Please assist me with assignment
Discussion 6
This week, critically think about the theories that were developed by Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow as well as the humanistic approach. Familiarize yourself with the Module 6 objectives, introduction, videos, articles, and all other content in the module. For primary references, use our readings for the week, then utilize the Saint Leo Online Library for peer reviewed sources and to find relevance to the topic this week.
1. Think about the content of our readings by Rogers and Maslow. Explain both Rogers and Maslow’s views on human behavior. How are their theories similar and how are they different?
2. How have Rogers’ views on client-centered therapy and Maslow’s theories on motivation stood the test of time today? Which aspects of their views do you believe influenced the humanistic approach the least?
Reading
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50, 370-396. [The first published description of the “hierarchy of needs.”]
Rogers, C. R. (1946). Significant aspects of client-centered therapy. American Psychologist, 1, 415-422
Rogers, C. R. (1947). Some observations on the organization of personality. American Psychologist, 2, 358-368. [Rogers’ APA Presidential Address.]
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Christopher D. Green
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Carl R. Rogers (1946)
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First published in American Psychologist, 1, 415-422
Posted March 2000
In planning to address this group, I have considered and discarded several possible topics. I was tempted to describe the process of non-directive therapy and the counselor techniques and procedures which seem most useful in bringing about this process. But much of this material is now in writing. My own book on counseling and psychotherapy contains much of the basic material, and my recent more popular book on counseling with returning servicemen tends to supplement it. The philosophy of the client-centered approach and its application to work with children is persuasively presented by Allen. The application to counseling of industrial employees is discussed in the volume by Cantor. Curran has now published in book form one of the several research studies which are throwing new light on both process and procedure. Axline is publishing a book on play and group therapy. Snyder is bringing out a book of cases. So it seems unnecessary to come a long distance to summarize material which is, or soon ·n-ill be. obtainable in written form.
Another tempting possibility, particularly in this setting, was to discuss some of the roots from which the client-centered approach has sprung. It would have been interesting to show how in its concepts of repression and release, in its stress upon catharsis and insight, it has many roots in Freudian thinking, and to acknowledge that indebtedness. Such an analysis could also have shown that in its concept of the individual’s ability to organize his own experience there is an even deeper indebtedness to the work of Rank, Taft, and Allen. In its stress upon objective research, the subjecting of fluid attitudes to scientific investigation, the willingness to submit all hypotheses to a verification or disproof by research methods, the debt is obviously to the whole field of American psychology, with its genius for scientific methodology. It could also have been pointed out that although everyone in the clinical field has been heavily exposed to the eclectic “team” approach to therapy of the child guidance movement, and the somewhat similar eclecticism of the Adolf Meyers — Hopkins school of thought, these eclectic viewpoint have perhaps not been so fruitful in therapy and that little from these sources has been retained in the non-directive approach. It might also have been pointed out that in its basic trend away from guiding and directing the client. the non-directive approach is deeply rooted in practical clinical experience, and is in accord with the experience of most clinical workers, so much so that one of the commonest reactions of experienced therapists is that “You have crystallized and put into words something that I have been groping toward in my own experience for a long time.”
Such an analysis, such a tracing or root ideas, needs to be made, but I doubt my own ability to make it. I am also doubtful that anyone who is deeply concerned with a new development knows with any degree of accuracy where his ideas came from.
