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Abraham Maslow
To attain Self-actualization:
people must satisfy lower level needs such as hunger, safety, love, and esteem
Basic Assumptions:
CONATIVE NEEDS:
PHYSIOLOGICAL NEEDS
including food, water, oxygen, maintenance of body temperature, and so on.
The most prepotent of all.
Characteristics:
First, they are the only needs that can be completely satisfied or even overly satisfied.
Second, their recurring nature
SAFETY NEEDS
When people have partially satisfied their physiological needs, they become motivated by safety
needs
including physical security, stability, dependency, protection, and freedom from threatening
forces such as war, terrorism, illness, fear, anxiety, danger, chaos, and natural disasters. The
needs for law, order, and structure are also safety needs
Characteristics:
they cannot be overly satiated
ESTEEM NEEDS
which include self-respect, confidence, competence, and the knowledge that others hold them
in high esteem
AESTHETIC NEEDS
are not universal, but at least some people in every culture seem to be motivated by the need
for beauty and aesthetically pleasing experiences
Characteristics
People with strong aesthetic needs desire beautiful and orderly surroundings, and when these
needs are not met, they become sick in the same way that they become sick when their conative
needs are frustrated
People prefer beauty to ugliness, and they may even become physically and spiritually ill when
forced to live in squalid, disorderly environments
COGNITIVE NEEDS
Most people have a desire to know, to solve mysteries, to understand, and to be curious.
Note:
When cognitive needs are blocked, all needs on Maslows hierarchy are threatened; that is,
knowledge is necessary to satisfy each of the five conative needs.
believed that healthy people desire to know more, to theorize, to test hypotheses, to uncover
mysteries, or to find out how something works just for the satisfaction of knowing.
Pathology
However, people who have not satisfied their cognitive needs, who have been consistently lied
to, have had their curiosity stifled, or have been denied information, become pathological, a
pathology that takes the form of skepticism, disillusionment, and cynicism.
NEUROTIC NEEDS
Other needs when not satisfied leads to some level of illness
neurotic needs lead only to stagnation and pathology
Characteristics
are nonproductive
They perpetuate an unhealthy style of life and have no value in the striving for self-actualization
are usually reactive is, they serve as compensation for unsatisfied basic needs
For example, a person who does not satisfy safety needs may develop a strong desire to hoard
money or property
Unmotivated Behavior
Maslow believed that even though all behaviors have a cause, some behaviors are not motivated
other words, not all determinants are motives.
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 (coping behavior). Much of
what Maslow (1970) called expressive behavior is unmotivated
Coping behavior
is ordinarily conscious, effortful, learned, and determined by the external environment
individuals attempts to cope with the environment; to secure food and shelter; to make friends;
and to receive acceptance, appreciation, and prestige from others
serves some aim or goal (although not always conscious or known to the person), and it is
always motivated by some deficit need
Deprivation of Needs
Lack of satisfaction of any of the basic needs
leads to some kind of pathology results in malnutrition, fatigue, loss of energy, obsession with
sex, and so on.
Threats to ones safety
ead to fear, insecurity, and dread.
When love needs go unfulfilled
a person becomes defensive, overly aggressive, or socially timid.
Lack of esteem
Results in the illnesses of self-doubt, self-depreciation, and lack of confidence.
Deprivation of self-actualization needs
also leads to pathology, or more accurately, metapathology.
Meta-pathology
as the absence of values, the lack of fulfillment, and the loss of meaning in life.
Instinctual needs
Produces pathology,
persistent and their satisfaction leads to psychological health.
species-specific humans
can be molded, inhibited, or altered by environmental influences
Noninstinctoid needs
does not produce illness
usually temporary and their satisfaction is not a prerequisite for health.
species-specific not human
Note:
Maslow (1970) insisted that society should protect the weak, subtle, and tender instinctoid
needs if they are not to be overwhelmed by the tougher more powerful culture
Similarities
Both Instinctoid and biological
Differences
higher level needs
are later on the phylogenetic or evolutionary scale.
only humans (a relatively recent species) have the need for self-actualization.
appear later during the course of individual development;
produce more happiness and more peak experiences,
more subjectively desirable to those people who have experienced both higher and lower level
needs
In other words, a person who has reached the level of self-actualization would have no
motivation to return to a lower stage of development
lower level needs
must be cared for in infants and children before higher level needs become operative
produce more happiness and more peak experiences,
Hedonistic pleasure, however, is usually temporary and not comparable to the quality of
happiness produced by the satisfaction of higher needs.
SELF-ACTUALIZATION