How Maslow Missed Meaning — Part II

Maslow Missed Meaning. I wrote about that in Reflection #6. In spite of the exciting and even revolutionary insights that he achieved with the Hierarchy of Needs model, it was because Maslow overlooked the role of meaning in our experience that his model became static and rigid. How he missed it I know don’t.

Perhaps he missed it because he put meaning as one of the self-actualization needs and having filled the category he didn’t see it having other functions. Perhaps he missed it because he used other words (value, significance, “for the sake of,” “symbolic value,” etc.) which blinded him from it. Perhaps he was so focused on describing the higher states of self-actualization, modeling self-actualizers, and linking it to the lower biological needs that he just didn’t think it was important. And finally, perhaps that’s why, toward the end of his life, his dissatisfaction with “the third force” in psychology (the growth or human potential movement), he felt ready to pioneer an entirely new approach, his “fourth force,” the transpersonal psychology.

Whatever caused it, Maslow missed the most dynamic factor of all. He missed the key factor that actually serves as the leverage within human experience for change, ongoing development, and transformation.

What is the meaning that Maslow missed? And how does it play such a critical role? The meaning that Maslow missed is the freedom we have for defining, representing, associating, framing, and evaluating things. In Neuro-Semantics, I have recently traced out 10 kinds or levels of meaning. Our ways of creating meaning are so many. We create associative meaning, representational meaning, metaphorical meaning, linguistic meaning, evaluative meaning, perceptual meaning, intentional meaning, etc.

So when we ask the question, “What does that mean to you?” we have to listen to the many things that they “hold in mind” about the reference, the many ways that they encode or represent their meanings, and the levels or layers of meaning. In that way, we can identify the entire meaning system (or matrix).

What does food mean to you? What does eating mean to you? Does it only mean fuel, energy, vitality, and health? Or does it mean love, reward, comfort, the good life, deserving, de- stressing, socializing, feeling full, enjoyment, fun, etc.? Whatever it means to you determines how you experience it, how you feel about it, and how you relate to it and it relates to you. If you over-load it with meaning, if you semantically load it with too much meaning—food can become dominating, controlling, even destructive to you.

People who can’t say no to food and to over-eating, may now have a habit that has them, but within and above the habitual way of handling food is “what saying no” means. If it means deprivation, loss of joy, loss of love, loss of comfort, misery, etc., then we would experience and feel saying no to three extra helpings of dessert as far too painful to endure.

Actually, the feeling of pain, loss, deprivation, dieting, giving up, etc. have are semantic reactions. They are reactions from the meanings we attribute to food and eating. Give food and eating opposite meanings, “fat, ugly, undesirable, out-of-control,” etc. and we create another problem, “eating disorders.” Then, our meanings about being fat, about the importance of being thin, etc. will even shift our perceptions distorting our body image.

Ultimately, meaning is the most critical factor. There’s nothing more critical. In the end, no experience and no event makes us feel anything. In itself, it means nothing. It is the meanings we create and attribute to those events that create our experience and our emotions. That’s why every emotion is always right— right in relation to the meanings (the maps) out of which they come. That’s also why we cannot blindly trust our emotions. Emotions are derived from our mappings. They reflect the relationship between the meanings we have mapped and our experiences of the territory they seek to help us navigate.

Knowing all of this now enables us to recognize the static nature of Maslow’s hierarchy and how he missed the most dynamic variable of all in human motivation and personality—a dynamic that would energize the hierarchy and transform it into a more dynamic model.

He even admitted such. In The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971), Maslow wrote:

“It is a great mystery to me why affluence releases some people for growth while permitting other people to stay fixated at a strictly materialistic’ level.” (p. 316)

In his classic work, Motivation and Personality (1954) he described meaning as a cognitive capacity:

“If we remember that the cognitive capacities (perceptual, intellectual, learning) are a set of adjustive tools, which have, among other functions, that of satisfaction of our basic needs, then it is clear that any danger to them, any deprivation or blocking of their free use, must also be indirectly threatening to the basic needs themselves.” (p. 47)

In the same work, about the search for meaning, he describe it as one of our higher needs:

“This process is called by some, search for meaning. We shall then postulate a desire to understand, to systematize, to organize, to analyze, to look for relations and meanings, to construct a system of values.” (1954, p. 50)

Yet Maslow came very close to recognizing the distinction between needs and the meanings we attribute to them:

“Eating may be partially for the sake of filling the stomach, and partially for the sake of comfort and amelioration of other needs. One may make love not only for pure sexual release, but also to convince oneself of one’s masculinity, or to make a conquest, to feel powerful, to win more basic affection. (1954, p. 55)

In that quote, he used the phrase “for the sake of” as synonymous with meaning. Perhaps that’s what caused him to miss the significance of meaning. In the following, he used the phrase “symbolic value” for meaning.

“A goal object may have two meanings for the individual. First, it has its intrinsic meaning and secondly, it may have a secondary, symbolic value. A certain child deprived of an ice-cream cone that he wanted may have lost simply an ice cream cone. A second child, deprived of an ice cream cone, may have lost not only a sensory gratification, but may feel deprived of the love of his mother because she refused to buy it for him.”

“For the second boy the ice-cream cone has an intrinsic value, but may also be the carrier of psychological values. First, carries the physiological value only, the second adds a psychological value to it. It’s only when a goal object represents love, prestige, respect, or other basic needs that being deprived of it will have the bad effects ordinarily attributed to frustration in general.” (1954, p. 106)

Regarding celibacy, he wrote:

“It’s now well known that many cases are found in which celibacy has no psychopathological effects. But if it felt to represent rejection by the opposite sex, inferiority, lack of worth, lack of respect, isolation, or other thwarting of basic needs – it is pathological.”

He even recognized that the experience of deprivation differs from the meaning of a threat. “Deprivation is not psycho-pathogenic; threat is.” (p. 107). In this he understand that “Most neurotic symptoms or trends among basic-need gratification bent impulses that have got stymied or misdirected or confused.” That is, distorted meanings and responses about needs can create distortions.

It is precisely because our construction and attribution of meaning is a dynamic process that what something means can and does change. It changes all the time. First we frame it one way, then we frame it another. This reframing of meaning creates a transformation. Missing this dynamic variable caused Maslow’s hierarchy to be rigid and static and led to the pyramid metaphor and emblem.

But now, recognizing and incorporating the dynamic variable of meaning construction into the picture enables us to re-frame the old pyramid so that we can now see it as a volcano with the spiraling, swirling reflexive thoughts-and-emotions of a human being within it creating all kinds of meanings about things. If we can accept, embrace, and use our ego-strength to look this in the face, we have a holding place for meaning-making, a Crucible. So within the volcano of our driving needs is the Construct of our meaning making as we meta-state layers upon layers of meanings and when we construct meanings that work, that fit the territory, and that can enable us to navigate in our development, then we explode into the higher self-actualization needs where we are in the Zone.

This describes the latest model in Neuro-Semantics: The Construct, the Crucible, and the Zone and the theme of my first book on self-actualization. As we are pushed by desires and pulled by meanings, as we take charge of our construct and meta-state the transformational holding place of a Crucible, we are able to jet propel ourselves into the Zone of self-actualizing — the flow zone of the genius state. And all because we have recovered meaning in the self-actualizing process.