Consequently I am, in this presentation. Adopting a third pathway. While I shall bring in a brief description of process and procedure. and while I shall acknowledge in a general way our indebtedness to many root sources, and shall recognize the many common elements shared by client-centered therapy and other approaches, I believe it will be to our mutual advantage if I stress primarily those aspects in which nondirective[
*
] therapy differs most sharply and deeply from other therapeutic procedures. I hope to point out some of the basically significant ways in which the client-centered viewpoint differs from others, not only in its present principles, but in the wider divergencies which are implied by the projection of its central principles. [p. 416]
THE PREDICTABLE PROCESS OF CLIENT-CENTERED THERAPY
The first of the three distinctive elements of client-centered therapy to which I wish to call your attention is the predictability of the therapeutic process in this approach. We find, both clinically and statistically, that a predictable pattern of therapeutic development takes place. The assurance which we feel about this was brought home to me recently when I played a recorded first interview for the graduate students in our practicum immediately after it was recorded, pointing out the characteristic aspects, and agreeing to play later interviews for them to let them see the later phases of the counseling process. The fact that I knew with assurance what the later pattern would be before it had occurred only struck me as I thought about the incident. We have become clinically so accustomed to this predictable quality that we take it for granted. Perhaps a brief summarized description of this therapeutic process will indicate those elements of which we feel sure.
It may be said that we now know how to initiate a complex and predictable chain of events in dealing with the maladjusted individual, a chain of events which is therapeutic, and which operates effectively in problem situations of the most diverse type. This predictable chain of events may come about through the use of language as in counseling, through symbolic language, as in play therapy, through disguised language as in drama or puppet therapy. It is effective in dealing with individual situations, and also in small group situations.
It is possible to state with some exactness the conditions which must be met in order to initiate and carry through this releasing therapeutic experience. Below are listed in brief form the conditions which seem to be necessary, and the therapeutic results which occur.
This experience which releases the growth forces within the individual will come about in most cases if the following elements are present.
(1) If the counselor operates on the principle that the individual is basically responsible for himself, and is willing for the individual to keep that responsibility.
(2) If the counselor operates on the principle that the client has a strong drive to become mature, socially adjusted. independent, productive, and relies on this force, not on his own powers, for therapeutic change.
(3) If the counselor creates a warm and permissive atmosphere in which the individual is free to bring out any attitudes and feelings which he may have, no matter how unconventional, absurd, or contradictory these attitudes may be. The client is as free to withhold expression as he is to give expression to his feelings.
(4) If the limits which are set are simple limits set on behavior, and not limits set on attitudes. (This applies mostly to children. The child may not be permitted to break a window or leave the room. but he is free to feel like breaking a window, and the feeling is fully accepted. The adult client may not be permitted more than an hour for an interview, but there is full acceptance of his desire to claim more time.)
(5) If the therapist uses only those procedures and techniques in the interview which convey his deep understanding of the emotionalized attitudes expressed and his acceptance of them. This under standing is perhaps best conveyed by a sensitive reflection and clarification of the client’s attitudes. The counselor’s acceptance involves neither approval nor disapproval.
(6) If the counselor refrains from any expression or action which is contrary to the preceding principles. This means reframing from questioning, probing, blame, interpretation, advice, suggestion, persuasion, reassurance.
If these conditions are met. then it may be said with assurance that in the great majority of cases the following results will take place.
(1) The client will express deep and motivating attitudes.
(2) The client will explore his own attitudes and reactions more fully than he has previously done and will come to be aware of aspects of his attitudes which he has previously denied.
(3) He will arrive at a clearer conscious realization of his motivating attitudes and will accept himself more completely. This realization and this acceptance will include attitudes previously denied. He may or may not verbalize this clearer conscious understanding of himself and his behavior.
(4) In the light of his clearer perception of himself he will choose, on his own initiative and on his own [p. 417] responsibility, new goal which are more satisfying than his maladjusted goals.
(5) He will choose to behave in a different fashion in order to reach these goals, and this new behavior will be in the direction of greater psychological growth and maturity. It will also be more spontaneous and less tense, more in harmony with social needs of others, will represent a more realistic and more comfortable adjustment to life. It will be more integrated than his former behavior. It will be a step forward in the life of the individual.
