Holistic-Dynamic Theory

Abraham Maslow
Abraham Maslow
 His childhood is filled with intense feelings
of shyness, inferiority and depression

 At City College, he attended Law School but

quitted – he felt law dealt too much with
evil people and was not concerned with the
good
 He enrolled in Medical school, still did not
finished his studies – unemotional and negative
view of people

 His personal life is filled with pain, both

physical and psychological.
 In his later years, he was often in poor health
Basic Assumption
 The whole person is constantly being motivated by one
need or another and that people have the potential to
grow toward psychological health - self-actualization

 People must satisfy lower level needs such as hunger,

safety, love, and esteem
 Only after they are relatively satisfied in each of these needs
can they reach self-actualization
Motivation
 The whole person, not any single part or function, is
motivated (Holistic approach to motivation)

 Motivation is usually complex

 People are continually motivated by one need or another

 All people everywhere are motivated by the same basic

needs

 Needs can be arranged on a hierarchy

Physiological Needs
 The most prepotent of all
 These needs differ from other needs
 They are the only needs that can be completely satisfied or
even overly satisfied
 They have a recurring nature
Safety Needs
 These needs cannot be overly satisfied
 Basic Anxiety – Adults feel unsafe because they retain
irrational fears from childhood that cause them to act as
if they were afraid of parental punishments
Love and Belongingness
 People who had love and belongingness needs adequately
satisfied, they do not panic when they are denied of love
 People who never experienced love and belongingness
are incapable of giving love
 People who received love and belongingness in small
doses have stronger needs for affection and acceptance
Esteem Needs
 Two levels of Esteem Needs
 Reputation – the perception of the prestige, recognition or
fame
 Self-esteem – desire for strength, for achievement, for
adequacy, for mastery and competence…
Four Dimensions of Needs
 Conative Needs
 Aesthetic Needs – these are not universal, but at least
some people in every culture seem to be motivated by
the need for beauty and aesthetically pleasing experiences
 Cognitive Needs - people have a desire to know, to solve
mysteries, to understand, and to be curious
 Healthy people have the desire to know more
 People who have not satisfied their cognitive needs become
pathological, a pathology that takes the form of skepticism,
disillusionment, and cynicism
 Neurotic Needs - perpetuate an unhealthy style of life
and have no value in the striving for self-actualization
Expressive Behavior
 Unmotivated behavior
 Unconscious behavior and usually takes place naturallyt
and with little effort

Coping Behavior
 Motivated behavior and aimed at satisfying a need
 Ordinarily conscious, effortful, learned and determined by
the external environment
Metapathology
 Lack of satistfaction of any basic needs leads to some kind
of pathology
 The absence of values, lack of fulfillment and the loss of
meaning of life
Instinctoid Needs
 Human needs are innately determined even though they
can be modified by learning
 Criteria in separating instinctoid needs from
noninstinctoid needs
 Level of pathology upon frustration
 Persistency and psychological health
 Instinctoid needs are species-specific
 Instinctoid needs can be molded, inhibited or altered by
environmental influences
Self-Actualization
 Criteria
 Free from psychopathology
 Progressed through the hierarchy of needs
 Embraced the B- Values
 Fulfilled their needs to grow, to develop and to increasingly
become what they were capable of becoming
Being Values

