It is tempting to update Julius Caesar and conclude that all modern therapy is divided into three parts: depth psychology, behaviorism, and positive psychology.

The first of the three, a grand and ambitious therapeutic view most easily identified with Sigmund Freud and his late 19th century “discovery” of “the unconscious,” plumbed destructive internal conflict. Freud aimed through psychoanalysis to free his patients from irrational fear, baseless self-blame, and persistent anxiety and replace these not with happiness, as such, but with serviceable self-revelation.

A second paradigm, behavioral psychology, associated with 20th century American experimentalists John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner and others, radically narrowed researchers’ attention away from mood and emotion and feeling and desire to focus on the way environment “conditioned” behaviors. Practical strategies to re-enforce salutary behaviors and steer clear of those deemed most harmful dominated the therapies that emerged from behaviorism.

But a “third force,” approach, also characteristically American, not for its practicality but for its optimism (back when optimism was quintessentially American), hit its stride in the 21st century with the innovations of positive psychology, associated with Martin Seligman, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, and others. Sharply distinguishable from both its predecessors, positive psychology turned toward maximizing human happiness and unshackling healthy human potential.

The concept “emotional intelligence” emerged as a guiding light of positive psychology.

Thinkers and therapists who framed an intelligence based in rewarding, character-bolstering emotion usually identify four pillars that uphold a successful personality: greater self-awareness,........

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