Maslow Redux

11 February 2023

I just read a line from one of my favourite fiction writers, Irwin Shaw.  In The Young Lions (1949), one of the protagonists, Noah, is thinking about how he met the woman he loves, marries, and has a child with.  “Accident, the only law of life.”  It is a position with a great deal of philosophical and statistical support.

However, I mention accident as a causal agent because the next few blogs are the result of a happy accident last Spring.  Just having completed my winter semester, with a few weeks until the summer work began, my wife and I went shopping and she kindly left me in a bookstore for some time to review their offerings on philosophy and psych.  It was there that I first discovered S. B. Kaufman’s Transcend: The new science of self-actualization.  That book revises and updates Maslow’s message, which is pretty important in the world occupied by theory and therapy.

The roots of self-actualization run at least as deep into history as Aristotle.  In On the Soul, and in Physics, Aristotle argued that life is motion and that the motion of a living thing has an internal direction toward self-actualization.  Made plain, leaves turn their largest surface areas to the sun to foster maximal nutritive processing through photosynthesis.  Human beings, per Aristotle, Rogers, Maslow, Frankl, Erickson, et al., seek to know what is most meaningful to themselves and how to maximize time in that pursuit.  If that pursuit is fruitful, and if other needs are met, Maslow believed humans can move from self-actualization to a sort of self-transcendence.  I have argued that psychotherapy is no more (and no less) than removing the obstacles from a person’s path to self-actualization.  So, let’s look at what Kaufman (2020) discovered when he returned to the published and unpublished work of Maslow.  We’ll begin with an image of the traditionally presented hierarchy of needs.

Maslow’s “Hierarchy” as represented since his death (1970). 

(Image: courtesy S. McLeod in Simply Psychology, 2020)

Most people who have formally (or informally) studied psychology are familiar with Maslow’s “Hierarchy.”  Guess what?  Maslow didn’t create that hierarchy.  He identified the parts and the relationships, but it was never used by Maslow; the pyramidal shape was invented by a management consultant in the 1960s (Kaufman, 2020, p. xxix).  That has some implications.

First, the hierarchy has been taught as a stepped sequence of sought and achieved needs.  That was not Maslow’s intent.  He maintained that needs were worked on simultaneously and that, at different times, we might need to return to various needs.  In other words, there’s no don’t-pass-go if you haven’t yet mastered your physiological or safety needs.  In fact, there’s no mastery.  Though these needs may be satisfied, they don’t disappear, and they are not forever resolved, they just fall into the bag of things we no longer need to think about with our most precious resource: attention.

Instead of the pyramidal hierarchy, Kaufman adopts the image and metaphor of a sailboat.  The hull is made up of security needs those being self-esteem, connection, and safety.  To anyone in the addictive community, connection has become a buzzword conveying what many now believe to be the opposite of addiction i.e., the opposite of addiction is connection, not sobriety.  And there’s merit in that position.

Kaufman’s revised Maslovian needs. 

(Image: Andy Ogden in Harper, 2020).

With security needs receding, in importance and focus, more fortunate people move on to the growth needs, exploration, love, and purpose.  Yet, if I understand Kaufman’s take on Maslow correctly, most people will already have begun exploration of their growth needs while working on their security needs. This is one of the points Kaufman’s research brings forward: these needs are in play from conception through to post-burial, depending on the realm of influence you may have knowingly or unknowingly cast. 

We’ll close this first Maslow Redux blog by going to Kaufman (2020, pp. xxxii-xxxiii).

Note that you don’t ‘climb’ a sailboat like you’d climb a mountain or a pyramid.  Instead, you open your sail, just like you’d drop your defenses once you felt secure enough.   This is an ongoing dynamic: you can be open and spontaneous one minute but can feel threatened enough to prepare for the storm by closing yourself to the world the next minute. The more you continually open yourself to the world, however, the further your boat will go and the more you can benefit from the people and opportunities around you.  And if you’re truly fortunate, you can even enter ecstatic moments of peak experience.  In these moments, not only have you temporarily forgotten your insecurities, but you are growing so much that you are helping to raise the tide for all the other sailboats...

More next week.

Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies.  He works as a supervised psychotherapist at CMHA-Hamilton where his primary focus is trauma.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.  Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.

References

Harper, C. (2020, April 14). Transcending Maslow’s Pyramid: A New Hierarchy of Human Needs.  https://medium.com/craig-harper-essays/transcending-maslows-pyramid-a-new-hierarchy-of-human-needs-2ca50a49af35

Kaufman, S. B. (2020). Transcend: The new science of self-actualization. TarcherPerigee Books.

Shaw, I. (1949). The Young Lions, Jonathan Cape.