Maslow Redux: Exploration

18 March 2023

This entry continues the strand begun in the last five blogs on Maslow.  We move from general- and security-based needs to growth needs.  Per Figure 1, that means we’re at the base of the sail and out of the hull. 

Figure 1: Kaufman’s revised Maslovian needs. 

(Image: Andy Ogden in Harper, 2020).

Part of Kaufman’s winning formula for writing Transcend was the vignettes he interspersed with dense discussions of psychology.  The little story with which he introduced the growth needs had large consequences. 

Between 1935 and 1945, due to the build-up of racially and ideologically based national socialism, in Germany and elsewhere, the brain-drain out of Europe and into New York City was enormous and of huge importance to Abraham Maslow.  He compared that concentration of intelligence to ancient Athens, at her apex.

Of particular interest to Maslow were Ruth Benedict, an anthropologist, and Max Wertheimer, a Gestalt psychologist.  Gestalt psychology was moving away from behaviourism—which held that we learn by stimulus and response, like Pavlov’s dogs.  Wolfgang Kohler, Wertheimer, and Kurt Koffka maintained that we might profit by viewing learning as whole patterns of perception and cognition and not sets of parts.  The stimulus-based learning of behaviourism made no room for intelligence, inference, or insight, all supported by humanism, which was what Maslow was moving toward.

However, larger than what these people were working on was they themselves as Maslow saw Wertheimer and Benedict as self-actualized people—and that perceived state of being arrested his attention for some time.  He wanted to know why these people were so different from others.  By following Kaufman’s Maslovian ascent, from the bottom of the hull to the top of the sail, we should get a sense of how that epitome—self-actualization—is sought and found.

“The need for exploration—the desire to seek out and make sense of novel, challenging, and uncertain information and experiences—is an irreducible fundamental need”  (Kaufman 2020, p. 91).  So what blocks exploration?

Avoidance makes problems worse and kills exploratory willingness.  Research has found that, in people who experienced trauma, those who grew from the suffering were those with low avoidance = a willingness to explore.  This was validated and expanded by Forgeard et al., (2013) who focused on rumination, a subject often discussed in meetings concerning recovery from addiction.  Intrusive rumination discouraged growth—in multiple areas—while deliberate rumination showed growth in five areas including an expanded sense of life’s possibilities and positive relationship changes. 

Kaufman had this to say about deliberate rumination: “Writing about a topic that triggers strong emotions for just fifteen to twenty minutes a day has been shown to help people create meaning from their stressful experiences and better express both their positive and negative emotions” (Kaufman, 2020, p. 106). 

Openness to experience is an important attribute cited by Carl Rogers and Maslow (both 1962). Per Rogers, openness to experience is the opposite of defensiveness.  If we think about defensiveness in relation to exploration, there’s a closing in and closing down that accompanies defensiveness versus opening up which implies risky leaps into the unknown, when thinking of exploration.

Helpfully, Transcend (2020, p. 109) also included an Openness to Experience Scale divided into four categories:

·        Absorption/Flow

• e.g., “Sometimes I am so immersed in nature or in art that I feel as if my whole state of consciousness has somehow been temporarily changed.”

·        Imagination

• e.g., “I identify strongly with characters in movies I watch or books I read.”

·        Aesthetic Sensitivity

• e.g., “I see beauty in things that others might not notice.”

·        Intuition/Emotionality

• e.g. “When I have a strong emotional experience, the effect stays with me for a long time.”  [All categories abbreviated.]

At the end of the chapter on exploration, Kaufman spent time on the importance of the need to know in relation to exploration and IQ (intelligence quotient).  His own research found a “moderate” relationship between intellectual curiosity and IQ.  As he put it, there are many people with very high IQs and little intellectual curiosity.  Perhaps more interestingly, both that intellectual curiosity and high IQ are predictors of academic achievement (Kaufman, 2020, p. 113).  It was also sad, at least to me, that the first line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics was not referenced in this discussion, “All men by nature desire to know” Barnes (1995, p. 1552).  It is not difficult to see how this forms the basis of the differentia between humans and other creatures, humans being Aristotle’s rational animals.

As I see it, the takeaway here is that exploration leads us outward into an untested world which gives us inward clues about who and how we are.  Fear, isolation, and avoidance discourage exploration and foster unrealized potential.

Next week we move further up the sail of growth, per Fig. 1, above, and into the realm of love.

Dan Chalykoff is near completion of an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies.  He works as a supervised psychotherapist at CMHA-Hamilton where his focus is addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes.  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

Barnes, J. (Ed.). (1995). The complete works of Aristotle: The revised Oxford translation.  Princeton University Press.

Forgeard, M. J. C. (2013). Perceiving benefits after adversity: The relationships between self-reported posttraumatic growth and creativity.  Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts Vol 7:3, 245-264.  American Psychological Association.

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