ABRAHAM H.

MASLOW: Holistic-Dynamic Theory

Overview
 Maslow’s theory has been called humanistic theory, transpersonal theory, the third force in psychology, the fourth force in
personality, needs theory, and self-actualization theory.
 Maslow referred to it as holistic-dynamic theory because it assumes that the whole person is constantly being motivated
by one need or another and that people have the potential to grow toward psychological health, that is self-actualization.
To attain self-actualization, people must satisfy lower needs.
o Maslow’s theory accepted some tenets of psychoanalysis and behaviorism just like other humanistic theories.
However, he criticized both theories for their limited views of humanity and their inadequate understanding of
the psychologically healthy person.

Maslow’s View of Motivation

Maslow’s theory of personality rests on several basic assumptions regarding motivation:
(1) He adopted a holistic approach to motivation. That is, the whole person, not any single part or function, is motivated.
(2) Motivation is usually complex, meaning that a person’s behavior may spring from several separate motives.
(3) People are continually motivated by one need or another. When one need is satisfied, it ordinarily loses its motivational
power and is then replaced by another need.
(4) All people everywhere are motivated by the same basic needs.
(5) Needs can be arranged on a hierarchy.

Hierarchy of Needs

Self-Actualization

Esteem

Love & Belongingness

Safety

Physiological

 The hierarchy assumes that lower needs must be satisfied or at least relatively satisfied (prepotency) before higher level
needs become motivators. The needs are arranged in order of their prepotency.
o The five basic needs, composing the hierarchy are conative needs, meaning that they have a striving or
motivational character.

Physiological Needs
 the most basic and prepotent needs of any person, including food, water, oxygen, and so on
 Physiological needs differ from other needs in two important respects:
(1) they are the only needs that can be completely satisfied or even overly satisfied
(2) it has a constantly recurring nature
Safety Needs
 These includes physical security, stability, dependency, protection, and freedom.
 They cannot be completely or overly satisfied
Love and Belongingness Needs
 These include the desire for friendship, the wish for a mate and children, to belong to a family, a neighbourhood. These
also include some aspects of sex and human contact, and the need to both give and receive love.
Esteem Needs
 These include self-respect, confidence, competence, and the knowledge that others hold them in high esteem.
 Maslow identified two levels of esteem needs:
o Reputation, the perception of the prestige, recognition, or fame a person has achieved in the eyes of others.
o Self-esteem is a person’s own feelings of worth and confidence.
Self-Actualization Needs
 the highest need recognized by Maslow
 Once esteem needs are satisfied, they do not always move to the level of self-actualization unless they embrace the B-
values.
 Self-actualization needs includes self-fulfillment, the realization of all one’s potential, and the desire to become creative in
the full sense of the world.
 Self-actualizing people become independent on the satisfaction of either love or esteem needs.
In addition to the five conative needs, Maslow identified three other categories of needs:

(1) Aesthetic Needs

- Unlike conative needs, they are not universal.
- People with strong aesthetic needs desire beautiful and orderly surroundings and pleasing experiences.
(2) Cognitive Needs
- the desire to know, to solve mysteries, to understand, and to be curios
- When cognitive needs are blocked, all of the five conative needs are threatened, that is, knowledge is necessary to
satisfy each of the basic needs.
(3) Neurotic Needs
- Satisfaction of neurotic needs lead only to stagnation and pathology unlike the satisfaction of conative, aesthetic, and
cognitive needs which leads to physical and psychological health.
- Neurotic needs are non-productive. They are usually reactive, that is, they serve as compensation for unsatisfied basic
needs.

General Discussion of Needs

 Reversed Order of Needs: occasionally the hierarchal order of the basic needs are reversed.
 Unmotivated Behavior: Maslow believed that even though all behaviors have a cause, some behaviors are not
motivated. In other words, not all determinants are motives. Much of what Maslow called “expressive behaviors” is
unmotivated.
 Expressive and Coping Behavior
- Expressive behavior (which is often unmotivated) is often an end itself and serves no other purpose than to be. It is
frequently unconscious and usually takes place naturally and with little effort.
- Coping behavior (which is always motivated and aimed at satisfying a need) is ordinarily conscious, effortful, learned,
and determined by the external environment. It serves some aim or goal.
 Deprivation of Needs
- Lack of satisfaction of any the basic needs leads to some kind of pathology.
- Metapathology, the deprivation of self-actualization needs by the absence of values, the lack of fulfillment, and the loss
of meaning in life.
 Instinctoid Nature of Needs
- Instinctoid needs are human needs that are innately determined even though they can be modified by learning (e.g.
sex).
- The thwarting of instinctoid needs produces pathology unlike noninstinctoid ones.
- Instinctoid needs are persistent and their satisfaction leads to psychological health.
- Instinctoid needs are species-specific.
- Though difficult to change, instinctoid needs can be molded, inhibited, or altered by environmental influences. Even
though instinctoid needs are basic and unlearned, they can be changed and even destroyed by the more powerful forces
of civilization.

Comparison of Higher and Lower Needs

o Higher needs (love, esteem, and self-actualization) and lower needs (physiological and safety) are similarly instinctoid in
nature.
o Differences between the two are those of degree and not kind:
o (1) Higher level needs are later on the phylogenetic or evolutionary scale [e.g. only humans (a relatively recent
species) have the need for self-actualization]. Also, higher needs appear and operate late during the course of
individual development.
o (2) Higher level needs produce more happiness and more peak experiences, although satisfaction of lower level
needs produce a degree of hedonistic pleasure, which is usually temporary. Also, the satisfaction of higher level
needs is more subjectively desirable to those people who have experienced both higher and lower needs. A
person who has reached the level of self-actualization would have no motivation to return to a lower stage of
development.

