From Maslow’s Levels of Needs to the Neuro-Semantics of Self-Actualization

It was absolutely revolutionary when Maslow came up with the idea. Prior to his sorting out the levels of needs, nobody else had even thought in those terms. In fact, psychologists and theorists about human nature had all been working on the assumption that people had needs—drives, urges, “instincts,” etc. and that one or more of these would be “the driving need” that could explain all the rest.

Actually, this was also the foundation of the Nature versus Nurture debate that had raged in Philosophy for centuries and which the new field of Psychology inherited. In fact, the “Need” or “Instinct” debate raged in the early twentieth century. Various pioneers posited that it was sex, food, survival, death, life, superiority, dominance, and a hundred other possibilities.

In the midst of all of that Maslow created a true paradigm shift by positing that there were basic or lower needs and then higher or meta-needs. He even used the term meta. What led him to this conclusion? Where did his originality arise from? You might be as surprised as I was to discover that Maslow’s first graduate study research was in Wisconsin with Harry Harlow and his monkeys. He studied the chimpanses and basic animal instincts in the famous studies about bonding.

Next, Maslow did research on human sexuality. In fact, there was a time, several years before McKinsey began his studies, that Maslow was recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on human sexuality. That’s right, Abraham Maslow!

Then came the beginning of the second World War in Europe in the late 1930s and finally American’s entry into it in Dec. of 1941. And that changed everything. Maslow himself described December 7, 1941 as a day that became a epiphany for him as it gave him a direction for his life.

How so? On that day, he made a decision. He decided that what political leaders needed was a more accurate and useful theory of human motivation, that if they had that, that would contribute to peace among nations.

To understand this we have to remember that at that time psychology was dominated by two models of human nature which were both mostly negative and deterministic about changing human nature. You also have to remember that the primary model of human nature at work was what McGregor later called Theory X —people don’t really want to work, have to be forced to work by playing on their fears and anxieties, have to be watched every moment, can’t be expected to take responsibility, will resist, deny, etc.

It was these theories of human nature and human “drives, needs, or instincts” that Maslow felt were fundamentally wrong that he set out to correct. From this background came his breakthrough discovery as he mapped the levels of human needs. Regarding this he wrote and researched extensively throughout the 1940s about the basic needs of human beings and how they differed from the content programming that instincts give animals. He also poked fun at the psychologists who would compare people to the “bad” animals (snakes, wolves, tigers, pigs, vultures, and other predators) instead of the “good” and more peaceful animals (chimpanzee, deer, elephant, dog, etc.).

H introduced the term instinctoid to distinguish the instinct-like left-over within humans in contradistinction of a true instinct in animals that has content information regarding how to be. Maslow noted that as a species, we humans have a hard time being a species since we are left with almost no information content. Our instinctoids give us a only general disposition or drive.

He also noted that the basic needs were deficiency needs (D-Needs), driven by lack. When we first experience these, deficiency drives us and dominate personality. All we can think about is gratifying the lack. But then when we do, the “need” goes away. Afterwards, and we even forget how driving the deficiency was. Maslow called that “post gratification forgetting.”

How different are the higher needs. These need are not driven by deficiency and only emerged once the lower needs are basically satisfied. These include the cognitive needs for knowing, understanding, discovering, etc., the aesthetic needs for beauty, form, and so on, the structural needs for order, sequence, patterning, the spirit needs for meaning, significance, importance, contribution, etc. These needs are the growth, expressive, and self-actualization needs. Instead of deficiency, they are driven by abundance so that when we gratify them, they don’t go away but grow. Our capacity for them grows and expands.

At what level do we live? At what level do we live in our businesses or societies? Do we individually or as a group, live at the deficiency level or at the abundance level?

In distinguishing the levels of needs within the lower needs Maslow showed that we move from survival to safety (safety and security) to social needs (love and affection) and to self needs (self- regard). In the basic needs, we move from one to the other as the lowest needs are prepotent to the higher ones, that is, they are more powerful, driving, and dominating. This generated the idea of a hierarchy of needs until we reach the higher needs.

What was so revolutionary with this analysis of human needs? The paradigm shift that this initiated was how our needs are sequenced developmentally and naturally move us to the higher needs. These truly human needs are not driven by deficiency. It is in our nature to actualize our highest needs and not to live at “the jungle level.”

From this Maslow argued that in business we can move from Theory X to Theory Y and that in society, we need to create structures that support the best in people and that facilitate groups and societies living at the highest levels instead of the lowest. He even called this the meta life. Maslow freely used the term meta for this area: meta-needs, meta-values (B-values), meta- pathologies, meta-pay, etc. This takes us to “the farther reaches of human nature” (the title of his fourth book) where we experience peak experiences and peak performances. This is the area of Self-Actualization Psychology, the psychology that describes anyone who has moved into the being dimension.

So it was the discovery of levels that opened up the new psychology. As he could not understand the first two self-actualizers that he met with the tools that psychology provided him because they lived at a different level, so he believed that business owners, leaders, politicians, sociologists, etc. could not create models for working with groups of people without a new psychology. Yet while he created the foundation for that new psychology with the hierarchy of needs, he died before he was able to create the new psychology. And it is that gap that we in Neuro-Semantics have been addressing – the subject of Reflection #9.