Maslow's Holistic-Dynamic Theory

• Maslow's holistic-dynamic theory emphasizes a continuously motivated whole person seeking psychological health and self-actualization.
• The theory proposes a hierarchy of needs from physiological to safety, belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization.
• Maslow's theory is part of the third force in psychology, reacting against psychoanalysis' pessimism and behaviorism's mechanistic view.
• Maslow criticized psychoanalysis and behaviorism for not understanding healthy individuals and focusing on pathology or environmental reactions.
• Self-actualization requires individuals to satisfy lower-level needs like hunger, safety, love, and esteem first.
• Self-actualization is optimal psychological health, where individuals fulfill their potential and contribute to society.

Abraham H. Maslow

• Abraham Harold Maslow was born April 1, 1908, in Brooklyn, New York.
• He was the oldest of seven children to Jewish immigrant parents, Samuel and Rose Maslow.
• Maslow had a difficult, lonely childhood, developing a love for books and academics as an escape.
• Maslow earned his BA, MA, and PhD in psychology from the University of Wisconsin under Harry Harlow.
• Maslow taught at Brooklyn College, chaired the psychology department at Brandeis University, pioneered humanistic psychology, and developed the hierarchy of needs.
• Maslow collaborated with or was influenced by Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Max Wertheimer, Ruth Benedict, and Kurt Goldstein.
• Maslow also worked with Harry Harlow and E.L. Thorndike.
• Maslow died of a heart attack on June 8, 1970, at 62, in Menlo Park, California, having significantly contributed to psychology and human potential studies.

Maslow's View of Motivation

• Maslow stated motivation involves the entire person, encompassing all aspects rather than isolated parts.
• Human behavior is complex and driven by multiple conscious and unconscious motives like basic needs, social pressures, and personal desires.
• People's motivation is continuous and evolves, with one need's fulfillment leading to another's emergence.
• Despite cultural differences, all people are motivated by the same basic needs, like food, safety, love, and self-esteem, met differently across cultures.
• Maslow organized universal needs into a hierarchy, often a pyramid, starting with physiological needs progressing to safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization.

Hierarchy of Needs

• Maslow's hierarchy of needs includes five levels: physiological, safety, love and belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization.
• Lower needs must be satisfied for higher ones to become motivators.
• Lower needs have potency over higher needs and must be fulfilled first.

Physiological Needs

• Physiological needs are the most basic required for human survival
• These include air, water, food, shelter, clothing, warmth, sleep, and health.
• Physiological needs take precedence and must be met before higher-level needs.
• Physiological needs are recurring and must be satisfied repeatedly (e.g., hunger returns after eating).
• The motivation is instinctual, driven by the need to survive.

Safety Needs

• Safety needs motivate individuals once physiological needs are partially satisfied.
• Safety includes physical security, stability, protection, and freedom from threats like war, illness, and natural disasters.
• Safety also involves the need for law and order.
• Safety needs cannot be fully satisfied due to ongoing potential dangers, unlike physiological needs.
• Children are more motivated by safety needs due to fears of darkness and strangers, while some adults carry irrational childhood fears.
• Failure to meet these needs can result in "basic anxiety".

Love and Belongingness

• Love and belongingness needs arise after physiological and safety needs are met.
• Individuals who had these needs adequately satisfied from early years do not panic when denied love.
• Those who have never experienced love and belongingness may devalue love and take its absence for granted.
• Individuals who have received love and belongingness only in small doses are strongly motivated to seek it.
• Children need love to grow psychologically, whereas adults may disguise their unmet love needs through behaviors like aloofness or cynicism.

Esteem

• Esteem includes self-respect, confidence, competence, and the desire for recognition and respect from others.
• Self-esteem relies on real competence and achievement, not just external validation.
• Two levels of esteem exist: reputation and self-esteem.

Two levels of esteem

• Reputation is the prestige, recognition, or fame one has achieved in the eyes of others.
• Self-esteem is one's feelings of worth and confidence.
• Self-esteem is founded on real competence and personal achievements, not outside opinions.
• Meeting self-esteem needs leads to self-actualization.

