CHAPTER 15: ABRAHAM MASLOW Flashcards
What was Maslow’s primary focus?
On outstanding individuals who has significant impact in politics, history, medicine, or other fields.
How did Maslow took the development of humanistic psychology?
With religious fervour.
When was Maslow born?
Abraham Harold Maslow was born onApril 1, 1908, in Brooklyn, New York. He was the first of seven children.
Why was Maslow unhappy?
He was the only Jewish boy in his neighbourhood.
What was a problem Maslow experienced with his father Samuel?
He made a remark about Maslow being the ugliest child he had ever known.
How did Maslow’s self-image deteriorate?
He only took empty subway cars so others would not have to see his face after his father’s remark.
What was a problem Maslow faced with his mother, Rose.
Rose smashed each one of Maslow’s kitten’s heads against the basement wall until it was dead in front of Maslow.
What made Maslow sold on behaviourism?
J. B. Watson
What did Maslow teach at Brooklyn College?
A full load, conducted research on human sexuality, and advised students.
What happened when Maslow became popular as a teacher?
The college newspaper referred to him as the Frank Sinatra of Brooklyn College.
Third-Force Psychology
Humanistic psychology.
An alternative to psychoanalysis and behaviourism.
Humanistic psychology
Attends to human’s positive aspects and thus provide information that could be used in formulating a comprehensive theory for human motivation, a theory that would include both the positive and the negative aspects of human nature.
Reductive-Analytic Approach to Science
Reduces human beings to a collection of habits or conflicts and overlooks the essence of human nature.
Hollistic-Analytic Approach to Science
Studies the person as a thinking, feeling, and totality which is more likely to yield valid results
Desacralization
Any process that distorts human nature and depicts it as less marvellous and dignified than it is.
How do scientists desacralize people?
By making them less alveolus, beautiful, and awesome than they really art.
American Association of Humanistic Psychology Principles
- The primary study of psychology should be the experiencing person.
- Choice, creativity, and self-realization, rather than mechanistic reductionism, are the concern of the humanistic psychologist.
- Only personally and socially significant problems should be studied—significance, not objectivity, is the watchword.
- The major concern of psychology should be the dignity and enhancement of people.
Hierarchy of Human needs
Arrangement of the needs from lowest to highest in terms of their potency.
What did Maslow contend of humans?
That they have an umber of needs that are instinctoid, that is innate.
Instinctoid
An instinctoid need is innate but weak and is easily modified by environmental conditions.
Why is the inner core and instinctoid weak?
It is easily overcome, suppressed or repressed.
Humans no longer have instincts in the animal sense, powerful, unmistakable, inner voices which tell them unequivocally what to do, when, where, how and with whom.
All that we have left are instinct-remnants which are weak, subtle and delicate, very easily drowned out by learning, by cultural expectations. by fear, by disapproval, etc.
Physiological Needs
Basic cluster of needs in the hierarchy of needs.
Included are the needs for water, food, oxygen, sleep, elimination, and sex.
Safety Needs
Needs for structure, order, security, and predictability.
Example of Safety Needs
Clearly seen operating in children who have been abused or neglected.
Once they have adequate nutrition and sleep, they become invested in trying to find an environment that is safe and secure.
What is the satisfaction of Safety Needs?
Assures individuals that they are living in an environment free from danger, fear and chaos,
Belongingness and Love Needs
Need for affliction.
The need for friends and compassions, a supportive family, identification with a group, and an intimate relationship.
What happens if Belongingness and Love Needs are not met?
The person will feel alone and empty.
Example of Belongingness and Love Needs
Children who have been removed from dangerous situations into a foster home or adoptive parents.
Esteem Needs
This group of needs requires both recognition from other people that results in feelings of prestige, acceptance, and status, and self-esteem that results in feelings of adequacy, competence, and confidence.
What happens when there is a lack of satisfaction of Esteem Needs?
Results in discouragement and feelings of inferiority.
Self-Actualization
Ongoing actualization of potentials, capacities, and talents, as fulfillment of mission (or call, fate, destiny, or vocation), as fuller knowledge of, and acceptance of, the person’s own intrinsic nature, as an unceasing trend toward unity, integration, or synergy within the person.
Desire to Know and Understand
Knowing and understanding were thought to be tools used in solving problems and overcoming obstacles, thereby allowing the satisfaction of basic needs.
Must be unencumbered.
