Wisdom psychotherapy

Abstract

Almost every person has a notion of what wisdom is and who can be called wise. Because of the culturally rich meaning and heritage of wisdom, it is not easy to define and operationalize wisdom as a scientifically grounded psychological construct. Still, there has been great progress in this respect in the context of life span psychology (Baltes and Smith 1990; Baltes and Staudinger 1993; Staudinger et al. 1997; Staudinger and Baltes 1996; Sternberg 1998; Baltes and Staudinger 2000; Böhmig-Krumhaar et al. 2002; Ardelt 2004). © 2011 Springer-Verlag Vienna.