Personality Theories in Psychology: Abraham Maslow

Humanistic psychology made its way by understanding people as something conscious and intellectual, as opposed to other theories of the time. At Online Psychology, we cannot talk about personality without mentioning an important humanist scholar in Personality Theories in Psychology: Abraham Maslow.

Index

1. Biography
2. Theory
3. Auto-update
4. Metaneeds and metapathologies
5. Discussion
6. Readings

Abraham Maslow was born in Brooklyn, New York on April 1, 1908. He was the first of seven siblings and his parents were non-Orthodox Jewish emigrants from Russia. They, hoping to achieve the best for his children in the new world, demanded a lot of him to achieve academic success. Unsurprisingly, Abraham was quite a lonely boy, taking refuge in books.

To satisfy his parents, he first studied law at the City College of New York (CCNY). After three semesters, he transferred to Cornell and then returned to CCNY. He married Berta Goodman, his older cousin, against the wishes of his parents. Abe and Berta had two daughters.

They both moved to Wisconsin so that he could go to the University of Wisconsin. It was here that he became interested in psychology and his work began to improve considerably. Here he spent time working with Harry Harlow, famous for his experiments on baby monkey resus and attachment behavior.

He received a BA from him in 1930, an MA from him in 1931, and his Ph.D. in 1934, all in psychology and from the University of Wisconsin. One year after his graduation, he returned to New York to work with E.L. Thorndike at Columbia University, where he became interested in human sexuality research.

He then began teaching full time at Brooklyn College. During this period of his life, he came into contact with many of the European immigrants who came to the United States, and especially to Brooklyn; people like Adler, Froom, Horney, as well as various Gestalt psychologists and Freudians.

In 1951 Maslow became Head of the Department of Psychology at Brandeis, staying there for 10 years and having the opportunity to meet Kurt Goldstein (who introduced him to the concept of self-actualization) and began his own journey theoretical. It was here also that he began his crusade for humanistic psychology; something that became far more important than his own theory.

He spent his last years semi-retired in California until on June 8, 1970 he died of a myocardial infarction after years of illness.

One of the many interesting things that Marlow discovered while working with monkeys very early in his career was that certain needs prevail over others. For example, if you are hungry or thirsty, you will tend to quench your thirst before you eat. After all, you can go without food for a few days, but you can only go a couple of days without water. Thirst is a "stronger" need than hunger.

In the same way, if you are very, very thirsty, but someone has placed a device on you that does not allow you to breathe, which is more important? The need to breathe, of course. On the other hand, sex is far less important than any of these needs. Let's face it, we won't die if we don't get it!

Maslow picked up on this idea and created his now famous hierarchy of needs. In addition to considering the obvious water, air, food and sex, the author expanded 5 large blocks: physiological needs, security and reassurance needs, the need for love and belonging, the need for esteem and the need to actualize the yes same (self); in this order.

• Physiological needs. These include our needs for oxygen, water, protein, salt, sugar, calcium, and other minerals and vitamins. Also included here is the need to maintain the balance of PH (becoming too acidic or basic would kill us) and temperature (36.7 ºC or close to it). Other needs included here are those aimed at staying active, sleeping, resting, eliminating waste (CO2, sweat, urine and feces), avoiding pain and having sex. What a collection!

Maslow believed, and was supported by his research, that these were in fact individual needs and that, for example, a lack of vitamin C would lead this person to look specifically for those things that in the past provided vitamin C, for example juice Orange. I think the contractions that some pregnant women have and the way babies eat most baby food anecdotally support the idea.

• Security and reinsurance needs. When physiological needs are balanced, these needs come into play. You will begin to worry about finding issues that provide security, protection and stability. You might even develop a need for structure, for certain limits, for order.

Looking at it negatively, you may start to worry not about needs like hunger and thirst, but about your fears and anxieties. In the average North American adult, this group of needs is represented in our urgencies by finding a home in a safe place, job security, a good retirement plan, and good life insurance, and the rest.

• The needs of love and belonging. When the physiological and safety needs are fulfilled, the third needs begin to enter the picture. We begin to have needs for friendship, for a partner, for children, and for emotional relationships in general, including the general sense of community. On the negative side, we become overly susceptible to loneliness and social anxieties.

In our daily lives, we exhibit these needs in our desires for union (marriage), to have families, to be parts of a community, to be members of a church, to a sorority, to be part of a gang or to belong to a club Social. It is also part of what we look for in career choice.

