Self-Actualisation, Life’s Rarest Gift

 Self-Actualisation, Life’s Rarest Gift

From Maslow

One of the many interesting things Maslow noticed was that some needs take precedence over others. For example, if you are hungry and thirsty, you will tend to try to take care of the thirst first. After, you can do without food for weeks, but you can only do without water for a couple of days! Thirst is there for a “stronger” need than hunger. Likewise, if you are very, very thirsty, but someone has put a choke hold on you and you can’t breathe, which is more important? The need to breathe, of course. On the other hand, sex is less powerful than any of these. Let’s face it; you won’t die if you don’t get any!

Deficit Needs

Maslow took this idea and created his no famous hierarchy of needs (a theory that for some strange, unexplainable reason, many other psychologists have an obsession to try to confuse, and change, or modify to their own thinking). Beyond the details of air, water, food and sex, he laid out five broader layers: The needs for safety and security, the needs for love and belonging, the needs for esteem, and the need to actualise the self, in that order.

1.       The physiological needs. These include the needs we have for oxygen, water, protein, salt, sugar, calcium, and other minerals and vitamins. They also include the need to maintain a pH balance (getting too acidic, or base, will kill you) and (98.6F or near to it). Also, there’s the needs to be active, to rest, to sleep, to get rid of wasted, (CO2, sweat, urine, and faeces), to avoid pain, and to have sex. Quite a collection!

Maslow believed, and all research supports him, that these are in fact individual needs, and that a lack of, say, vitamin C, will lead to a very specific hunger for things which have in the past provided vitamin C—e.g. orange juice. I guess the cravings that some pregnant woman have, and the way in which babies eat the most foul tasting baby food, or the alcoholics’ craving for a drink support the idea anecdotally.

2.       The Safety and security needs. When the physiological needs are largely taken care of, this second layer of needs comes into play. You will become increasingly interested in finding safe circumstances, stability, and protection. You might develop a need for structure, for order, some limits.

Looking at it negatively, you become concerned, not with needs like hunger, and thirst, but with your fears, anxieties, and desires. In the ordinary adult, this set of “needs” can manifest themselves in the form of our urges, to have a home in a safe neighbourhood, a little job security, a nest egg a good retirement plan, all the luxuries, and so on.

3.       The love and belonging needs. When physiological needs and safety needs are, by the large, taken care of, a third layer starts to show up. You begin to feel the need for friends, children, affectionate relationships, love, even as sense of communism. Looked at negatively, you become increasingly susceptible to; loneliness, and social anxieties.

In our day-to-day life, we exhibit these needs in our desire to “shack up” have a family, be part of a commune or community,  a brother in the fraternity, a part of a gang, or peer group it is also a part of what we look for in a career. This is as far as the vast majority of people ever get in their lives. Most people never reach level four.

4.      The Esteem Needs: Very few people ever reach this level-- we begin to look for self-esteem. Maslow noted two versions of esteem needs, a lower one, and a higher one. The lower one is the need for the respect of others, the need for status, fame, glory, recognition, attention, reputation, appreciation, dignity, even DOMINANCE. The higher form involves the need for self-respect, including such feelings as confidence, competence, achievement, mastery, independence, and freedom. Note that this is the “higher”form because, unlike the respect of others, once you have self-respect, it’s hard to lose but it can be lost, if you follow the sheep herd, always follow the popular way of thinking, or let self-doubt creep in!

The negative version of these needs is no self-esteem and inferiority complexes.  Maslow thought that Adler was really onto something, when he proposed that these were at the roots of many, if not all, of our psychological problems. In modern countries, most of us have what we need in regard to our physiological and safety needs. We, more often than not, have quite a bit of affection and belonging, too. It’s a little respect that often seems so very hard to get!

All of the preceding four levels he calls deficit needs or D-needs. If you don’t have enough of something—i.e. you have a deficit—you feel the need. But if you get all you need, you feel nothing at all! In other words, they cease to be motivating. As the old blues song goes, “you don’t miss your water till your well runs dry!”

He also talks about these levels in terms of homeostasis. Homeostasis is the principle by which a thermometer or your furnace thermostat operates: (Until you reach a certain level, or temperature, you have not reached it. Once you have, you move on to the next level or temperature. There is no such thing as having a low ninety degree temperature; and there is no such thing as having low esteem--you either have it, or you do not). When it gets too cold, it switches the heat on; when it gets too hot, it switches the heat off. In the same way your body, when it lacks a certain substance, develops a hunger for it. When it gets enough of it, then the hunger stops. Maslow simply extends the homeostatic principle to needs, such as safety, belonging, and esteem, that we don’t ordinarily—but should—think of in these terms; it is not that difficult to understand.

