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April-May 2008 Newsletter: Abraham Maslow, 10 points to ponder
Back in February I wrote about Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and how he expanded our awareness of living. Today I’d like to share the story of Abraham Maslow and how this has enriched and shaped our understanding of life and people.
I first came across Maslow in a lecture on work motivation. He is most famous for his well-known theory of the hierarchy of human needs which we explain in Chapter 4 of Building Self-Confidence for Dummies. You may know him for this and for his related concepts of peak experiences and self-actualization.
It was in trying to understand self-actualizing behaviour more recently that I got really interested in Maslow and I found there was much more to him than I had thought. First, there is his human story. He was an unhappy child, born into a dysfunctional New York family, and well into later life he still hated his mother for the way she had raised him. He was an unattractive young fellow too, gangly and ugly with poor social skills and deep shyness of girls. What he had in his favour was an enquiring mind and a thirst for understanding. For most of his career, certainly from the depression of the 1930s to the anti-liberal McCarthyism of the 1950s, Maslow had to battle against the institutional anti-Semitism in American education. He found true recognition only in the 1960s and died prematurely of a heart attack in 1970.
His career story is equally mixed. Discovering he had an abnormally high IQ must have been a great relief to Maslow and he lived up to it, losing the self-doubt that had previously dogged his relations with his colleagues and teachers (in fact he became a royal pain to them). Having decided on psychology as his profession he set about rethinking and improving much of what he was taught. His work beneitted from the influx of leading Jewish psychiatric practitioners from Vienna and Frankfurt fleeing from Hitler to his home town of New York, and he questioned and challenged many of them; eventually synthesising the two great schools of Freudianism and Behaviourism into his own theory.
Maslow was one of nature’s natural outsiders. He excelled in most of what he took on but in the process he alienated many of those whom could have most effectively helped him and appreciated his work. Having built a solid reputation for original and pioneering science, he even turned his back on this as he found academic psychology too slow and cumbersome for his towering intellectual insights into human nature. Ironically, it was for this final stage of his work that he was he was elected the President of the American Psychological Society.
So, what did this remarkable man discover about life that he so wanted to understand and explain to the rest of us before he died at the age of only 62? Here is a collection of 10 of his insights; I invite you to savour them one at a time over the next few weeks, and if they begin to inspire you, you can check out some of his work, especially “The Farther Reaches of Human Nature” and “Toward a Psychology of Being”. You might also want to remind yourself of his basic ideas on the hierarchy of human needs.
Enjoy - Brinley
Abraham Maslow: 10 Points to Ponder
DAY 1The American Dream is typically expressed in lower-need and almost entirely materialistic terms. Personal success is generally defined in the amount of money one receives and along with it the number of status objects one has attained (fancy automobile, boat, big house, lavish vacations, fine clothes). But to enjoy a good life, all of these status objects are expendable; not one of them is actually necessary for true fulfilment. What is necessary for human nature is that we move upward in our needs through belongingness, to love and affection, to achievement and competence with ensuing dignity and self-respect, and then on up to freedom for self-actualization and for expressing and resolving our unique idiosyncrasies.
DAY 2Why don’t people achieve their full potential in life? What inwardly stands in their way? We fear our highest possibilities (as well as our lowest ones). We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments, under the most perfect conditions, under conditions of greatest courage. We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before these very same possibilities. I challenge my students by asking who among them hopes to write the great American novel, or be a Senator or President, or Secretary-General of the UN. Who aspires to becoming a saint like Schweitzer or a great leader? When the embarrassed giggles died down I ask: “if not you then who else?”
DAY 3Self-actualization means experiencing fully, vividly, with concentration and absorption. It means experiencing without getting in your own way, without adolescent self-consciousness. It is a development of personality which frees you from the deficiency problems of youth, and from the neurotic problems of life, so that you are able to face, endure and grapple with the real human existential problems of living to which there is no perfect solution. It is not an absence of problems but an understanding and acceptance of our intrinsic human situation with no poses, no defences, no shyness. That is, facing and accepting courageously, and even enjoying and being amused by the shortcomings of human nature instead of trying to deny them. At this moment of experiencing, you are wholly and fully human. This is a self-actualizing moment.
