Self-Actualization

Maslow’s Concept of Self-Actualization

Maslow conceived his theory on the hierarchy of human needs in his landmark 1943 article titled “A Theory of Human Motivation.” He enlisted a set of human needs and argued that humans more or less satisfied their needs by following a path or hierarchy. The five needs he originally enlisted were physiological needs, safety needs, love/belonging needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs. In his later writings, he replaced self-actualization needs with cognitive needs, aesthetic needs, self-actualization needs, and self-transcendent needs. He classified the first four needs as deficiency or lower needs and the latter four as being or higher needs.

Physiological needs include needs for basic survival like food, water, shelter, and clothing. Safety needs include needs for personal safety, financial [Page 1921]security, health and well-being, and so on. Love/belonging needs include social needs like friendship, family, romantic partner, intimacy, and affiliation with a club or organization. Esteem needs include needs for recognition, attention, fame, competence, mastery, and self-confidence. Cognitive needs include the need to pursue knowledge, meaning, morality, truth, and in general to understand the universe through reason, thought, and learning. Aesthetic needs include the need for beauty, art, order, and symmetry. Maslow argued that once individuals satisfied the aforementioned six needs they were primed to truly realize their full potential through introspection, contemplation, and self-discovery. He called this need the self-actualization need. Maslow went on to claim that the final need is the self-transcendence need, which is the need to go beyond one’s self. This need could manifest itself through spirituality, deep meditation, peak experiences, flow, social activism, or using one’s fully realized potential to make the world a better place.

Maslow claimed that humans are typically motivated to satisfy their lower deficiency needs before embarking on their higher growth needs, though he admitted that there were exceptions. He suggested that one must satisfy one’s deficiency needs before truly realizing one’s full potential and self-actualizing. He termed this kind of deficiency-free motivation as meta-motivation. Self-actualized individuals do not ignore their deficiency needs but rather spend much less time and effort pursuing them because they are mostly satisfied. Ignoring deficiency needs in pursuit of higher needs is not advisable because it could lead to frustration and/or depression.

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