The best scientific description of this process is that supplied by Snyder. Analyzing a number of cases with strictly objective research techniques, Snyder has discovered that the development in these cases is roughly parallel, that the initial phase of catharsis is replaced by a phase in which insight becomes the most significant element, and this in turn by a phase marked by the increase in positive choice and action
Clinically, we know that sometimes this process is relatively shallow, involving primarily a fresh reorientation to an immediate problem, and in other instances so deep as to involve a complete reorientation of personality. It is recognizably the same process whether it involves a girl who is unhappy in a dormitory and is able in three interviews to see something of her childishness and dependence, and to take steps in a mature direction, or whether it involves a young man who is on the edge of a schizophrenic break, and who in thirty interviews works out deep insights in relation to his desire for his father’s death, and his possessive and incestuous impulses toward is mother, and who not only takes new steps but rebuilds his whole personality in the process. Whether shallow or deep, it is basically the same.
We are coming to recognize with assurance characteristic aspects of each phase of the process. We know that the catharsis involves a gradual and more complete expression of emotionalized attitudes. We know that characteristically the conversation goes from superficial problems and attitudes to deeper problems and attitudes. We know that this process of exploration gradually unearths relevant attitudes which have been denied to consciousness. We recognize too that the process of achieving insight is likely to involve more adequate facing of reality as it exists within the self, as well as external reality; that it involves the relating of problems to each other, the perception of patterns of behavior; that it involves the acceptance of hitherto denied elements of the self, and a reformulating of the self-concept; and that it involves the making of new plans.
In the final phase we know that the choice of new ways of behaving will be in conformity with the newly organized concept of the self; that first steps in putting these plans into action will be small but symbolic; that the individual will feel only a minimum degree of confidence that he can put his plans into effect, that later steps implement more and more completely the new concept of self, and that this process continues beyond the conclusion of the therapeutic interviews.
If these statements seem to contain too much assurance, to sound “too good to be true,” I can only say that for many of them we now have research backing, and that as rapidly as possible we are developing our research to bring all phases of the process under objective scrutiny. Those of us working clinically with client-centered therapy regard this predictability as a settled characteristic, even though we recognize that additional research will be necessary to fill out the picture more completely.
It is the implication of this predictability which is startling. Whenever, in science, a predictable process has been discovered, it has been found possible to use it as a starting point for a whole chain of discoveries. We regard this as not only entirely possible, but inevitable, with regard to this predictable process in therapy. Hence, we regard this orderly and predictable nature of nondirective therapy as one of its most distinctive and significant points of difference from other approaches. Its importance lies not only in the fact that it is a present difference. but in the fact that it points toward a sharply different future, in which scientific exploration of this known chain of events should lead to many new discoveries, developments. and applications.
THE DISCOVERY OF THE CAPACITY OF THE CLIENT
Naturally the question is raised, what is the reason for this predictability in a type of therapeutic procedure in which the therapist serves only a catalytic function? Basically the reason for the predictability [p. 418] of the therapeutic process lies in the discovery — and I use that word intentionally — that within the client reside constructive forces whose strength and uniformity have been either entirely unrecognized or grossly underestimated. It is the clearcut and disciplined reliance by the therapist upon those forces within the client, which seems to account for the orderliness of the therapeutic process, and its consistency from one client to the next.
I mentioned that I regarded this as a discovery. I would like to amplify that statement. We have known for centuries that catharsis and emotional release were helpful. Many new methods have been and are being developed to bring about release, but the principle is not new. Likewise, we have known since Freud’s time that insight, if it is accepted and assimilated by the client, is therapeutic. The principle is not new. Likewise we have realized that revised action patterns, new ways of behaving, may come about as a result of insight. The principle is not new.
But we have not known or recognized that in most if not all individuals there exist growth forces, tendencies toward self-actualization, which may act as the sole motivation for therapy. We have not realized that under suitable psychological conditions these forces bring about emotional release in those areas and at those rates which are most beneficial to the individual. These forces drive the individual to explore his own attitudes and his relationship to reality. and to explore these areas effectively. We have not realized that the individual is capable of exploring his attitudes and feelings, including those which have been denied to consciousness, at a rate which does not cause panic, and to the depth required for comfortable adjustment. The individual is capable of discovering and perceiving, truly and spontaneously, the interrelationships between his own attitudes, and the relationship of himself to reality. The individual has the capacity and the strength to devise, quite unguided, the steps which will lead him to a more mature and more comfortable relationship to his reality. It is the gradual and increasing recognition of these capacities within the individual by the client-centered therapist that rates, I believe, the term discovery. All of these capacities I have described are released in the individual if a suitable psychological atmosphere is provided.