DAY 4Self-actualization is not only an end state but also the process of actualizing your potentialities at any time, in any amount. It means using your intelligence and being prepared to go through an arduous and demanding period of preparation in order to realize your possibilities (studying to get smarter, exercising to get stronger). Self actualization means working to do well the thing that you want to do. You want to be first-rate, or as good as you can be. Peak experiences are transient moments of self-actualization. They are moments of ecstasy that cannot be bought, cannot be guaranteed, cannot even be sought. You must be, as CS Lewis wrote, “surprised by joy.” You cannot set up the conditions to make peak experiences more likely, but perversely you can set up the conditions which make them less likely. Breaking up an illusion, getting rid of a false notion, learning what you are not good at, learning what your potentialities are not – these are also part of self discovery.
DAY 5We can learn from self-actualizing people (people who have been reasonably gratified in their basic needs for safety, belonging, affection, dignity) what the ideal attitude toward work might be under the most favourable circumstances. These highly evolved individuals assimilate their work into their identity, into the self. Work actually becomes part of the individual’s definition of himself. Self-actualizing people are motivated no longer by their basic needs but higher needs which turn out to be essentially the intrinsic values, the eternal verities, the values of Being (beauty, truth, excellence, order, unity, perfection, and so on). A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write. If you are to be at peace with yourself ultimately you must be all you can be. This need we may call self-actualization; it refers to your desire for self-fulfilment, namely to the tendency for you to become actually what you are potentially; to become everything you are capable of becoming.
DAY 6Every age but ours has had its model, its ideal. All of these have been given up by our culture; the saint, the hero, the gentleman, the knight, the mystic. Perhaps we shall soon be able to use as our guide and model the fully growing and self-fulfilling human being. The one in whom all potentialities are coming to full development, the one whose inner nature expresses itself feely. The achievement of self-actualization paradoxically makes more possible the transcendence of self, self-consciousness and selfishness. It makes it easier to accept and merge as a part in a larger whole than yourself.
DAY 7Most people lack a strong sense of self. They do not know what they want or what they are looking for in life. Many are afraid of freedom and would prefer to have their decisions made for them. As a result, they are extremely suggestible and will follow a self-confident leader rather than determine their own destinies. The annals of political leadership are full of decisive-looking paranoid characters (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, McCarthy). Such emotionally disturbed people never relent for a moment and find it easy to win loyal followers whom they often lead to destruction.
DAY 8Creativeness is correlated with our ability to withstand the lack of structure, predictability, or control, with our tolerance for ambiguity, for planlessness. We must move beyond our fear of the future and trust in our ability to improvise in the face of something that could come up unexpectedly. This then is a combination of trust in yourself and a belief that you have the ability or the capacity to face anything that is unexpected or unpredicted. The rate of acceleration of accumulation of new scientific facts, of new inventions, of increased affluence presents every human being today with a situation different from any that has happened before. We must develop into people who are capable of coping with the inevitable rapid obsolescence of any new product or any old way of doing things. We must be people who will not fight change but will anticipate it and enjoy it.
DAY 9Authentic persons are those who have discovered and accepted their own biological, temperamental and constitutional cues, the signals from within. This description relates to intuition as well. If you achieve this ability to hear your own impulse voices, then you have virtually infallible suggestions and commands. Such people know what is good and what is bad for them and what they like and dislike. Life is a series of choices, one after another. At each point there can be a movement towards defence, towards safety, towards being afraid; but over on the other side there is the growth choice. To make the growth choice instead of the fear choice a dozen times a day is to move a dozen times a day toward self-actualization.
DAY 10What is the cause of creativity? What is the most important single thing we can do? Shall we add a three-credit course in creativity into the curriculum or try implanting electrodes with which to turn it on or off? In the consultations I have had with Research and Development people in industry, I get the feeling that they are looking for some secret button to push, like switching a light on or off. The key question isn’t what fosters creativity? It is why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? A good question might be not why do people create but why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon the sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.
Best wishes
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