could be better suited to embody and make vivid the cyclic process involved than the death and rebirth of the god of grain? And what could serve to make this faith-engendering myth more vivid and accessible to the consciousness of the people than the sacrifice of a human incarnation of this god or goddess, especially since the universe's

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