Maslow sees all these needs as essentially “survival needs”. Even love and esteem are needed for the maintenance of health. He says we all have these needs build into us genetically, by nature, like instincts. In fact, he calls them “instinctoid”—instinct-like needs.

In terms of overall development, we move through these levels in stages. As newborns, we focus (if not our entire set of needs) is on the physiological. After, these needs are met, and only after, we begin to recognise that we need to be safe. After the needs for safety are met, we crave attention and affection. Once these are met, we look for self-esteem.

Under stressful conditions, or even when survival is threatened, we can “regress” to a lower need level. When your great career falls flat, you might seek out a little attention. When your family ups and leaves you, it seems that LOVE is again all you ever wanted. When you face chapter eleven after a long happy life, you suddenly can’t think of anything except money.

These things can occur on a society-wide basis as well: When society suddenly flounders, people start clamouring for a strong leader to take over and make things right. When the bombs start to fly, they look for safety. When the food stops coming into the stores, their need become even more basic—often they will resort to what we now call “terrorism”. Love is a very over rated need and many people will use the term; as a means of obtaining the basic, more important needs.

Maslow suggested that we can ask people for their “philosophy of the future” what would their ideal life, or world, be like (while everyone would not be the same) we could get significant information as to what needs they do or do not have covered.

If you have significant problems along your development—a period of extreme insecurity, or hunger, as a child, or loss of a family member through death, single parenting, or significant neglect, or abuse—you may “fixate” on that set of needs for the rest of your life.

This is Maslow’s understanding of neurosis. Perhaps you went through a war as a kid. Now you have everything your heart desires—yet you still find yourself obsessing over having enough money and keeping the pantry well-stocked. Or perhaps your parents divorced when you were young--perhaps you didn’t have any to begin with—now you have a wonderful spouse—yet you get insanely jealous, or worry constantly, that they are going to leave you because you are not “good enough” for them You get the picture.

Self-actualisation: fewer yet ever approach this level.

This last level is a bit different. Maslow has used a variety of terms to refer to this level: he called it “growth motivation” (in contrast to deficit motivation), “being needs” (or B-needs, in contrast to D-needs) and self-actualisation.

These are needs that do not involve balance or homeostasis. Once engaged, they continue to be felt. In fact, they are likely to become stronger as we “feed “them! They involve the continuous desire to fulfil potentials, to “be all that you can be” They are a matter of becoming the most complete, the fullest, “YOU”—hence the term, self actualisation.

Now, in keeping with his theory up to this point, if you want to; be truly self actualising, you need to have ALL your lower needs taken care of. This makes sense: If you are hungry, you are scrambling for food—you are not looking for love. If you are unsafe, you have to be continuously on guard; if you are isolated and unloved, you have to satisfy that need; If you have not reached the level of self esteem—and the vast majority of us have not—you have to be defensive or compensate in other ways ;such as being very “thin skinned.” When any of the lower (more important) needs are unmet, you can’t fully devote yourself to fulfilling your potentials.

It isn’t surprising, then the world being as difficult as it is, that only a small percentage of the world’s population truly has ESTEEM and a smaller percentage still is truly self-actualising. Maslow suggested only about 2%.

The question becomes of course, what exactly, does Maslow mean by self-actualisation. To answer that, we need to look at the kind of people he called self-actualisers. Fortunately, he did this for us, using a qualitative method called biographical analysis.

He began by picking out a group of people, some historical figures, some people he knew, whom he felt clearly met the standard of self-actualisation. Included in this august group were Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Adams, William James, Albert Schweitzer, Benedict Spinoza, Aldus Huxley, plus 12 unnamed people who were alive at the time Maslow did his research. He looked at their biographies, writings, the acts and words of those he knew personally, and so on. From these sources, he developed a list of qualities that seemed characteristic of these people, as opposed to the great mass of us.

These people were all “REALITY-CENTERED”, which means they could differentiate what is fake and dishonest from what is real and genuine. They were problem cantered, meaning they treated life’s difficulties as problems demanding solutions, not as personal troubles, or insults, to be railed at, or surrendered to. And they had a different perception of means and ends. They felt that the ends don’t necessarily justify the means, that the means could be ends in themselves, and the means—the journey—was often more important than the ends.

The self-actualisers also had a different way of relating to others. First they enjoyed solitude and were comfortable being alone. And they enjoyed deeper personal relations with only a few close friends and family members, rather than more shallow relationships with many people.

