Psychology Classics

If you have ever felt a little uneasy when people go on about technological achievement and discuss the future of the human race in technological terms – without mentioning human progress or evolution, Abraham Maslow will feel like a kindred spirit to you.

In the late 1960s, when people were getting excited about what life would be like in the year 2000, it all seemed to be about space travel, faster cars and brilliant home appliances. The scientists driving such speculation seemed to have no interest in whether or not people and their attitudes would have advanced at all in 30 years time.

Though coined by another psychologist, Kurt Goldstein, it was Maslow who made the term 'self-actualized' well-known. It described the seemingly rare individuals who had achieved 'full humanness' – a blend of psychological health and devotion to their work that made them highly effective. If there were a lot more such people, he reasoned, our world would be transformed. Instead of putting all our energies into dreaming up faster and better things, we should be trying to create societies which produced more self-actualized people.

Before Maslow, psychology was divided into two camps: the 'scientific' behaviorists and positivists, who felt no idea in psychology was valid unless proven; and the Freudian psychoanalysts. Maslow originated a 'third force', humanistic psychology, which refused to see human beings as machines operating 'in response to environment', or as the pawn of subconscious forces. Human beings became people again, creative, free-willed and wanting to fulfill their potential. In addition, Maslow's studies of 'peak experiences', those transcendent moments in which everything makes sense and we sense a unity in ourselves and with the world, helped to lay the ground for transpersonal psychology. This 'fourth force' has lent a more scientific framework to the study of religious of mystical experience, and made Maslow a celebrated figure in the milieu of West Coast America in the 1960s. 

Published after his death, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature is really a collection of articles rather than an integrated work. The first half is the more inspiring, and provides an excellent introduction to the thoughts of this psychological adventurer.

The self-actualizer 

Maslow's study of self-actualizing people began with his admiration for his teachers, anthropologist Ruth Benedict and psychologist Max Wertheimer. Though not perfect, they struck him as fully evolved in every aspect, and he recalls his excitement that it was possible to generalize about such people.

What marked out these individuals from the rest? Firstly, a devotion to something greater than themselves: a vocation. They devote their lives to what he called 'being' values, such as truth, beauty, goodness, simplicity. Yet these 'B-Values' are not simply nice attributes that the self-actualizer wishes for – they are needs that must be fulfilled. “In certain definable and empirical ways,” Maslow observed, “it is necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness, as it is necessary for him to have food for his aching belly or rest for his weary body”. We all know we must eat, drink and sleep, but Maslow argued that once these basic needs were met, we developed 'metaneeds' regarding the higher B values which also had to be fulfilled. This was his famous 'hierarchy of needs', which began with oxygen and water and finished with the need for spiritual and psychological fulfillment.

Nearly all psychological problems, he believed, stemmed from 'sicknesses of the soul' which involved lack of meaning or anxiety in these needs not being met. Most people cannot articulate that they even have these needs, yet their pursuit was vital to being fully human.

Achieving full humanness

To make it a less esoteric concept, Maslow was keen to show what self-actualization meant on a daily basis, from moment to moment. For him it was not a case of 'one great moment' like a religious experience. Rather, it involved:

• Experiencing with full absorption. Engagement with something that makes us forget our defenses and poses and shyness. We regain “the guilelessness of childhood” in these moments.
• Awareness of life as a series of choices; one way advances us towards personal growth, the other involves a regression.
• Being aware that you have a self and listening to its voice, rather than the voice of a parent or society.
• Deciding to be honest, and as a result taking responsibility for what you think and feel. The willingness to say, “No, I don't like such and such”, even if it makes you unpopular.
• Willingness to work and apply yourself in order make the most of your abilities. In whatever field you are in, to be among the best.
• Real desire to uncover your psychological defenses and give them up.
• Being willing to see other people in their best light, “under the aspect of eternity”.

What were the implications of studying only healthy, creative, fully realized people? Not surprisingly, Maslow concluded that “You get a different view of mankind”.

It is hard to see now what a revolution Maslow sparked in deciding on this focus, but remember it occurred within a medical paradigm framed only on psychological illness. Maslow  felt that psychology should rather be focused on 'full humanness'. In this context, the neurotic person becomes simply a person who is 'not yet fully actualized'. This may seem like a semantic difference, but actually represented a sea-change in psychology.

