CH9: Maslow's Holistic-Dynamic Theory

• Assumes that the whole person is constantly being motivated by one need or another.
• Everyone has the potential to grow toward psychological health (self-actualization).
• Lower level needs such as hunger, safety, love, and esteem, must be relatively satisfied before one can reach self-actualization
• The whole person, not any single part, is motivated (holistic approach).
• Motivation is complex. A person’s behavior may spring from several separate motives.
• People are continually motivated by one need or another; when one need is satisfied, it ordinarily loses its motivational power and is replaced by another need.
• Everyone is motivated by the same basic needs, but the manner in which they satisfy these needs varies from culture to culture.
• Needs can be arranged on a hierarchy.
• Physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging needs, esteem, cognitive needs, aesthetic needs, self-actualization, transcendence
• Needs emerge gradually. The more a lower-level need is satisfied, the greater the emergence of the next-level need.
• Our behaviors are usually motivated by multiple needs simultaneously.
• The order of the levels is not completely fixed. While needs are generally satisfied in the hierarchical order, they are occasionally reversed.
• Expressive Behavior: Is unconscious, unlearned, spontaneous, and determined by forces within the person; merely a person’s mode of expression such as a smile, gestures.
• Coping Behavior: Is conscious, effortful, learned, and determined by the external environment; involves the individual’s attempts to cope with the environment; serves a goal, such as to secure food.
• Deprivation of physiological needs results in malnutrition, fatigue, loss of energy, obsession with sex, among others.
• Threats to one’s safety lead to fear, insecurity, and dread.
• When love needs go unfulfilled, a person becomes defensive, overly aggressive, or socially timid.
• Lack of esteem results in self-doubt, selfdepreciation, and lack of confidence.
• Deprivation of self-actualization needs leads metapathology, the absence of values, the lack of fulfillment, and the loss of meaning in life.
• Maslow believed that value-free science does not lead to the proper study of human personality
• Maslow argued that psychological science should place more emphasis on the study of the individual than on large groups.
• Scientists must be willing to resacralize science, that is, to instill it with human values, emotions, and rituals.
• Argued for a Taoistic attitude to psychology, that is, noninterfering, passive, and receptive, and abolishing prediction and control as the major goals of science
• Awe, not analysis, as the proper response to mystery. He Stressed that psychologists must themselves be healthy and happy, and that they must be able to help others to and ask the right questions.
• Measuring: Personal Orientation Inventory (POI). First inventory that attempted to measure Maslow’s concept of self-actualization.
• Short Index of Self-Actualization (SISA)

  • Second measure of self-actualization developed by Jones and Crandall in 1986

  • Borrowed 15 items from the POI
• Other measures include the Brief Index of Self-Actualization (BISA) (Sumerlin & Bundrick, 1996, 1998) and the Measure of Actualization Potential (MAP)
• Characteristics of Self-Actualization Scale (CSAS)

  • Developed by Kaufman in 2018

  • Newest self–actualization measure designed to test and validate the 17 qualities of self-actualizing people identified by Maslow.
• The Jonah Complex - Fear of doing one’s best that prevents people from growing toward self-actualization.