Toward a Psychology of Being

Abraham H. Maslow
Essential Concepts
1. The Inner Nature of Human Beings: Maslow believed that each person has an essential biologically based inner nature and that it was possible to discover what it is like (not invent but discover). He stated that it was the goal of each human being to pursue that inner nature and realize its potential so as to bring happiness to each individual and benefit society as well. Maslow believed that this inner nature is good or neutral rather than bad and that it is best to bring it out and to encourage it rather than suppress it. If it is permitted to guide our life, he added, we [would] grow healthy, fruitful, and happy. This inner nature is not strong and overpowering and unmistakable like the instincts of animals, Maslow warned. It is weak and delicate and subtle and easily overcome by habit, cultural pressure, and wrong attitudes toward it. Maslow believed that the destructive or malicious aspects of human behavior were not intrinsic but rather they seem to be violent reactions against frustration of our intrinsic needs, emotions, and capacities. 2. The Hierarchy of Needs: Simply, it is the ranking of human needs - from basic needs for safety to higher needs such as belongingness, love, respect and self-esteem to the highest level of needs, self-actualization. Maslow maintained that all healthy human beings, once they have gratified their basic needs move inevitably toward, if the environmental conditions necessary for them to do so were created, the highest ranking of needs self-actualization, which is defined below. 3. Self-actualization: In Toward a Psychology of Being, Maslow defined selfactualization as the ongoing actualization of potentials, capacities and talents, as fulfillment of mission (or call, fate, destiny, or vocation). It was, he continued, a fuller knowledge of, and acceptance of, the persons own intrinsic nature, as an unceasing trend toward unity, integration or synergy within the person. In the preface of the first edition of his book Maslow stated that self-actualization stresses full-humanness, the development of the biologically based nature of man. It conforms to biological destiny, rather than to historically arbitrary, culturally local value-models as the terms of health and illness. If you are confused by all of that, simply put, you can say that it is the ongoing process (for it continues once a person begins the process) by which the unique potential of each individual is realized.

Growth: Maslow wrote extensively about growth, though he admitted the concepts of self-actualization, growth, and self are all high level abstractions. In the chapter entitled, Defense and Growth, Maslow pondered over how and why growth took place. He said that growth is not in the pure case a goal out ahead, nor is self-actualization, nor is the discovery of Self. In the child, it is not specifically purposed; he said, rather it just happens. He doesnt so much search as find. So, from these words, one can ascertain that growth was not so much a destination as a journey. Growth was a process the process by which a person came to realize his or her unique potential and the development of the person that resulted from such a process (refer to the explanation of self-actualization in #3). As a result, the person involved emerged as something distinctly different from engaging himself/herself in such an endeavor.
4.

Maslow said that growth takes place when the next step forward is subjectively more delightful, more joyous, more intrinsically satisfying than the previous gratification with which we have become familiar and even bored. We dont do it [grow as individuals] because it is good for us, or because psychologists approve, or because somebody told us to, or because it will make us live longer. We do not grow, he continued, because it is good for the species, or because it will bring external rewards, or because it is logical. We do it, he said, for the same reason that we choose one dessert over another. The steps and the choices, he said, are taken out of pure spontaneity, from within outward. The healthy infant or child, just Being, as part of his Being, is randomly, and spontaneously curious, exploratory, wondering, interested. He tends to try out his powers, to reach out, to be absorbed, fascinated, interested, to play, to wonder, to manipulate the world. Yet, there were obstacles to this growth that each individual had to overcome. Every human being has [two] sets of forces within him. One set clings to safety and defensiveness out of fear, tending to regress backward, hanging on to the past, afraid to take chances, afraid to jeopardize what he already has, afraid of independence, freedom and separateness. The other set of forces impels him forward toward wholeness of Self and uniqueness of Self, toward full functioning of all of his capacities, toward confidence in the face of the external world at the same time that he can accept his deepest, real, unconscious Self. This basic dilemma or conflict between the defensive forces and growth can be diagrammed like this.

Accentuate the dangers SAFETY Minimize the attractions {PERSON}

Accentuate the attractions GROWTH Minimize the dangers

We can consider the process of healthy growth, he maintained, to be a never ending series of choice situations, confronting each individual at every point throughout his life, in which he must choose between the delights of safety and growth, dependence and independence, regression and progression, immaturity and maturity. Safety has both anxieties and delights; growth has both anxieties and delights. We grow forward when the delights of growth and anxieties of safety are greater than the anxieties of growth and the delights of safety. In other words, we grow when we choose to pursue the positive aspects of doing so (the delights), overcoming the negative aspects (the anxieties) in the process. 5. Peak Experiences: Maslow defined a peak experiences as a moment that one is at the height of his powers, using all his capacities at the best and fullest. Peak experiences are characterized by situations in which: (a) A person is at his best, at concert pitch, at the top of his form. (b) A person is no longer wasting effort fighting and restraining himself (c) A person attains a sense of identity, autonomy, or selfhood while conversely going beyond and above selfhood, in the process becoming relatively egoless. (d) A person feels more integrated (unified, whole, all-of-piece), than at other times. He does not fight himself and is more at peace with himself. (e) A person functions at his best with effortlessness and ease. (f) A person is therefore more spontaneous, more expressive, more innocently behaving (guileless, nave, honest, candid, ingenuous. childlike, artless, unguarded, defenseless), more natural (simple, relaxed, unhesitant, plain, sincere, unaffected, primitive in a primitive sense, immediate), more uncontrolled and freely flowing outward (automatic, impulsive, reflexlike, instinctive, unrestrained, unself-conscious, thoughtless, unaware). (g) A person, in a peak experience, is most here-now, most free of the past and of the future in various senses, most all there in the experience. In other words, in the parlance of modern day sports psychology, the person lives in the moment.
5.

Cognition of Being: What Maslow referred to as Cognition of Being or BCognition we would call living in the moment. In B-Cognition, Maslow stated, the experience or the object tends to be seen as a whole, as a complete unit, detached from relations, from possible usefulness, from expediency, and from purpose. In such a state a person attempts just to be.