Metamotivation
 Ultimate level of needs
 Characterized by expressive rather than coping behavior
and is associated with the B-Values
Being-Love (B-Love)
 Before people can become self-actualizing, they must
satisfy their love and belongingness needs
 Love for the essence or “Being” of the other
 Self actualizing people are capable of giving and receiving
love
 This kind of love is mutually felt and shared and not
motivated by a deficiency or incompleteness within the
lover
Characteristics of Self-Actualizing People
 More Efficient Perception of  Gemeinschaftsgefühl
Reality
 Profound Interpersonal Relations
 Acceptance of Self, Others and
 Democratic Character Structure
Nature
 Discrimination between Means and
 Spontaneity, Simplicity and
Ends
Naturalness
 Philosophical Sense of Humor
 Problem-Centering
 Creativeness
 The Need for Privacy
 Resistance to Enculturation
 Autonomy
 Continued Freshness of
Appreciation
 The Peak Experience
Characteristics of Self-Actualizing People
 More Efficient Perception of Reality – being able to
discriminate between the genuine and the fake not only in
people but also in literature,art, and music
 Acceptance of Self, Others and Nature - lacking
defensiveness, self-deafeting guilt, not burdened by undue
anxiety
 Spontaneity, Simplicity and Naturalness – being able to live
simple llives in the sense that they have no need to erect a
complex veneer designed to deceive the world
 Problem-Centering – being able to see problems outside
themselves, not self-centered
Characteristics of Self-Actualizing People
 The Need for Privacy – having quality of detachment that
allows them to be alone without feeling lonely
 Autonomy – being able to have autonomy and being able
to depend on themselves for growth even though at some
time in their past they had to have received love
 Continued Freshness of Appreciation – having the
wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly
and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe,pleasure,
wonder, and even ecstasy
Peak Experience
 Experiences that are mystical in nature and that
somehow give a feeling of transcendence
 All most all people have peak experiences or
ecstasies though not all experiences are of equal
intensity
 It is unmotivated, nonstriving, and nonwishing, and
during such an experience, a person experiences no
needs, wants, or deficiencies
 It often has a lasting effect on a person’s life
Peak Experience
 Peak experiences are quite natural and are part of human
makeup
 People having a peak experience see the whole universe
as unified or all in one piece, and they see clearly their
place in that universe
 Peakers feel both more humble and more powerful at the
same time; feel passive, receptive, more desirous of
listening and more capable of hearing; feel more
responsible for their activities and perceptions, more
active and more self-determined; loss of fear, anxiety, and
conflict and become more loving, accepting, and
spontaneous
Characteristics of Self-Actualizing People
 Gemeinschaftsgefühl – having social interest, community
feeling, or a sense of oneness with all humanity
 Profound Interpersonal Relations – having deep and
profound feelings for individuals
 Democratic Character Structure – being able to become
friendly and considerate with other people regardless of
class, color, age, or gender
 Discrimination between Means and Ends – having a clear
sense of right and wrong conduct and have little conflict
about basic values
Characteristics of Self-Actualizing People
 Philosophical Sense of Humor – having a humor that is is
intrinsic to the situation rather than contrived and it is
spontaneous rather than planned
 Creativeness – having a keen perception of truth, beauty,
and reality which are the ingredients that form the
foundation of true creativity
 Resistance to Enculturation – having a sense of
detachment from their surroundings and are able to
transcend a particular culture
 Being autonomous by following one’s own standards of
conduct and not blindly obeying the rules of others
Jonah Complex
 The fear of being one’s
best
 Characterized by attempts
to run away from one’s
destiny
 Represents a fear of
success, a fear of being
one’s best and a feeling pf
awesomeness
Psychotherapy
 Aim: Clients would embrace the Being Values
 Clients must free from their dependency on others so
that their natural impulse toward growth and self-
actualization could become active

 People who seek therapy:

Difficulty achieving love and
belongingness needs
 Psychotheraphy: Interpersonal
process
 Personal Orientation Inventory
 Everett L. Shostrom (1974)
 Attempt to measure the values and behaviors of self-actualizing
people
 150 forced-choice items
 High scores on the two major scale and 10 subscale indicate
some level of self-actualization

Sample items:
(a) I can feel comfortable with
less than a perfect performance, VS
(b) I feel uncomfortable with anything
less than a perfect performance”
POI Major Scales and Subscales
Major Scales Subscale
 Self-actualization values
 Time
 Flexibility in applying values
Competence or  Sensitivity to one’s own needs and
Time feelings
 Spontaneity in expressing feelings
Incompetence behaviorally
 Support Scale  Self-regard
 Self-acceptance
 Positive view of humanity
 Ability to see opposites of life as
meaningfully related
 Acceptance of aggression
 Capacity for intimate contact
Other Measures of Self-Actualization
 Short Index of Self-Actualization – Alvin Jones and Rick
Crandall (1986)
 Brief Index of Self-Actualization – John Sumerlin and
Charles Brundick (1996, 1998)