In 1998, seligman used his presidential address to the American Psychological Association to call for a fundamental reorientation of psychology. The discipline had spent the postwar decades focused primarily on pathology — on diagnosing and treating mental illness. seligman argued this had left psychology without a rigorous account of what made life worth living: human flourishing, strengths, and optimal experience.
The Call and Its Target
seligman's address named three neglected domains that a positive psychology would need to develop:
Flow — csikszentmihalyi's construct — was already the most empirically developed of the positive subjective experience concepts. seligman immediately recruited csikszentmihalyi as a co-author and intellectual partner, recognizing that the foundational-research-1975-1990 and subsequent work provided exactly the kind of rigorous empirical grounding that positive psychology needed.
The Institutional Consequence
The address triggered a funded, coordinated research initiative. Within two years, seligman and csikszentmihalyi co-authored positive-psychology-introduction-2000, published in American Psychologist — the APA's flagship journal — as the founding manifesto of the new field. That publication event, positive-psychology-launch-2000, formally positioned flow as central to positive psychology's empirical core.
Lineage Significance
Without this address, flow research might have remained a productive but bounded specialty within personality and social psychology. seligman's institutional move gave it a new disciplinary home with greater visibility, funding streams, and connection to applied domains — education, organizational behavior, clinical practice. The neuroscience-turn-2000-2015 and popular-applied-period-2014-present eras both benefit from the institutional legitimacy that positive psychology provided.