Abraham Moslow Essay Research Paper IntroductionThe theorist

Abraham Moslow Essay, Research Paper

Introduction

The theorist I chose was Maslow, he was born in 1908 in Brooklyn, New York. He was the first of seven children born to his parents, Jewish immigrants from Russia. His parents, hoping for the best for their children in the New World, pushed him hard for academic success. He became the psychologist who many people consider the founder of a movement called humanistic psychology. The movement developed as a revolt against behaviorism and psychoanalysis, the two most popular psychological views of the mid- 1900’s. Humanistic psychologists believe individuals are controlled by their own values and choices and not by the environment, as behaviorists think, or by unconscious drives, as psychoanalyst believe. Maslow stressed the importance of studying well-adjusted people instead of just the disturbed ones.

Theory

Maslow’s contributions are many and diverse; perhaps his most famous is the hierarchy of needs. Beyond the details of air, water, food, and sex, he laid out five broader layers: the physiological needs, the needs for safety and security, the needs for love and belonging, the needs for esteem, and the need to actualize the self, in that order.

The physiological needs encompass specific biological requirements for water, oxygen, proteins, vitamins, proper body temperature, sleep, sex, exercise and so on. When the physiological needs are largely taken care of, the second layer of needs, the safety and security needs comes into play. We will become increasingly interested in finding safe circumstances, stability, and protection. We might develop a need for structure, for order, some limits. When physiological needs and safety needs are taken care of the third layer shows up, the love and belonging needs. We begin to feel the need for friends a companion, children and sense of community. Looked at negatively, we become increasingly susceptible to loneliness and social anxieties. In our day to day life we exhibit these needs in our desires to marry, have a family be a part of a community, a member of church, brother part of a fraternity, a part of a gang or a bowling club. It is also a part of what we look for in a career. The esteem needs. Next we begin to look for a little self-esteem. Maslow noted two versions of esteem needs, a lower one and a higher one. The lower one is the need for the respect of others, the need for status, fame, glory, recognition, attention, reputation, appreciation, dignity, even dominance. The higher form involves the need for self-respect, including such feelings as confidence, competence, achievement, mastery, independence, and freedom. This is the “higher”

form because, unlike the respect of others, once we have self-respect, it is a much harder to lose.

The negative version of these needs is low self-esteem and weakness complexes. Maslow felt that Adler was onto something when he stated that these were at the roots of many, even of our psychological difficulties. In modern countries, many of us have what we need in regard to our physiological and safety needs. Sometimes we even have reasonable amount of love and sense of belonging. It is a respect that often seems hard to get!

The next four levels Maslow calls deficit needs, or D-needs. If you do not have an adequate amount of something it would make it a deficit .We feel the need, however if we obtain everything we need of, we feel nothing at all. In other terms, they cease to be motivating.

He also talks about these levels in terms of homeostasis. Maslow simply extends the homeostatic principle to needs, such as safety, belonging, and esteem that we do not normally think of in these conditions. Maslow sees all these needs essentially for survival. However love and esteem are needed for the maintenance of health. He says we all have these needs built in to us genetically like instincts. In fact, he calls them instinctual which are instinct like needs. In overall development, we go through these levels kind of like stages. As newborns, our focal point is on the physiological. Quickly, we begin to recognize that we need to be safe. After that we crave attention and affection. Later, we look for self-esteem. Under worrying conditions, or when survival is threatened we can “regress” to a lower need level. These things can happen on a society-wide basis as well.

When society unexpectedly struggles, people begin to look for a strong leader to make things right. Maslow suggested that we should ask people for their “philosophy of the future,” what would their ideal life be like and get significant information as to what needs they need to cover.

Self-actualization, the last level is different then the rest. Maslow used many terms to refer to this level. He has called it growth motivation being needs and self-actualization. These needs involve the continuous desire to fulfill potentials, to be the best that you can be. When lower needs are unmet, you can’t fully devote yourself to fulfilling your potential. Only a small percentage of the world’s population is predominantly, self-actualizing.

By self-actualization Maslow means people he called self-actualizers. He picked out a group of people, some historical figures, and some people he knew, whom he felt

clearly met the criteria of self-actualization. Some people that were in this group were people