• Esteem needs. Next we start to worry about some self-esteem. Maslow described two versions of esteem needs, one low and one high. The downside is that of respect for others, the need for status, fame, glory, recognition, attention, reputation, appreciation, dignity, and even dominance. Discharge encompasses the needs for self-respect, including feelings such as confidence, competence, achievement, mastery, independence, and freedom. Note that this is the "high" way because, unlike the respect of others, once we have respect for ourselves, it is much more difficult to lose it!

The negative version of these needs is low self-esteem and inferiority complexes. Maslow believed that Adler had discovered something important when he proposed that this was at the root of many and caution if most of our psychological problems. In modern countries, most of us have what we need by virtue of our physiological and safety needs. Fortunately, we almost always have a bit of love and belonging, but it is so hard to come by in reality!

Maslow calls all of these four previous levels deficit needs or Needs-D. If we don't have too much of something (e.g. we have a deficit), we feel the need. But if we get everything we need, we feel nothing! In other words, they are no longer motivating. As an old Latin saying goes: "You don't feel anything unless you lose it."

The author also talks about these levels in terms of homeostasis, which is the principle through which our thermostat operates in a balanced way: when it is very cold, it turns on the heating; when it's really hot, turn off the heater. In the same way, in our body, when some substance is missing, it develops a craving for it; when you get enough of it, then the craving stops. What Maslow does is simply extend the principle of homeostasis to needs, such as security, belonging, and esteem.

Maslow regards all of these needs as essentially vital. Even love and esteem are necessary for the maintenance of health. It states that all of these needs are genetically built in all of us, like instincts. In fact, he calls them needs instinct (almost instinctive).

In terms of general development, we move through these levels as if they were stadiums. As newborns, our focus (or almost our entire complex of needs) is on the physiological. Immediately, we begin to recognize that we need to be safe. Soon after, we seek attention and affection. A little later, we seek self-esteem. Imagine, this happens within the first two years of life!

Under stressful conditions or when our survival is threatened, we can "go back" to a lower level of need. When our great company has gone bankrupt, we might seek a little attention. When our family abandons us, it seems that from then on all we need is love. When we get to Chapter 11, it seems like we are immediately concerned with only money.

All this can also happen in an established welfare society: when the society abruptly falls, people begin to ask a new leader to take over and make the things good. When the bombs start to fall, they seek safety; When food doesn't reach stores, their needs become even more basic.

Maslow suggests that we could ask people about their "philosophy of the future"what would be your ideal of life or the world - and thus get enough information about which of your needs are covered and which are not.

If you have significant problems throughout your development (for example, more or less long periods of insecurity or anger in childhood, or the loss of a family member through death or divorce, or significant rejection and abuse) then you could "fix" this group of needs for the rest of the your life.

This is Maslow's understanding of neurosis. Perhaps as a child you went through calamities. Now you have everything your heart needs; but you feel obsessively needy to have money and constantly save. Or maybe your parents divorced when you were still very young; You now have a wonderful wife, but you constantly feel jealous or think that she will abandon you at the first opportunity because you are not "good" enough for her.

The last level is a bit different. Maslow has used a wide variety of terms to refer to it: growth motivation (opposite of motivational deficit), needs to be (or B-needs, opposite to D-needs), and auto-update.

These constitute needs that do not include balance or homeostasis. Once accomplished, they continue to make their presence felt to us. In fact, they tend to get even more insatiable as we feed them! They understand those continuous desires to fulfill potentials, to "be all that can be." It is a question of being the most complete; to be "self-actualizing".

Well; At this point, if you want to achieve true self-actualization, you must have your primary needs met, at least up to a certain point. Of course, this makes sense: if you are hungry, you will even crawl to get food; if you are seriously insecure, you will have to be continually on your guard; if you are isolated and helpless, you need to fill that lack; If you have a feeling of low self-esteem, you should defend yourself from that state or compensate for it. When basic needs are not met, you cannot dedicate yourself to fulfilling your potentials.

It is not surprising, therefore, that our world being as difficult as it is, there are only a handful of people who are truly and predominantly self-actualizing. At some point, Maslow suggested as little as 2%!

The question then arises: what exactly does Maslow mean by self-actualization? To answer, we will have to analyze those people that Maslow considers self-actualizing. Fortunately, Maslow did it for us.