They enjoyed autonomy, a relative independence from physical and social needs. And they resisted enculturation that is they were not susceptible to social pressure to be “well adjusted” or to “fit In” they were, in fact, nonconformists, themselves in every sense.

They had an unhostile sense of humour—preferring to joke at their own expense, or at the human condition, and never directing their humour at others. They had ESTEEM – complete acceptance of self and others, by which he meant that these people would be more likely to take you as you are than try to change you into what they thought you should be. This same acceptance applied to their attitudes toward themselves: If some quality of theirs wasn’t harmful, they let it be, even enjoying it as a personal quirk. On the other hand, they were often strongly motivated to change negative qualities in themselves that could be changed. Along with this comes spontaneity and simplicity: they preferred being themselves rather than being “PRETENTIOUS OR ARTIFICIAL, In fact, for all their nonconformity, he found that they tended to be conventional on the surface, just where less self-actualising nonconformists tend to be the most dramatic.

Further, they had a sense of humility and respect towards others—something Maslow called democratic values—meaning that they were open to ethnic and individual variety, even treasuring it but they did not subscribe to the “visible minority” or “minority rights” e.g. Native Rights, First Nations, Chinese American/Canadian, Coloured American/Canadian, Black History concepts. They saw these as another form of segregation; this time brought on by these individual groups but none the less serving to separate the nation rather than bringing it together. Instead they had a quality Maslow called human kinship or Gemeinschaftsgefuhl—social interest, compassion, humanity. And, this was accompanied by a strong ethics, which was spiritual, but seldom conventionally religious in nature.

And these people had a certain freshness of appreciation, an ability to see things, even ordinary things, with wonder. Along with this comes their ability to be creative, inventive, and original. And finally, these people tended to have more peak experiences than the average person. A peak experience is one that takes you out of yourself; it makes you feel tiny, or very large, to some extent, one with life and with NATURE. It gives you a feeling of being a part of the infinite and the eternal. These experiences tend to leave their mark on a person, change them forever for the better, and many people actively seek them out.

Maslow doesn’t think that self-actualisers are perfect of course. There were several flaws or imperfections he discovered along the way as well: First, they often suffered considerable anxiety and guilt—but realistic anxiety and guilt, rather than misplaced neurotic versions. Some of them were absent minded, and overly kind. And finally, most recognised an inborn insight that gave them a   superior understanding of the universe around them; they became disgusted at the narrow vision of average humanity; and so had unexpected moments of ruthlessness, surgical coldness and loss of humour.

Two other points he makes about these self-actualisers: their values were “natural” and seemed to flow effortlessly from their personalities. They appeared to transcend many of the dichotomies others accept as undeniable, such as the differences between the spiritual and the physical, the selfish and the unselfish, and the masculine and the feminine.

Metaneeds and metapathologies

Another way in which Maslow approached the problem of what self-actualisation is was to talk about the special, driving needs (B-needs, of course) of the self-actualisers. They need the following in their lives in order to be happy:

ü Truth, rather than dishonesty.

ü Goodness, rather than evil

ü Beauty, not ugliness or vulgarity.

ü Unity, wholeness, and transcendence of opposites, not arbitrariness or forced choices.

ü  Aliveness, not deadness or the mechanisation of life.

ü  Uniqueness, not bland uniformity.

ü  Perfection and necessity, not sloppiness, inconsistency, or accident

ü  Completion, rather than incompleteness.

ü  Justice and order, not injustice and lawlessness.

ü  Simplicity, not unnecessary complexity.

ü  Richness, not environmental impoverishment.

ü  Effortlessness, not strain.

ü  Playfulness, not grim, humourless, drudgery.

ü  Self-sufficiency, not dependency

ü  Meaningfulness, rather than senselessness.

At first glance, you might think that everyone needs these. But think. If you are living through an economic depression or a war, or are living in a ghetto, or in rural poverty, do you worry about these issues, or do you worry about getting enough to eat and a roof over your head? In fact, Maslow believes that much of what is wrong with the world comes down to the fact that very few people really are interested in these values—not because they are bad people, but because they haven’t even had their basic needs taken care of!

When a self-actualiser doesn’t get these need fulfilled, they respond with metapathologies—a list of problems as long as the list of Metaneeds! Let me summarise it by saying that, when forced to live without these values, the self-actualiser develops depression, despair, disgust, alienation, and a degree of cynicism.

Maslow hopped that his efforts at describing the self-actualising person would eventually lead to a “periodic table “of the kinds of qualities, problems, pathologies, and even solutions characteristic of higher levels of human potential. Over time, he devoted increasing attention, not to his own theory, but to humanistic psychology and the human potentials movement.