Aesthetic Needs
For order, symmetry, closure, structure, and for completion of actions, which are seen in some adults and almost universally in children.
What did Maslow believe of Aesthetic Needs?
They are instinctoid and they are given their fullest expression in self-actualizing individuals.
Being Motivation
The person becomes qualitatively different from those who are still attempting to meet their basic needs.
Also called Growth Motivation.
What does “B” refer to?
Being, the focus of self-actualizers.
What does “D” refer to?
Deficiency, the needs that are the focus of non-actualized individuals.
Metamotives
Those higher aspects of life pursued by self-actualizing individuals.
Includes are such values as trust, goodness, beauty, justice, and perfection.
Also called Being Values.
Deficiency Motives
Influenced by the absence of such things as food, love, or esteem.
Need-Directed Perception
Perception motivated by a search for objects or events that will satisfy a basic need.
Also called D-Perception or D-Cognition.
Example of Need-Directed Perception
A hungry person looking for food.
D-Love
Motivated by the lack of fulfillment of the need for love and belongingness.
Characteristics of B-Love
- B-love is nonpossessive.
- B-love is insatiable; it can be enjoyed without end. It usually grows with time.
- The B-love experience has the same effect as an aesthetic or mystic experience.
- B-love has a profound and widespread therapeutic effect.
- B-love is a richer, higher, and more valuable experience than D-love.
- There is a minimum of anxiety and hostility in B-love.
- B-lovers are more independent of each other, less jealous, less needful, more interested, and more autonomous than D-lovers. Also, they are more eager to help the other toward self-actualization and are genuinely proud of the other’s triumphs.
- B-love makes the truest, most penetrating perception of the other possible.
- B-love, in a sense, creates the partner. It offers self-acceptance and a feeling of love-worthiness, both of which permit the partner to grow. Perhaps full human development cannot occur without the experience of B-love.
What happens if a B-Value is not Satisfied?
Pathogenic Deprivation.
B-Value: Truth
D-Value: Dishonesty
What happens when an individual fails to satisfy B-Values?
Metapathology
Metapathology
Psychological disorder that results when a being motive is not allowed proper expression.
Peak Experiences
Mystical, oceanic experiences that are accompanied by a feeling of ecstasy or rapture.
Such experiences were thought by Maslow to reach their full magnitude as B-values are fully embraced.
“They Perceive Reality Accurately and Fully” Characteristic.
Their perceptions are not coloured by specific needs or defences and are characterized by B-Cognition rather than by D-Cognition.
They are able to easily detect dishonest or insincerity.
“They Demonstrate a Greater Acceptance of Themselves, Others, and of Nature in General” Characteristic.
Self-actualizers accept themselves as they are. They lack defensiveness, phoniness, and are not burdened by undue guilt, anxiety, or shame.
Similarly, they accept others and have no need to instruct, inform, or convert them. Not only can they tolerate weakness in others; they are not threatened by their strengths. Nature is also accepted as it is.
“They Exhibit Spontaneity, Simplicity, and Naturalness” Characteristic.
Self-actualizers tend to be true to their feelings; what they really feel they tend to say or experience.
They do not hide behind a mask and do not act in accordance with social roles. They are true to themselves.
“They Tend to be Concerned with Problems Rather than with Themselves” Characteristic.
Self- actualizers are typically committed to some task, cause, or mission toward which they can direct most of their energies.
This is contrasted with the preoccupation with oneself often found in nonactualizers.
“They Have a Quality of Detachment and a Need for Privacy” Characteristic.
Because self- actualizing individuals depend on their own values and feelings to guide their lives, they do not need constant contact with other people.
They are able to remain reserved and detached from the regular interpersonal dramas that occur in life.
Since self-actualized individuals do not take things personally, they do not overreact and are often able to remain dignified even when others around them cannot.
“They are Autonomous” Characteristic.
Because self-actualizers are B-motivated rather than D-motivated, they are more dependent on their inner world than on the outer world.
They do not need other people in the same way that deficiency motivated people do and their satisfaction is not based on others.
Maslow suggests that they may actually be hindered by others. Their ultimate focus is personal growth.
“They Exhibit a Continued Freshness of Appreciation” Characteristic.
Self-actualizers continue to experience the events of their lives with awe, wonder, and pleasure. Every baby or sunset is as beautiful and exciting as the first they had seen.
Marriage is as exciting after 40 years as it was in the beginning.
