Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Self-Actualization Models

Introduction to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

In his experiments with monkeys early in his career, Abraham Maslow, a leading American psychologist, noticed that certain needs are stronger or more basic than others. Food, water, air, and sex are basic needs that humans and animals require to survive, but air is the strongest and most important, followed by water, food, and then sex (Boeree 1970). He concluded that motivation derives from these basic needs for survival, which are physiological in nature, and from them he derived a hierarchy of needs. He arranged these needs under five broad categories — physiological, safety and security, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization — whereby one category cannot be achieved unless the previous one is satisfied. Until it is satisfied, motivation remains fixated at that level. Maslow proposed that all motivation is ultimately directed toward self-actualization (Boeree).

Physiological needs cover everything required for organic survival, not restricted to air, water, food, and sex; they are numerous (Simone et al. 1987) and vary depending on the description. These include protein, salt, sugar, minerals, vitamins, a normal pH balance, a given body temperature, sleep, activity, the elimination of wastes, the avoidance of pain, and even Vitamin C (Boeree 1970). When these organic needs are consistently satisfied, the organism or person becomes free and motivated to pursue and fulfill the next higher category of needs.

In the second category are needs for safety and a sense of security, stability, dependency, protection, and freedom from fear and anxiety. When physical and biological needs are met, the individual looks outward and seeks protection in his or her environment (Simone et al. 1987). The person wants to live under safe and secure circumstances, looks for a stable environmental structure, a safe neighborhood, job security, and insurance and retirement plans. If these needs are satisfied, the person proceeds to the next higher category; otherwise, motivation remains fixed at that unsatisfied or incompletely satisfied level.

Deficit Needs: The First Four Levels

Needs for belongingness and love revolve around giving and receiving affection. If these are not gratified sufficiently, the person will hunger for relationships with people in general (Boeree 1970) and specifically for a place within a family. If the needs are not filled, the person will react intensely to the absence of friends, a partner, or children, and will go to extreme lengths to fill them. Achieving a sense of belonging becomes the most important of all pursuits. When the person was in the physiological phase, love did not seem especially real or important; but now he or she is most affected by loneliness, rejection, friendlessness, or the absence of family and roots. The feeling of belonging becomes the foremost motivation. This is experienced in everyday life not only through the desire to marry and have a family, but also through becoming part of a community, an organization, or a career (Boeree 1970).

With the first three categories of needs fulfilled, the person now seeks the need to be valued and esteemed by others. This need may manifest as a desire to become strong, to achieve, to feel adequate, to master skills, to gain confidence, or to earn reputation or prestige. Every dimension points to esteem by others — status, fame and glory, dominance, dignity, and importance (Simone et al. 1987). The person wants to develop self-confidence, a sense of worth, strength, capability, and usefulness. When this need is frustrated, the person develops feelings of inferiority, weakness, and helplessness.

Maslow distinguished between a lower and a higher form of the need for self-esteem (Boeree 1970). A person with the lower form seeks the respect of others — status, fame, glory, recognition, attention, reputation, appreciation, or dominance over others. The higher form involves the need for self-respect, expressed as self-confidence, achievement, independence, and freedom. The key difference is that once self-respect is genuinely achieved, it is difficult to lose (Boeree 1970). Maslow believed that most psychological and safety problems occur at this stage, in the form of low self-esteem and inferiority complexes. In advanced societies today, physical and environmental needs are generally met, and the need for belonging and love is relatively attainable; yet most troubles begin with the difficulty of obtaining the esteem of others.

Maslow described these four categories or levels of need as deficit needs, or D-needs. They are deficit needs in that a person feels them acutely when they are not adequately satisfied but feels nothing particular when they are met (Boeree 1970). The person inherently seeks homeostasis or balance, not just at the biological or physiological level, but at the psychological and emotional level as well. Maslow viewed all four levels as survival requirements, so that even love and esteem become necessary for the maintenance of health just as surely as genetic structures are. He suggested that strong, unresolved conflicts in any phase — extreme insecurity, extreme hunger in childhood, the death or loss of a family member, or severe neglect or abuse (Boeree) — can fixate a person at that level or produce neurosis. Neurosis can surface later in life when a person performs unexplainable compulsions or obsessions without apparent cause, such as repeatedly checking locked doors, keeping the kitchen well-stocked, or constantly seeking reassurances of one's importance. Neurosis is broadly understood as a psychological malfunction or disorder.

