In 1998, after being elected president of the American Psychological Association,31 Seligman made positive psychology the central focus of his tenure. “I want to remind our field that it has been side-tracked,” he wrote in his first Presidential Column for the APA’s newsletter. “Psychology is not just the study of weakness and damage, it is also the study of strength and virtue. Treatment is not just fixing what is broken, it is nurturing what is best within ourselves.”