Sex, too, can have special meaning to self-actualizers: “For several of my subjects the sexual pleasures and particularly the orgasm provided not pleasure alone, but some kind of basic strengthening and revivifying that some people derive from music or nature”
Generally, such individuals derive great inspiration and ecstasy from the basic experiences of everyday life.
“They Have Periodic mystic or Peak Experiences” Characteristic.
Maslow believed that all humans had the potential for peak experiences, but only self-actualizers could have them full-blown, because such people were not threatened by them and therefore would not inhibit or defend against them in any way.
Generally, peak experiences are the embracing of B-values and being strengthened by them
Non-Peakers
Low frequency of peak experiences tend to be practical, effective people.
Peakers
Relatively high frequency of peak experiences tend to be more poetic, aesthetically oriented, transcendent, and mystical.
“They Tend to Identify With All of Humankind” Characteristic.
The concerns that self-actualizers have for other people do not extend only to their friends and family but to all people in all cultures throughout the world.
This feeling of fellowship extends also to individuals who are aggressive, inconsiderate, or otherwise foolish. Self-actualizers have a genuine desire to help humanity.
“They Develop Deep Friendships with Only a Few Individuals” Characteristic.
Self-actualizers tend to seek out other self-actualizers as their close friends. Such friendships are few in number but are deep and rich.
“They Tend to Accept Democratic Values” Characteristic.
Self-actualizers do not respond to individuals on the basis of race, status, or religion. They are open to anyone without exception and appear to not even be aware of such differences.
“They Have a Strong Ethical Sense” Characteristic.
Although their notions of right and wrong are often unconventional, self-actualizers, nonetheless, almost always know the ethical implications of their actions.
The ethical issues with which self-actualizers become involved are substantial.
Maslow said that self-actualizers avoid trivial issues such as the morality of gambling, drinking and meat-eating.
“They Have a Well-Developed, Un-Hostile Sense of Humour” Characteristic
Self-actualizers tend not to find humour in things that injure or degrade other humans.
Rather, they are more likely to laugh at themselves or at human beings in general.
“They are Creative” Characteristic
Maslow found this trait in all of the self-actualizers. He stated that their creativity may not take the form of actual art or music, but they will be creative in whatever they do.
Maslow found that self-actualizers put creativity into any aspect of their work, even making shoes.
This creativity comes from the fact that self-actualizers are more open to experience and more spontaneous in their feelings. It is directly related to B-motivation.
“They Resists Enculturation” Characteristic.
Self-actualizers tend to be nonconformists because they are inner-directed people. If a cultural norm is contrary to their personal values, they simply will not adhere to it.
Negative Characteristic of Self-Actualizing People
Maslow concluded that as healthy, creative, democratic, and spontaneous as his self-actualizers were, “there are no perfect human beings!”
Self-Actualization is not universal because “it is at the top of the hierarchy.”
“This inner nature is not strong and overpowering and unmistakable like the instincts of animals. It is weak and delicate and subtle and easily overcome by habit, cultural pressure, and wrong attitudes toward it.”
Self-Actualization is not universal because “most people fear the knowledge about themselves that self-actualization requires.”
Such knowledge requires giving up the known and entering a state of uncertainty.
What is realted to the fear os self-knowledge?
The Jonah Complex
The Jonah Complex
Fear of one’s own greatness, evasion of one’s destiny, running away from one’s best talents.
Why is the Complex named after Jonah?
Jonah tried to escape the responsibilities of becoming a prophet.
We do not fear our weaknesses but we fear our strengths as well.
We are not strong enough to endure more.
Self-Actualization is not universal because “the cultural environment can stifle one’s tendency toward self-actualization”
The way our culture defines manly tends to prevent the male child from developing such traits as sympathy, kindness, and tenderness, all of which characterize the self-actualized individual.
Self-Actualization is not universal because childhood conditions influence the probability of a person becoming self-actualized.
Too much permissiveness was as harmful as too much control.
Women on Self-Actualization
A Woman who is self-actualized will always find a home and family to be the most important area of her life and the foundation of all higher development.
Eupsychia
Maslow’s name for the utopia that he believed a community of healthy adults could create.
What was an Eupsychian condition of work good for?
For personal fulfillment, health and propensity of the organization, and quantity and quality of the products or services turned out by the organization.
Synergy
Working together.
Individuals in a community characterized by synergy work in harmony and are not in conflict with their society.
Eupsychian management
Industrial or societal management that attempts to consider the basic human needs as Maslow viewed them.
