Opening the Door: The Limits of Positive Psychology and the Source of Mental Health

In this seminal book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor describes what he calls "the immanent frame." The immanent frame has been much described and commented upon. But to recap, the immanent frame is our modern bias toward describing and inhabiting the world without reference to the transcendent. The immanent frame is a secular, scientistic, technological, reductionistic, and materialist stance toward existence. Some describe the immanent frame as living in a house without windows that open outward to the beyond.

In The Shape of Joy I describe how the research of positive psychology has operated, as an empirical science, within the immanent frame. This has created a bit of a paradox for the discipline. Specifically, as positive psychology has progressed the research has repeatedly shown that a relationship with transcendence is good for your mental and relational health. And yet, living as it is in a house without windows, positive psychology cannot describe or specify the nature or ontological status of transcendence. Positive psychology knows something outside the house is good for you, but the house lacks windows. What lies beyond the immanent frame is a mystery to empirical science. 

One of the places you observe the constricting effects of the immanent frame upon positive psychology concerns what psychologists describe as "cosmic mattering" or "existential significance."  Cosmic mattering refers to the conviction that our lives possess intrinsic value, dignity, and worth. As I describe it in The Shape of Joy, existential significance means you matter no matter what. And, as positive psychology has shown, cosmic mattering is the most significant predictor of meaning in life, which is integral to mental health.

Notice, however, the borders of the immanent frame. Empirical science can observe a correlation between cosmic mattering and mental health. This correlation is observed within the empirical house. And yet, the variable being described--cosmic/existential mattering--exists outside of the house. This transcendent "beyondness" is captured by the words "cosmic" and "existential." Whatever is bestowing psychological resiliency can only be experienced by escaping the immanent frame, stepping beyond the borders of the factual and empirical. And yet, positive psychology cannot take this step given its delimited ontological commitments, as an empirical science, to the immanent frame. This creates an awkward silence at the very heart of positive psychology. Cosmic mattering, we know, is associated with mental health. But is cosmic mattering real? Is it true? Or is it, like Freud argued, a massive delusion? Is our mental health based upon a lie? Positive psychology cannot say. As an empirical science, positive psychology does not traffic in ontological realities that exist beyond the immanent frame. Which means, as I conclude in The Shape of Joy, that psychology can never reveal the ultimate sources of our mental health. 

True, psychology knows that the secret to joy lies outside the house of the immanent frame. But it cannot open the door.