How Maslow Missed Meaning

So in the 1940s Maslow set out on to do one of the first projects (if not the very first) for modeling experts. His goal at that time was to model self-actualizers and from that the process of self-actualization itself. To do that he began identifying the features and qualities of self- actualizing people and then began selecting people (living and dead) who met those qualifications. As he did, he also had to theorize about what motivated these people and how their motivational life and level differed from people who were not self-actualizing their potentials, but living at the level of the jungle, at the level of the basic needs.

In the process of doing this, Maslow collected “needs, drives, instinctions, goals,” etc. that move and motivate people and then began classifying them. From that came his creative insight that differentiated lower and higher needs. He called the higher needs, meta-needs. In fact, he used the word meta abundantly during the 1940s and may have been along with Bateson the first to so use the term. He spoke about meta-values, meta-pathologies, meta-pay, etc. [Of course what I don’t know is who began using the term first. Of course, given his work with Ruth Benedict and then his correspondence with Margartet Mead, he discovered and met Gregory Bateson, so which one influenced the other regarding the use of the term?]

Out of this arose the only “model” that we have from Maslow and his pioneering efforts in Self- Actualization Psychology, namely, the Hierarchy of Needs. Yet this simple model was so useful and insightful, that it very quickly (I mean very quickly) began to permeate psychology, self- improvement, management, leadership, communication, motivation, learning, education, etc.

Psychology prior to Maslow there had been in a War of Instincts. This began about the first of the twentieth century and continued for decades. Every psychologist and theorist was trying to identify the primary instinct, the key instinct, the mother of all instincts in their effort to understand and create a theory of human nature: Was it sex, aggression, fear, self-esteem, love, food, death, meaning, etc.? One psychology textbook that I read said that over 137 “instincts” had been identified.

What Maslow did in that morass of confusion was to offer a model that brought all of the human instincts or drives or needs together and provided an unifying mechanism. And he put them together in a format that showed the prepotency of the lower needs, which explains why we feel them so strongly and why they are so biologically based.

We experience a similarity to the animals in our lower needs for survival (food, water, air, sex, shelter, warmth, etc.) in that they are very strong and driving. The primary difference is that while animals have innate programs for knowing what will satisfy their needs and even how to satisfy their needs, we do not. We have the urge and need, but not the information content. We are program-less compared to them. Maslow said that we only have instinctoids.

This becomes more and more true as we move up the levels. As the need for safety and security drives us, as the social needs for love and affection, as the self needs drive us for feeling important, unique, special, and valued. How do we satisfy these inner drives? What will satisfy them?

Maslow insightfully recognized the nature of deficiency as the driving mechanism in the lower needs. When we do not have them, we feel a powerful sense of lack. We feel desperate. We want. We need. Yet something strange happens when we gratify the need. The drives goes away! Poof! It vanishes. Suddenly, we are no longer hungry, cold, insecure, etc. In fact, gratification not only makes the drive go away so that we do not want it any longer, but we typically even forget how drive it was. Maslow called this “post-gratification forgetting.”

If the lower or deficiency needs arising from our biology and describes our connection with the animals, it is the higher needs that differentiates us from them. By gathering all of the other needs, the ones that make us uniquely human, Maslow created the category of higher needs. Here we want meaning, purpose, direction, intention, beauty, order, contribution, truth, and all of the needs-wants-instincts that we call that relate to our “spirit” and that the lack of causes us to feel “dis-spirited” and the fulfillment causes us to feel “in-spirited.”

These needs do not operate by deficiency. We can live without them. When we lack them, we aren’t desperate as we are without the survival needs. Yet something other than death occurs without them. Without them we will tend to live “quiet lives of desperation” to quote Thoreau. Nor is there any post-gratification relief. Satisfy these higher needs and instead of going away, they become stronger! We then want them more. We also then develop more capacity for them. In this we cannot get too much truth, beauty, meaning, contribution, etc.

When we live at the level of the meta-needs and meta-values, we live very differently. It’s a world of abundance rather than deficiency. It’s the uniquely human world of growth and expressing ourselves, rather than trying to get. Maslow struggled for the decades trying to find the right words to describe this very special place. It is the place of Being and so we lose motivation to try to do or achieve as we become expressive. The value of the experience is the experience itself, hence, “non-purposive.” This is the place for self-actualizing, becoming more and more all we can become, and the place of “peak experiences.”

Yet in all of these, Maslow missed something. While he put meaning as one of our meta-needs, he missed another role that meaning and meaning-making plays in human personality. And this is precisely what we in Neuro-Semantics are adding to the whole study and research on Self- Actualization.

Maslow missed the role of meaning-making and meaning attribution that tempers and governs even our experience of our needs. Now, true enough, he was close to it. For example, he recognized that the hierarchy of needs was not a strict hierarchy. He realized and spoke about how that any need can become so important that it can come to dominate all other needs. He wondered about why some needs can become so unimportant, that they fail to drive us at all. But he didn’t identify the mechanism of meaning as the mechanism that made the difference.

Failing to recognize this meant that Maslow didn’t see how the meanings we create in our mind then self-organize our entire mind-body system as an attractor frame creating a self-fulfilling process. Yet now that we know that, we can introduce a more systemic understanding and images into the old static hierarchy pyramid of Maslow. To the static and rigid pyramid, we can add the information feedback loops to show how meaning influences our experience of our needs.

It is our meaning-constructions via our self-reflexive consciousness that enables us to add layer upon layer of meaning to our experiences that describes the highest and most critical human “instinct” of all. Most about that next time.