Motivation and Personality

"Being a human being—in the sense of being born to the human
species—must be defined also in terms of becoming a human being. In
this sense a baby is only potentially a human being, and must grow into
humanness."
"I certainly accepted and built upon the available data of experimental
psychology and psychoanalysis. I accepted also the empirical and
experimental spirit of the one, and the unmasking and depth-probing of
the other, while yet rejecting the images of man which they generated.
That is, this book represented a different philosophy of human nature, a
new image of man."

In the summer of 1962, Abraham Maslow was driving through heavy
fog on the treacherous Big Sur coastal highway in California. Noticing
an interesting sign, he decided to pull over. The place he had
stumbled on turned out to be the world's first personal growth center,
Esalen, where serendipitously staff were unpacking copies of his latest
book, Towards a Psychology of Being.
With such a beginning, it was perhaps inevitable that Maslow would
become the high priest of the 1960s human potential movement.
Through the core idea of the "self-actualizing person," his Motivation
and Personality had presented a new image of human nature that
excited a whole generation. With Rollo May and Carl Rogers, Maslow
founded the "third force" humanistic branch of psychology, and its
extension, transpersonal psychology, which went beyond the regular
needs and interests of people to their spiritual and cosmological
context.
Yet Maslow was not an obvious revolutionary. As an academic psychologist
his work was essentially a reaction against behaviorism,
which broke people down to mechanistic parts, and Freudian psychoanalysis,
which imagined us controlled by subterranean urges. Still
working within the boundaries of the scientific method, Motivation and
Personality instead sought to form a holistic view of people, one not
dissimilar to how artists and poets have always imagined us. Rather
than being simply the sum of our needs and impulses, Maslow saw us
as whole people with limitless room for growth. It was this clear belief
in human possibility and the organizations and cultures we could build
that has made his work so influential.
The key concepts: Hierarchy of needs and self-actualization
Maslow's "hierarchy of needs" is a famous concept in psychology. He
organized human needs into three broad levels: the physiological—air,
food and water—the psychological—safety, love, self-esteem—and,
finally, self-actualization. His insight was that the higher needs were as
much a part of our nature as the lower, indeed were instinctive and biological.
Most civilizations had mistakenly put the higher and lower
needs at odds with each other, seeing the animalistic basic drives as
conflicting with the finer things to which we aspire like truth, love, and
beauty. In contrast, Maslow saw needs as a continuum, in which the
satisfaction of the lower needs came before a person's higher mental
and moral development. Having met the basic bodily requirements, and
reached a state where we feel we are loved, respected, and enjoy a sense
of belonging, including philosophical or religious identity, we seek selfactualization.
Self-actualizing people have attained "the full use and exploitation
of talents, capacities, potentialities and the like." These are the people
who are successful as a person, aside from any obvious external success;
by no means perfect, but seemingly without major flaws. Since
Daniel Goleman wrote his bestseller on emotional intelligence people
have "discovered" it as a key to success, yet for self-actualized people
this type of intelligence is ingrained.
Maslow's research involved the study of seven contemporaries and
nine historical figures: US Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson,
scientist Albert Einstein, First Lady and philanthropist Eleanor
Roosevelt, pioneer social worker Jane Addams, psychologist William
James, doctor and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, writer Aldous
Huxley, and philosopher Baruch Spinoza. He identified 19 characteristics
of the self-actualized person, including:
? Clear perception of reality (including a heightened ability to detect
falseness and be a good judge of character).
? Acceptance (of themselves and things as they are).
? Spontaneity (a rich, unconventional inner life with a child-like ability
to constantly see the world anew and appreciate beauty in the
mundane).
? Problem-centeredness (focus on questions or challenges outside
themselves—a sense of mission or purpose—resulting in an absence
of pettiness, introspection, and ego games).
? Solitude seeking (enjoyed for its own sake, solitude also brings
serenity and detachment from misfortune/crisis, and allows for independence
of thought and decision). ? Autonomy (independence of the good opinion of other people, more
interest in inner satisfaction than status or rewards).
? Peak or mystical experiences (experiences when time seems to stand
still).
? Human kinship (a genuine love for, and desire to help, all people).
? Humility and respect (belief that we can learn from anyone, and that
even the worst person has redeeming features).
? Ethics (clear, if not conventional, notions of right and wrong).
? Sense of humor (not amused by jokes that hurt or imply inferiority,
but humor that highlights the foolishness of human beings in
general).
? Creativity (not the Mozart type of genius that is inborn, but in all
that is done, said, or acted).
? Resistance to enculturation (ability to see beyond the confines of culture
and era).
? Imperfections (all the guilt, anxiety, self-blame, jealousy, and so on
that regular people experience, but these do not stem from neurosis).
? Values (based on a positive view of the world; the universe is not
seen as a jungle but an essentially abundant place, providing whatever
we need to be able to make our contribution).
A further subtle difference sets these people apart. Most of us see life as
striving to get this or that, whether it be material things or having a
family or doing well career-wise. Psychologists call this "deficiency motivation."
Self-actualizers, in contrast, do not strive as much as develop.
They are only ambitious to the extent of being able to express themselves
more fully and perfectly, delighting in what they are able to do.
Another general point is their profound freedom of mind. Despite
the circumstances in which they may have been, and in contrast to the
conforming pressures all around them, self-actualizers are walking
examples of free will, the quintessential human quality. They fully
grasp what Stephen Covey calls the gap between stimulus and response,
the concept that no response should be automatic. In contrast, the
merely "well-adjusted" (that is, neurosis-free) person may not really
know who they are or have a defined purpose in life. As Theodore
Rozsak saw it in Person/Planet:
"Maslow asked the key question in posing self-actualization as the
proper objective of therapy: Why do we set our standard of sanity so cautiously low? Can we imagine no better model than the dutiful consumer,
the well-adjusted breadwinner? Why not the saint, the sage, the
artist? Why not all that is highest and finest in our species?"
Maslow made the intriguing observation that, although his selfactualizers
shared the above traits and therefore could be grouped as a
type, they were more completely individualized than any control group
ever described. This is the paradox of the self-actualizer: the more of
these traits a person has, the more likely they are to be truly unique.
Final comments
Maslow's greatness was in re-imagining what a human being could be.
Moving us away from the idea of mental health as merely the "absence
of neurosis," he insisted that psychological health required the presence
of self-actualizing traits. Such a fundamental recasting of psychology
has had implications for all areas of human activity.
At the time he wrote Motivation and Personality, Maslow believed
that only a tiny percentage of the population was self-actualized, but
that these few could change the whole culture. Given the impact of the
concept on the 1960s counter-culturalists, a generation that has changed
the world in its image, you would have to say that Maslow was right.
Certainly, his hierarchy of needs has been seminal to understanding
motivation in the workplace, and the self-actualization of the employee
has become a serious concern in business. He foresaw the trend toward
personal growth and excitement replacing money as the highest motivator
in a person's working life.
The principle clearly sets higher standards for individuals and society,
and the main criticism of Maslow has been that he was Utopian,
creating an ideal human nature that does not exist. He died before he
could address the problem that some say he ignored: evil. The desire
for self-actualization may be a factor in the spread of democracy and
the growth in recognition of human rights, but what light does it shine
on horrors like the genocide in Rwanda and Kosovo?
If self-actualization is a facet of human nature, then its absence
creates a vacuum that becomes filled by repression, poverty, and
nationalism, making the world ripe for evil. Seen in this way, the fulfillment
of the self should never be thought of as a luxury. The evolution
of the species depends on it.