Self-Actualization
- represents the highest level of human development (The Good Human Being)

Criteria for Self-Actualization

(1) Self-actualizing people were free from psychopathology.

(2) They had progressed through the hierarchy of needs
(3) embracing of the B-values
(4) Self-actualizing individuals fulfilled their needs to grow, to develop, and to increasingly become what they were capable of
becoming

Values of Self-Actualizers

- Self-actualizing people are motivated by the “eternal verities “called B-value, Being values.
- B-values are “metaneeds” to indicate that they are the ultimate level of needs.
- The motives of self-actualizing people are called metamotivation. It is characterized by expressive behaviors and is associated
with the B-values.
- Only people who live among the B-values are self-actualizing, and they alone are capable of metamotivation.
- The values of self-actualizing people include truth, goodness, beauty, wholeness or the transcendence of dichotomies, aliveness
or spontaneity, uniqueness, perfection, completion,
justice and order, simplicity, richness or totality, effortlessness, playfulness or humor, and self-sufficiency or autonomy.
- All people have a holistic tendency to move toward completeness or totality; and when this movement is thwarted, they experience
an existential illness. They suffer from feelings of inadequacy, disintegration, and unfulfillment.

Characteristics of Self-Actualizing People

1. More efficient perception of reality
2. Acceptance of self, others, and nature
3. Spontaneity, simplicity, and naturalness
4. Problem-centering
5. The need for privacy
6. Autonomy
7. Continued freshness of appreciation
8. The peak experience
9. Gemeinschaftsgefühl or social interest, community feeling, or a sense of oneness with the humanity
10. Profound interpersonal relations
11. The democratic character structure
12. Discrimination between means and ends
13. Philosophical sense of humor
14. Creativeness
15. Resistance to enculturation

Love, Sex, and Actualization

- Self-actualizing people are capable of B-love that is they love for the essence or “Being” of the other. B-love is mutually felt and
shared and not motivated by a deficiency or incompleteness within the lover. Self-actualizers do not love because they expect
something in return. They simply love and are loved.
- They can also tolerate the absence of sex, because they have no deficiency need for it.

Philosophy of Science
- Maslow belied that value-free science does not lead to the proper study of human personality. He argued for a different philosophy
of science, a holistic, a humanistic approach that is not value-free and that has scientists who care about the people and the
topics they investigate.
- Psychological should place more emphasis on the study of individuals and less on the study of large groups. Subjective reports
should be favored over rigidly objectives ones, and that people should be allowed to tell about themselves in a holistic fashion
instead of the more orthodox approach that studies people in bits and pieces.
- Desacralization, the concept that originated from Maslow which refers to the type of science that lacks emotion, joy, wonder, awe,
and rapture.
- Maslow also argued for a Taoistic attitude for psychology, one that would be noninterfering, passive, and receptive. Prediction
and goal be replaced with sheer fascination as goals for science.

The Jonah Complex

- According to Maslow, everyone is born with a will toward health, a tendency to grow toward self-actualization. People do not
achieve self-actualization because:
(a) Growth toward health personality can be blocked at each of the steps in the hierarchy of needs.
(b) Jonah complex, or the fear of being one’s best. It is characterized by the attempts to run away from one’s destiny. It represent a
fear of success, a fear of being one’s best, and a feeling of awesomeness in the presence of beauty and perfection.
- But why? First, the human body is not strong enough to endure the ecstasy of fulfillment for any length of time. Second, people
compare themselves with those who have accomplished greatness, and get appalled by their own arrogance.

Psychotherapy
- For Maslow, the aim of therapy is for clients to embrace the Being-values and to accomplish this aim, clients must be free from
their dependency on others so that their natural impulse toward growth and self-actualization could become active.
- Most people who seek for psychotherapy have the lower needs relatively well satisfied but have some difficulty achieving love and
belonging needs.
- Psychotherapy is largely and interpersonal process. Through a warm, loving, interpersonal relationship with the therapist, the client
gains satisfaction of love and belongingness needs and thereby acquires feelings of confidence and self-worth.

Positive Psychology
- This field in psychology which combines an emphasis on hope, optimism, and well-being stems directly from humanistic theories
such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers.
- One area of positive psychology where Maslow’s ideas have been particularly influential is in the role of positive experiences in
people’s lives (peak experiences).

Critique of Maslow
- Maslow’s ideas have received less research interest.
- Maslow left future researchers with few clear guidelines to follow when attempting to replicate his studies on self-actualization. He
failed to provide an operational definition of self-actualization and full description of his sampling procedures.
- Maslow’s framework on hierarchy of needs gives his theory excellent flexibility to organize what is known about human behavior.
- His theory is also highly useful in psychotherapy, workplace motivation.
- Maslow’s arcane and often unclear language makes important part of his theory ambiguous and inconsistent.
- The hierarchy of needs concept follows a logical progression, and Maslow hypothesized that the order of needs is the same for
everyone, although he does not overlook the possibility of certain reversals.
- A hierarchy of needs model with only five steps gives the theory a deceptive appearance of simplicity. A full understanding of
Maslow’s total theory, however, suggests a far more complex model.

- Maslow’s theory is high on optimism, but he recognized that people are capable of great evil and destruction when basic needs are
being thwarted.
- His theory places emphasis on both uniqueness and similarities, basic needs are structured the same for all people and that
people satisfy these needs at their own rate.
- Maslow’s view can be considered teleological and purposive because high level needs exist as potentials and people aim for it.
- The behavior of people motivated by physiological and safety needs is determined by outside forces, whereas the behavior of self-
actualizing people is at least partially shaped by free choice.
- For Maslow, individuals are both shaped by biology and society, and the two cannot be separated.