Abstract
In mental health care settings, the positive psychology approach has been widely incorporated in traditional cognitive-behavioral therapy aiming to foster change in individuals’ behavior and approach to life. The aim of this chapter is to integrate findings stemming from three lines of research focusing on the use of flow in psychotherapy and mental health rehabilitation. We will present studies in which the ability to find flow in everyday life was connected with individuals’ well-being and reduced symptomatology. Results also suggested a relationship between flow and psychotherapeutic intervention: finding flow fosters positive and meaningful changes both inside and outside the therapeutic and rehabilitation processes. Finally, we will present a new psychotherapeutic model in which flow is part and parcel in facing daily life challenges and in promoting clients’ integration and active involvement in society.
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Notes
- 1.
Generativity in essence refers to the ability to create, generate, or produce new content unique to the social or cultural system. In Developmental Psychology generativity is a struggle against stagnation that ascends during adulthood. In a wider, psychosocial sense it refers to the concern for establishing and guiding the next generation having as a starting point a sense of optimism about humanity (Erikson 1950; Slater 2003).
- 2.
Csikszentmihalyi and Gardner defined autotelic personality for the first time in their research on optimal experiences and creativity (Csikszentmihalyi 1996; Gardner 1993a, b). It is a quality that characterizes a person who is receptive, active and open to detecting new challenges adapted to promoting their own experience of flow. An autotelic person is a person with the ability to understand and extract the intrinsic characteristics of the activities connected to flow, starting from self-experience, and investigate their presence in other activities of daily experience, in order to maximize the opportunities to find flow and satisfaction in life.
- 3.
The development of a more flexible personality would result in a reinforcement of the self, that will be richer and more complex, and thus better able to deal with problematic situations and to find practical solutions (Csikszentmihalyi 1993; Csikszentmihalyi et al. 1993; Inghilleri 1999), without elapse in development of disease.
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Riva, E., Freire, T., Bassi, M. (2016). The Flow Experience in Clinical Settings: Applications in Psychotherapy and Mental Health Rehabilitation. In: Harmat, L., Ørsted Andersen, F., Ullén, F., Wright, J., Sadlo, G. (eds) Flow Experience. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28634-1_19
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