Maslow Redux II

18 February 2023

Last week we began a revised understanding of Maslow’s work, particularly as that work affects our perception of his hierarchy of needs—which turned out to be not as hierarchical as initially thought.

A paragraph, right near the beginning of Kaufman (2020, p. 10) lays out important assumptions about being human and the flux that involves:

To be sure, there will always be a certain amount of psychological entropy in our lives: we never achieve full mastery over our environment, and things we thought we could predict are constantly changing.  A certain amount of stress and unpredictability is healthy and normal.  As the British philosopher Alan Watts put it, ‘There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.’  Or as mathematician John Allen Paulos notes, ‘Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security.’  [Bold emphasis added.]

Let’s look at the word environment, in the second line.  Entropy comes from physics and dictates that systems inevitably devolve toward chaos.  If this seems improbable, think about ancient Greece or ancient Rome.  Or in more recent times, that for a few hundred years, news arrived hand-delivered on paper.  Eventually, radio and television transmission came about only to be eclipsed by the internet.  Psychological entropy means that assumptions and understandings of life fail to fully describe, sometimes collapse, and engender new growth i.e., our own understandings of people, places, and things is always changing—and that ability to roll with the changes is a sign of health and resilience.

Environment was cited because that process of entropic change happens inside and outside.  It’s happening to me as I type these words.  Some parts of my understanding are growing stronger and clearer while others are fading away, as I see some weakness in them.  Yet our nature is to crave and seek definitive certainty.

I have just completed a paper on theories of the self.  I quoted Heraclitus in that paper, as he’s the guy who observed that a person never steps in the same river twice.  I feel a need to provide that information to you because—for me today—that takes us to the first philosophical reference on flux and I still believe I’ll live long enough to know all the historical references to flux.  We like complete sets, and we seek to create them.  And that is unquestionably virtuous as it expands understanding (and understanding makes life more manageable, takes disciplined work = virtue).  But the older I get, the more I realize that it’s also folly—complete sets ain’t gonna happen.  And I hear an old English teacher’s voice quoting Browning (1855), “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/Or what's a heaven for?” 

I find heaven hard to accept but Browning’s point still stands: ambition is the nature of the human creature, and that’s part of the challenge of acceptance.  How do you reach for full sets while accepting the limitations of your own time, resources, and energy?  The short answer seems to be that well-spiritedness arises by dismissing illusions of perfectionism.  By accepting that well-spiritedness comes with a realistic notion of what any human being can accomplish.  And a corollary of that is that those who accomplish “the most” pay a price for the extremity of that accomplishment. 

Kaufman’s (2020) passage, above, ends with two quotes one of which claims that the awareness and acceptance of insecurity is the only security we can find.  Let’s test this. 

In recovery groups, and in psychotherapy, a lifestyle balance evaluation is often part of the regimen.  How, where, and why are you spending your most precious resource, time? Some tools let you graph this on a pie chart with the area of that circle being a 24 hour period.  When Googled, some of the circles have eight equal slices and some have six.  It’s kind of interesting just seeing the headings, never mind the assumption of 8 perfectly equal slices.

Wheel 1	Wheel 2	Wheel 3	Wheel 4
Home	Physical Environment	Home	Environment
Health	Health	Health	Health
Friends	Family & Friends	Friends	Creativity
Romance	Romance	Love	Relationships
Life Purpose	Fun & Recreation	Leisure	Fun & Recreation
Work	Business/Career	Career	Career & Business
Development	Personal Growth	Personal Growth	Personal Growth
Money	Finances	Finances	Money

These wheels were selected based on visual appeal before I zoomed up their magnification to an easily-read size—so fairly random in terms of slice labelling and categorization.  The bold green values indicate my optimum descriptors.

Above, emphasis was placed on the fact that excelling in one area meant skimping in another.  We have all seen people whose work took precedence over most other values (where’s that mirror!?) and we have all seen people who remained perfectly fit while their marriages or relationships with children collapsed.  This is what Kaufman (2020) was pointing to but without pie charts or lists. 

While I agree that different values will wax and wain, I return to Aristotle’s idea of virtues being in the middle of sliding scales; that moderation is probably essential for balance and that balance is always going to be tested as the winds of our individual and collective lives change. Being kind to ourselves, with such knowledge, is a means of accepting that knowing insecurity is the only security we can find. 

Kaufman’s revised Maslovian needs. (Image: Andy Ogden in Harper, 2020).

In Kaufman’s (2020) revision of the pyramid, which goes right to connection--understood in metaphysical terms: our connection to life is tenuous, and conditional upon factors far beyond our control.  So what do you do: have the courage to change the things you can. Accept the rest.

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

Browning, R. (1855).  Andrea del Sarto. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43745/andrea-del-sarto

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