He started by choosing a group of people, some historical figures, others that he knew; that it seemed to him that they met the criteria of being self-actualizing. Characters such as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, William James, Benedict Spinoza, and others were included in this narrow group. Then he focused on his biographies, writings, actions and words of those he knew personally and so on. From these sources, he then developed a list of qualities similar to the entire group, as opposed to the great mass made up of the rest of mortals like us.

These people were focused on reality, which means that they can differentiate what is false or fictitious from what is real and genuine. They were also people focused on the problem, or what is the same, people who face the problems of reality by virtue of their solutions, not as insoluble personal problems or to which they submit. And they also had a different perception of meanings and ends. They believed that the ends do not necessarily justify the means; that the means can be ends in themselves and that the means (the trip) were often more important than the ends.
Self-actualizers also possessed a peculiar way of relating to others. First of all, they had a need for privacy, and they felt comfortable being alone. They were relatively independent of culture and environment, relying more on their own experiences and judgments. Likewise, they were resistant to enculturation, that is, they were not susceptible to social pressure; they were, in fact, nonconformists in the best sense.

Furthermore, they possessed what Maslow called democratic valuesIn other words, they were open to ethnic and individual variety, and even defended it. They had the quality called in German Gemeinschaftsgefühl (social interest, compassion, humanity). And they enjoyed the intimate personal relationships with few close friends and family members, rather than a lot of superficial relationships with a lot of people.

They had a non-hostile sense of humor, preferring jokes at the expense of themselves or the human condition, but never directed at others. They also had a quality called acceptance of self and others, which implies that they preferred to accept people as they were, rather than wanting to change them. They had the same attitude with themselves: if they had some quality that was not harmful, they let it be, even if it was a personal oddity. In line with this comes the spontaneity and simplicity: they preferred to be themselves rather than pretentious or artificial. In fact, faced with their non-conformities, they tended to be conventional on the surface, precisely the opposite of less self-actualized non-conformists who tend to be more dramatic.

Likewise, these people had a certain freshness in appreciation; an ability to see things, even ordinary, as precious. Therefore they were creative, inventive and original. And finally they had a tendency to live with greater intensity the experiences than the rest of the people. A peak experience, as the author calls it, is one that makes you feel outside of yourself; as belonging to a Universe; as small or large by virtue of your belonging to nature. These experiences tend to leave a mark on the people who live them, changing them for the better; many people actively seek these experiences. They are also called mystical experiences and are an important part of many religions and philosophical traditions.

However, Maslow does not believe that the self-actualized are perfect people. He also discovered a number of imperfections throughout his analysis: first, quite often they felt anxiety and guilt; but realistic anxiety and guilt, not neurotic or out of context. Some of them were "gone" (mentally absent). And finally, some others suffered from moments of loss of humor, coldness and rudeness.

Another way in which Maslow approaches the problem of what is self-actualization is to speak of the impulsive needs (of course, the B-needs) of self-actualizers. They needed the following to be happy:

• Truth, instead of dishonesty.
• Goodness, better than evil.
• Beauty, not vulgarity or ugliness.
• Unity, integrity and transcendence of opposites, instead of arbitrariness or forced elections.
• Vitality, not poverty or mechanization of life.
• Singularity, not soft uniformity.
• Perfection and necessity, not inconsistency or accidentality.
• Realization, instead of being incomplete.
• Justice and order, not injustice and lawlessness.
• Simplicity, not unnecessary complexity.
• Wealth, not environmental impoverishment.
• Strength, instead of constriction.
• Playfulness, not boredom, or lack of humor.
• Self-sufficiency, not dependency.
• Search for the significant, not sentimentality.

At first glance, you might think that obviously we all need this. But, let's stop for a moment: if you are going through a period of war or depression, you are living in a ghetto or in a very poor rural environment, would you worry about these issues or would you be more busy with how to get food and the ceiling? In fact, Maslow believes that much of the bad things in the world today comes from not being too busy in these values, not because we are bad people, but because we do not even have our basic needs covers.

When an auto-updater doesn't meet these needs, it responds with metapathologies, a list of problems as long as the list of needs. To summarize, we would say that when a self-actualizer is forced to live without these needs, he will develop depression, emotional handicap, disgust, alignment, and a certain degree of cynicism.