Self-Actualization

• Self-actualization focuses on self-fulfillment, realizing one's potential, and a desire for creativity.
• Self-actualization needs embrace B-values (e.g., truth, beauty, justice) after satisfying esteem needs.
• Self-actualized individuals are fully human, expressing their basic human needs naturally without cultural suppression.
• Self-actualizing individuals maintain self-esteem even when facing rejection or dismissal via demonstrating independence from lower-level needs.
• Deprivation of aesthetic and cognitive needs leads to pathology.
• Neurotic needs contribute to pathology regardless of satisfaction.

Hierarchy of Needs

• In addition to the five conative needs, Maslow identified three other categories of needs: aesthetic, cognitive, and neurotic.
• Saisfying aesthetic and cognitive needs is consistent with psychological health.
• Deprivation of aesthetic and cognitive needs results in pathology.
• Neurotic needs lead to pathology regardless of their satisfaction.

Aesthetic Needs

• Aesthetic needs refer to the desire for beauty, order, and harmony.
• Aesthetic needs are not universal but are significant for individuals who seek aesthetically pleasing experiences.
• When unmet, aesthetic needs can lead to physical or spiritual distress, similar to the frustration of conative needs.
• People with strong aesthetic needs often prefer beauty over disorder and may suffer in unattractive or chaotic environments.

Cognitive Needs

• Cognitive needs refer to the desire for knowledge, understanding, curiosity, and solving mysteries.
• These needs are essential for fulfilling all levels of Maslow's hierarchy.
• Knowledge enables individuals to meet physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization needs.
• Unmet cognitive needs due to misinformation or suppressed curiosity may cause skepticism, disillusionment, and cynicism.
• Healthy individuals seek knowledge for the intrinsic satisfaction of learning and uncovering truths.

Neurotic Needs

• Neurotic needs are nonproductive and lead to stagnation and pathology.
• Neurotic needs arise as compensations for unmet basic needs and perpetuate an unhealthy lifestyle.
• Unsatisfied safety can result in a neurotic drive to hoard
• Unmet love can needs can lead to pathological relationship.
• Whether neurotic needs are gratified or frustrated, they do not contribute to self-actualization or ultimate health.

General Discussion of Needs

• Maslow estimated average satisfaction levels: physiological (85%), safety (70%), love and belongingness (50%), esteem (40%), and self-actualization (10%).
• Needs emerge progressively; for example, if love needs are 25% satisfied, esteem needs may emerge at 5%.
• If love is 75% satisfied, esteem may emerge at 50%, indicating overlapping motivations.
• Individuals can be motivated by needs from different levels simultaneously (i.e. a self-actualizing person at dinner can satisfy physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization)

Reversed Order of Needs

• Individuals may prioritize higher-level needs, like self-actualization/creativity, over lower-level, safety/physiological, needs.
• Apparent reversals are not actual deviations when considering unconscious motivations.
• The needs hierarchy remains intact.
• late sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski endangered his health and abandoned companionship to work on carving a mountain in the Black Hills into a monument to Chief Crazy Horse.

Unmotivated Behavior

• Even though all behaviors have a cause, some behaviors are not motivated.
• Some behavior is not caused by needs but by other factors such as conditioned reflexes, maturation, or drugs.
• Motivation is limited to the striving for the satisfaction of some need, like expressive behavior, which is unmotivated.

Expressive Behavior

• Expressive behavior is unmotivated, spontaneous, and often unconscious actions that serve as a mode of self-expression instead of fulfilling a need.
• Examples include slouching, smiling, gestures, or art, existing as an end in itself and persisting without reinforcement or external rewards.

Coping Behavior

• Coping behavior includes motivated/goal-oriented actions aimed at satisfying a deficit need.
• These behaviors are conscious, effortful, learned, and shaped by the environment, such as seeking food, shelter, or social acceptance.

Deprivation

• Deprivation of basic needs outlined in Maslow's hierarchy can lead to various psychological and physical issues.
• Lack of physiological needs causes malnutrition, fatigue, and obsession with survival basics like food or sex.
• Unmet safety needs result in fear, insecurity, and anxiety.
• Deprivation of love and belonging leads to loneliness, defensiveness, or social withdrawal.
• Unfulfilled esteem causes self-doubt, low confidence, and feelings of worthlessness.
• Lack of self-actualization results in metapathology=loss of meaning, values, and purpose in life.

