The paper provides a critical discussion of the interpretation in positive of the notion of health, of its capacity to operate as the scientific foundation of the health psychology. The criticisms is based on three arguments: the ideal and asymptotic character of the definition in posi-tive; its dependency on the historical-cultural contingencies; the lack of reference to a specific class of phenomena. Two alternatives are envisaged: the retrieval of the interpretation in negative ‒ i.e., the health as absence of illness ‒ and the methodological conception ‒ the health as the institutional dynamics comprising the health system’s action
Keywords: health, conceptual analysis, negative definition