Towards the end of his life, the author gave the impetus to what was called the fourth force in psychology. Freudians and other "deep" psychologists were the first force; the behaviorists, the second; his own humanism, including the European existentialists, was the third force. The fourth force was the transpersonal psychology, which, starting from the Eastern philosophers, investigated issues such as meditation, high levels of consciousness and even paranormal phenomena. Probably the best known transpersonalist today is Ken Wilber, author of books such as The Atman Project Y The History of Everything.

Maslow has been a very inspiring figure within personality theories. In the 1960s especially, people were weary of the reductionist and mechanistic messages of behaviorists and physiological psychologists. They were looking for meaning and purpose in their lives, even a much more mystical and transcendental meaning. Maslow was one of the pioneers in that movement to bring the human being back to psychology and the person to personality.

Around the same time, another movement was brewing; one of those that would knock out Maslow: computers and information processing, as well as rationalist theories such as Piaget's theory of cognitive development and Noam's linguistics Chomsky. All of this would become what we today call the cognitive movement in psychology. Just as humanism was dealing with the problems of drugs, astrology, and self-indulgence, the cognocivism provided psychology students with what they were looking for: the foundations scientific.

But we must not lose the message: psychology is, first and foremost, the human; what concerns people, real people in real lives and has nothing to do with computer models, statistical analysis, rat behaviors, test scores and labs.

Some criticism

Apart from the above, there is little criticism that can be made of Maslow's theory itself. The most common criticism concerns its methodology: choosing a small number of people that he himself considered self-actualizers, then reading about them or talking to them and coming to conclusions about what self-actualization is in the first place doesn't sound like good science at all. people.

In his defense, we could point out that he understood this and considered his work simply as a starting point. He hoped that others would start from this point and continue to develop the idea in a more rigorous way. It is curious that Maslow, who has been called the father of American humanism, began his career as a behaviorist with great physiological conviction. In fact, he believed in science and often based his ideas on biology. He simply wanted to expand psychology by wanting to include the best of us, as well as the pathological.

Another criticism, more difficult to counterattack, is that Maslow put so much limitation on auto-update. In the first place, Kurt Goldstein and Carl Rogers used a phrase to refer to what every living being does: trying to grow, to be more, to satisfy its biological destiny. Maslow reduced it to just two percent of what the human species achieves. And while Rogers argued that babies are the best example of human self-actualization, Maslow saw it as something that is only achieved rarely and in the young.

Another issue is that he takes care of how much we care about our basic needs before self-actualization enters the picture. And yet we can find many examples of people who exhibit aspects of self-actualization have been far from having their basic needs met. Many of our best artists and authors, for example, suffered from poverty, poor parenting, neurosis, and depression. We could even call some of them psychotic! If we think of Galileo, who defended ideas from which he would withdraw, or Rembrandt, who could barely leave food on a table, or Toulouse Lautrec, whose body was tormenting him, or van Gogh who, in addition to being poor, was not very well in his head, will know very well why we we refer. Didn't these people belong to some kind of self-actualization? The idea that artists and poets and philosophers (and psychologists!) Are rare is so common because there is so much truth to it!

We also have the example of people who were creative in some way while in concentration camps. For example, Trachtenberg developed a new way of doing arithmetic in one of these fields. Victor Frankl developed his therapeutic approach also in a field. And there are many more examples.

And there are also other examples of people who were creative while they were unknown and when they achieved success they stopped being so. If we are not mistaken, Ernest Hemingway is an example. Perhaps all these examples are exceptions and the hierarchy of needs remains fundamental in general. But of course, the exceptions give us pause.

We would like to suggest a variation on Maslow's theory that might be helpful. If we consider the update as Goldstein and Rogers use it, that is, as a "life force" that guides all creatures, we may also be able to see that there are various things that interfere with the achievement complete of that life force. If we are deprived of our basic physical needs, if we are living under threatening circumstances, if we are isolated from others, or if we do not have confidence in our abilities, we can continue to survive, but not living.

We will not be updating completely our potentials, and we will not even be very capable of understanding that there are people who update despite of deprivation. If we consider the deficit needs separated from the update and if we talk about a self-update complete Instead of self-actualization as a separate category of needs, Maslow's theory is intertwined with other theories, and those exceptional people who achieve success in the midst of adversity can then be regarded as heroes rather than oddities.

Maslow's books are easy to read and full of interesting ideas. The best known are Toward a Psychology of Being (1968), Motivation and Personality (first edition, 1954, and second edition, 1970), and The Further Reaches of Human Nature (1971) Finally, there are many articles written by Maslow, especially in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, of which he was co-founder.

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