Instinctoid Nature of Needs

• Instinctoid needs are innate human needs that can be modified by learning, including physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization needs.
• Instinctoid needs cause pathology when frustrated, are persistent, are crucial for psychological health, and are species-specific.
• Unlike non-instinctoid needs, such as combing one's hair, instinctoid needs can lead to illness if unmet.
• Although instinctoid needs are innate, environmental influences can shape them.
• Society must protect needs from cultural overwhelm.

Comparison of Higher and Lower Needs

• Higher and lower needs share the characteristic of being instinctoid, or biologically rooted.
• Love, esteem, and self-actualization needs are as biological as physiological and safety needs.
• Differences between them are of degree rather than kind.
• Higher needs emerge later in evolution and individual development, while lower needs are essential early in life.
• Satisfaction of higher needs leads to greater happiness and peak experiences, whereas fulfilling lower needs provides temporary pleasure.
• Individuals who satisfy higher needs find them more subjectively desirable and have no motivation to regress.

Maslow's Quest for the Self-Actualizing Person

• Maslow's study of self-actualization began out of curiosity about anthropologist Ruth Benedict and psychologist Max Wertheimer.
• Maslow wanted to understand what made them stand out and identified shared qualities.
• Initially, Maslow studied college students but found very few (about 1 in 3,000) who could be described as self-actualizing.
• Maslow focused on older individuals but found less than 1% met his criteria.
• Maslow eventually identified a few dozen self-actualizers like Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Harriet Tubman, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
• Maslow used biographical research for historical figures, interviews, free association, and projective tests for living subjects, studying them indirectly due to self-consciousness.

Criteria for Self-Actualization

• Conditions to satisfy the self-actualization need include being free of constraints imposed by society and ourselves.
• We must not be distracted by the lower-order needs and must be secure in our self-image and our relationships.
• We must be able to love and be loved in return.
• We must have a realistic knowledge of our strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices.

Values and Characteristics of Self-Actualizers

• Abraham Maslow didn't find many examples of self-actualizers, estimating they constitute 1% or less of the population, but they share characteristics.
• clear perception of reality
• acceptance of self, others, and nature
• spontaneity, simplicity, and naturalness
• dedication to a cause
• independence and need for privacy
• freshness of appreciation
• peak experiences
• social interest
• deep interpersonal relationships
• tolerance and acceptance of others
• creativeness and originality
• resistance to social pressures

Maslow's Psychology

• Maslow's view of personality is optimistic and humanistic.
• Maslow emphasized psychological health, growth, and potential rather than illness or weaknesses.
• We have the free will to shape our lives and achieve self-actualization, taking responsibility for personal development.
• Needs are universal, but the ways we satisfy them are learned, and personality is shaped by both heredity and environment. Maslow recognized the importance of early childhood experiences.
• Maslow believed that self-actualization is the highest human achievement and human nature is good, though evil can result from poor environments.

Measuring Self Actualization

• Everett Shostrom (1964, 1974) developed The Personal Orientation Inventory (POI), a self-report questionnaire consisting of 150 pairs of statements, to measure self-actualization.
• People taking the test indicate which of each pair is more applicable to them.
• The POI is scored for 2 major scales and 10 subscales.
• Time competence measures the degree to which we live in the present.
• Inner directedness assesses how much we depend on ourselves rather than on others for judgments and values.

Measuring Self Actualization

• Scores indicating higher self-actualization on the POI have been positively related to emotional health, creativity, well-being following therapy, academic achievement, autonomy, and racial tolerance.
• Other studies report negative correlations between high self-actualization scores and alcohol-ism, institutionalization for mental disturbances, neuroticism, depression, and hypochondriasis.
• POI research on women, ages 19 to 55, confirmed Maslow's view that self-actualization occurs gradually over the life span.

The Jonah Complex

• This idea is based on the biblical tale of Jonah, who was called by God to prophesy, but was afraid of the task, and ran away.
• Jonah eventually understood that he had to accept his fate (quoted in Hoffman, 1996, p. 50).
• Thus, the Jonah complex refers to doubts about our abilities.
• We may fear that taking action to maximize our potential will lead to new situations with which we may be unable to cope.
• Simultaneously, we are afraid of and thrilled by the possibilities, but too often, fear takes precedence.