Abraham Maslow, we're talking about the humanistic psychologists as we
were talking about before.
We have already covered Carl Rogers and his client centered therapy. When we get into
abnormal psychology and talk about the disorders that people might encounter in
life and
how to go about therapy, you'll see Carl Rogers again because
the humanistic movement changed things. Again, it was a reaction against
psychoanalytic points of view
and behavioristic points of view and held that you have this
ability as a human being to grow, to change, that you have an inner directedness,
that you have a uniqueness
and free will. So, looking at Abraham Maslow, you develop this hierarchy of needs and
you might say, well where am I ever going to use that kind of stuff? I have seen
this hierarchy of needs used in business. I've seen uit used in sports.
It's a pretty handy concept. It's an idea
that helps understand human needs.
So he has it labeled in the hierarchy where some needs
take precedence over other needs where his overall point is that you
have the ability to grow. Not only do you have the ability, you're compelled to
grow.
You have to grow unless something gets in your way.
You have to be all you can be unless circumstances
limit you. So if you look at an acorn, for example,
right? If an acorn falls into fertile ground, gets buried at the right time,
has enough sunlight, has enough rain, has enough space,
it has no choice, right, but to become a massive tree,
assuming its genetics will allow it, it has no choice but to do that.
So, in other words, it has to grow. It has to develop
but life ain't always like that, right? That acorn might fall
near a squirrel and that's the end of that acorn, right, or it might fall
into ground that's not nutrient-rich. It might not have enough water, it may not have
enough light. It may get
various amounts of that. It may be too many trees in the area crowded in,
right? All kinds of circumstances might arise to prevent that
acorn from becoming the tree it was destined to be.
That's the same idea here. There's a lot of circumstances and obstacles in your life
that prevent you from reaching your full potential but where the
psycho-dynamic and behavioral schools of thought thought that, you know, that's just
what it is and you are kind of limited to who you are.
The humanist thought you can get around that. If you can understand your circumstances
and better understand yourself
you can change your circumstances and, as such, you have no choice but to go higher
and higher up this pyramid
of needs. So, at the bottom we've got physiological needs. You have to have these met.
These are survival needs. These are primary reinforcers when we look at
behaviorism, right?
You've got to have food. You've got to have shelter from the
from the elements but beyond that the next level up is safety.
If you've got food and shelter that doesn't mean you are necessarily safe,
right? So, safety would be protecting yourself against hostile forces from the
world.
Might be your neighbors. It might be your government, right? It might be an
enemy of the state of some type
but we lock our doors if we have doors to lock, if you see what I'm saying. If you're
homeless
you have no doors to lock, right? You have no place to go so what do you worry
about?
Eating, first. Second to that you find a place to stay
where you feel some security. If this is met, then you can really move into love
and belongingness where you
have feelings for other people and they reciprocate and return those to you or you
feel part of
a family or part of a community,
part of an intimate relationship. In that sense, you have a different level
of fulfillment of your needs. Once these are filled,
then you feel good. You have now reached self esteem needs, feeling good
about yourself because you have what you need to live.
You have a place that you feel comfortable and safe. You have people that
love you and you love them.
Naturally it follows that you start to work on feeling the best you can about yourself.
Esteem needs now need to be met,
and then once you're feeling as good as you could possibly feel about yourself
and you've got security all down through that pyramid,
you move into this top pinnacle part called self-actualization
where you become all you can be. You realize your full potential.
You exercise what is being latent but has been yearning to be part of your
self because it is part of yourself. It's part that has been hidden by circumstances
that have prevented you from being the person you could be
but once you've got all these obstacles removed, you can't help
but be the person that you were meant to be. In fact,
before he died, Maslow actually went a step further and blew the top of the
pyramid and said once you've finished
all of these things, you're not satisfied.
It's not fulfilling anymore to be all you can be. Now you have to turn
outward to get your fulfillment. Now you have to give back. Now you might give
back in any of these stages.
One of the critiques in any stage theory is that you may be in multiple places
simultaneously, right?
Just because you lose your job doesn't mean your family doesn't love you anymore
but believe me if you lose your job you don't start reading philosophy
you start reading want ads, right? You start readjusting your life based on
the primary needs as they're satisfied you move up or down
this hierarchy. But once you are fully satisfied, you take kind of these
these pinnacle people that we look to, JFK,
Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Mother Teresa.
What did they do with their lives once they satisfied all their personal needs?
They then went to trying to satisfy social needs.
It wasn't satisfying just to be the best they they could be.
They had to go further and do more to help
others. They moved up past self actualization.
That inner directed need to fulfill one's potential though,
from Maslow's point of view, is something most people never achieve.
They don't reach it. If they do, they have these things called peak experiences
which aren't on your test but
clearly are on your slide.
The idea that you have these little epiphanies, these little revelations, these little moments
of clarity
where you see yourself connected to the greater world or the greater community
in a way that really is life-changing potentially
but they come and they go. People have a peak experience and then it leaves
and then they're back into life, right? Well, when everything is going really
really well
with your life, you have these inklings of what you might do with it. These special
things, right? You reach
for your ideal self, if we look at
Carl Rogers terminology, right? You reach to be the best you can be,
knowing you can't ever be perfect. Now we're going to move from the humanistic and the
psychodynamic
and the behavioral into a thing called trait theory.