El Bienestar Psicológico

Un Tema de Estudio con Varias Aristas

Abstract

Psychological well-being has been researched by various authors and this article includes enriching theory such as Jung’s Theory of Personality Types (1933), Buhler’s Functional Theory (1935), Jahoda’s Theory of Positive Traits (1958) who later called it the Ideal Mental Health Theory and its five categories of study: time structure, social contact, collective effort or purpose, identity or social status, and regular activity. In addition, we include Erikson’s (1959) Psychosocial Development, Rogers’ (1961) Theory of Personality, Allport’s (1961) personality traits, Maslow’s (1968) self-actualization, Neugarten’s personality (1973) and, currently, Seligman’s (2011) PERMA, theory that will be expanded upon in this article.

Psychological well-being is a construct that is directly related to the concept of flourishing, where the sum of a life properly lived is built from a conscious process of recovery and is also related to resilience where, despite ordeals, the person continues to struggle for life and beyond the struggle, there is the joy of it. For this reason, a good life is associated with a process of nature that is flourishing.

Flourishing is incorporated into aspects such as genetics, hormones and environmental conditions associated with beliefs and cognitive distortions. Thus, emphasis will be placed on the two aspects previously mentioned since they are closely related to psychological well-being and need to be studied in depth because they are the product of automatic thoughts that deconfigure reality. These aspects cause the person to have conflictive relationships with their entire environment in general; just as there are pests that damage crops in nature, distortions alter information and create a misunderstanding of
objective facts. Therefore, it is essential to understand that by working on and reducing distortions, it is more possible to flourish and, therefore, have psychological well-being.