The Jonah Complex

Why is it that we are all born with limitless potential, yet few people fulfil that potential?

One of the reasons Maslow put forward is what he calls the 'Jonah complex'. The Biblical Jonah was a timid merchant who tried to resist God's call for him to go on an important mission. In short, it means the 'fear of one's greatness', or avoiding one's true destiny or calling,

Maslow observed that we fear our best as much our worst. Perhaps it seems too frightening to have a mission in life, so instead we take on a series of jobs for survival’s sake. We all have perfect moments in which we glimpse what we are truly capable of, when we know ourselves to be great. “And yet”, Maslow notes, “we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before these very same possibilities”.

He liked to ask his students questions like, 'Which of you intends to become President?' or 'Which of you will become an inspirational moral leader, like Albert Schweitzer?' When they would squirm or blush, he then posed the question, “If not you, then who else?” These were all people in training to be psychologists, but he asked them, what was the point of learning to be a mediocre one? Doing only as much as necessary to be competent, he told them, was a recipe for deep unhappiness in life. You will then be “evading your own capacities, your own possibilities”. He recalled Nietzsche's idea of the law of eternal recurrence -that is, that the life we lead has to be lived over and over again into eternity, like the movie Groundhog Day. If you lived with this law in mind, you would only ever do what was really important.

Some people avoid seeking to be great because they fear being seen as grandiose, wanting too much. Yet this can just become an excuse not to try. Instead we adopt mock humility and set low aims for ourselves. For many unremarkable people, the possibility of becoming remarkable shoots a thunderbolt of fear into them. I will attract attention, they suddenly realize. The Jonah complex is partly a fear of losing control, of the possibility that we might undergo a total transformation from the old person we were.

Maslow's suggestion is this: you need to balance grand aims with having your feet on the ground. Most people have too much of one and not enough of the other. If you study the successful, the self-realized, you find they have a blend of both: that is, they shoot for the sky, yet are also grounded in reality.

Work and creativity

As an academic psychologist, Maslow was surprised when, in the 1960s, big business came knocking on his door. In a time of increasing competition to produce better products, companies sensed that work environments in which people were more creative and fulfilled would also be more productive. He had written about 'Eupsychia', which was “the culture that would be generated by 1,000 self-actualizing people on some sheltered island where they would not be interfered with”. While this was a utopia, his real-world solution of Eupsychian management aimed to achieve the psychological health and fulfillment of all in a workplace.

Over a quarter of The Farther Reaches of Human Nature is devoted to the question of creativity, for this lay at the heart of Maslow's idea of the self-actualizing person. He distinguishes between primary creativity – the flash of inspiration that 'sees' a final product before it has been created – and secondary creativeness – the working out and development of the inspiration, seeing it through.

He noted that because we live in a world that changes much quicker than it did in the past, it is not enough to 'do things the way they have always been done'. The best people will be willing to give up the past, and instead to study a problem as it is without baggage. This feature, which he calls 'Innocence', was common in self-actualized people. Of this trait Maslow wrote: “The most mature people are the ones that can have the most fun...These are people who can regress at will, who can become childish and play with children and be close to them.”

He was keenly aware that such people are often the unconventional ones or troublemakers in an organization, and was frank in telling businesses that they had to somehow accommodate and value these individuals. Organizations are by nature conservative, but to survive and prosper they also needed to indulge in the creative flights of fancy that may foresee the need for, or produce, great new products or concepts. The ideal workplace would be like a reflection of the self-actualized person's creative nature: a childlike inspiration to truly create something new; and the maturity to see a vision through to reality.

Final word

As with many trailblazers, Maslow was not at all sure of his ground in terms of research methodology (he wrote that “Knowledge of low reliability is also a part of knowledge”), but his ideas breathed new life into psychology. As Henry Geiger points out in an introduction to the book, though highly respected academically Maslow’s writings also sold in big numbers to the general public. People responded to the fact that, rather than being a crazy notion, self-actualization was actually a goal within most people's reach. It was not just for the 'saints and the sages' and the great figures of history, but perhaps the birthright of everyone.

It is no surprise, therefore, that Maslow’s thinking has been adapted for the workplace. While on the one hand the self-actualization concept inspires us to always seeking meaningful work above other rewards, being reminded of the Jonah complex can urge us to really live up to our potential and think big.