The last level or category of needs is vastly different from the first four. Maslow believed that meeting all four lower levels can still produce a distinct kind of restlessness and discontent unless and until a person becomes what he or she is fitted to do or become. This is the self-actualization category (Simone et al. 1987), where the person reaches ultimate fulfillment. A musician, for example, reaches self-actualization when making music; an artist, when painting or writing; each individual, when becoming true to his or her own nature. Maslow later redefined this category as a function of peak experiences (Simone et al.), wherein a person is taken out of himself or herself, feels very small or very large in relation to nature or to something greater, and senses a connection to the infinite (Boeree 1970). Peak experiences create such a powerful impact that they can transform a person. They are also called mystical experiences in religious and philosophical traditions.

Maslow also called this level growth motivation, as opposed to deficit motivation, and referred to its needs as B-needs (being needs), as distinct from D-needs (deficit needs). Self-actualization does not require the balance or homeostasis that deficit needs demand (Boeree 1970). Deficit needs cease to motivate once satisfied and the person moves to a higher level, but self-actualization increases as it is fed. It establishes a continuous desire to fulfill one's potential — to become the most and best that one can be. Maslow argued that actualizing oneself requires that all preceding, lower needs must be adequately met. The hungry must first be adequately fed; the unloved must be unconditionally loved; and the emotionally insecure must be sufficiently assured of their worth before they can begin to approach and realize their potential. The frank and stark conditions of increasing unrest, poverty, crime, and disease in the world suggest that relatively few have reached this level; Maslow proposed that only two percent of human beings belong there (Boeree).

Self-Actualization and Growth Motivation

Maslow studied an initial group of self-actualizers through a method called biographical analysis. These self-actualizers included Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Benedict Spinoza, Albert Schweitzer, Aldous Huxley, and twelve others living during Maslow's time. He studied their biographies, works, actions, and words, and from these developed a list of qualities common among them and uncommon among average individuals (Boeree 1970). He found that these prominent figures were reality-centered and problem-centered, perceived means and ends differently, had a distinctive way of relating to others, and possessed a fresh and un-hostile sense of humor. A self-actualizer is comfortable with aloneness and solitude, has few but deep close friendships rather than many shallow ones, enjoys autonomy and independence, shows respect and appreciation for others as well as for himself or herself, and is humble (Boeree). As already noted, the self-actualizer has frequent peak experiences, which set him or her apart from the ordinary person quite distinctively.

By his hierarchy of needs, Maslow maintained that the human personality is so constructed that ultimate fulfillment and healthy existence depend on the adequate satisfaction of each category of needs in that exact chronological sequence. The more need categories fulfilled, the nearer the person comes to the fullness of existence — hence Maslow's humanist-existential approach to personality development. In counseling, a person's past is recorded, analyzed, and evaluated in search of fixations at any of the stages, since these fixations are the motivations behind behavior, whether conscious or unconscious. Maslow's method places greatest emphasis on an individual's physical, psychological, and social needs and on his or her right to become the most and best of what he or she can be (Simone et al. 1987; Boeree 1970).

Maslow's emphasis on the human person and lived experience brought him considerable attention and made him an inspiring figure in personality theory, particularly during the difficult 1960s when people were burdened and disillusioned by the hard, reductionistic, and mechanistic stance of behaviorists and physiological psychologists (Boeree 1970). Maslow offered self-meaning and self-appreciation and became one of the pioneers of a movement that returned the focus of individual feeling, yearning, and wholeness to psychology. He devoted much energy to humanistic psychology and the human potential movement, and near the end of his life inaugurated what he called the "fourth force" in psychology. The first force consisted of Freud and other depth psychologists; the second, the behaviorists; the third, his own humanism combined with European existentialism. The fourth force was made up of transpersonal psychologies derived from European philosophies, which examined meditation, higher states of consciousness, and para-psychological phenomena, and which reacted against the then-dominant schools of psychoanalysis and behaviorism in the twentieth century. Among the most prominent European philosophers associated with this tradition were Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger; the most prominent figures in the humanist-existential group were Carl Rogers, Maslow, and Rollo May.

Humanist-existentialist psychologists rejected Freud's deterministic position and the implied inability of the individual to engage meaningfully with his or her own nature (Boeree). Instead, they placed primary focus on specifically human factors such as choice, responsibility, freedom, and the meanings constructed from the choices made (Boeree). In handling neurosis and other mental or psychological disorders, the person must be viewed in terms of the level of fulfillment of his or her needs across the four or five categories. Behavior should not be viewed mechanically — as driven solely by inner psychological forces, programmed external circumstances, reinforcements, or genetic structures — but rather as the result of choice and the meaning created from those choices.