There has, of course, been lip service paid to the strength of the client, and the need of utilizing the urge toward independence which exists in the client. Psychiatrists, analysts, and especially social case workers have stressed this point. Yet it is clear from what is said, and even more clear from the case material cited. that this confidence is a very limited confidence. It is a confidence that the client can take over, if guided by the expert, a confidence that the client can assimilate insight if it is first, given to him by the expert, can make choices providing guidance is given at crucial points. It is, in short, the same sort of attitude which the mother has toward the adolescent. that she believes in his capacity to make his own decisions and guide his own life, providing he takes the directions of which she approves.
This is very evident in the latest book on psychoanalysis by Alexander and French. Although many of the former views and practices of psychoanalysis are discarded, and the procedures are far more nearly in line with those of nondirective therapy, it is still the therapist who is definitely in control. He gives the insights. he is ready to guide at crucial points. Thus while the authors state that the aim of the therapist is to free the patient to develop his capacities, and to increase his ability to satisfy his needs in ways acceptable to himself and society; and while they speak of the basic conflict between competition and cooperation as one which the individual must settle for himself; and speak of the integration of new insight as a normal function of the ego, it is clear when they speak of procedures that they have no confidence that the client has the capacity to do any of these things. For in practice, “As soon as the therapist takes the more active role we advocate, systematic planning becomes imperative. In addition to the original decision as to the particular sort of strategy to be employed in the treatment of any case, we recommend the conscious use of various techniques in a flexible manner, shifting tactics to fit the particular needs of the moment. Among these modifications of the standard technique are; using not only the method of free association but interviews of a more direct character, manipulating the frequency of the interviews, giving [p. 419] directives to the patient concerning his daily life, employing interruptions of long or short duration in preparation for ending the treatment, regulating the transference relation-hip to meet the specific needs of the case, and making use of real-life experiences as an integral part of therapy” (1). At least this leaves no doubt as to whether it is the client’s or the therapist’s hour; it is clearly the latter. The capacities which the client is to develop are clearly not to be developed in the therapeutic sessions.
The client-centered therapist stands at an opposite pole, both theoretically and practically. He has learned that the constructive forces in the individual can be trusted. and that the more deeply they are relied upon, the more deeply they are released. He has come to build his procedures upon these hypotheses, which are rapidly becoming established as facts; that the client knows the areas of concern which he is ready to explore; that the client is the best judge as to the most desirable frequency of interviews; that the client can lead the way more efficiently than the therapist into deeper concerns; that the client will protect himself from panic by ceasing to explore an area which is becoming too painful; that the client can and will uncover all the repressed elements which it is necessary to uncover in order to build a comfortable adjustment; that the client can achieve for himself far truer and more sensitive and accurate insights than can possibly be given to him; that the client is capable of translating these insights into constructive behavior which weigh his own needs and desires realistically against the demands of society; that the client knows when therapy is completed and he is ready to cope with life independently. Only one condition is necessary for all these forces to be released, and that is the proper psychological atmosphere between client and therapist.
Our case records and increasingly our research bear out these statements. One might suppose that there would be a generally favorable reaction to this discovery, since it amounts in effect to tapping great reservoirs of hitherto little-used energy. Quite the contrary is true, however, in professional groups. There is no other aspect of client-centered therapy which comes under such vigorous attack. It seems to be genuinely disturbing to many professional people to entertain the thought that this client upon whom they have been exercising their professional skill actually knows more about his inner psychological self than they can possibly know, and that he possesses constructive strengths which make the constructive push by the therapist seem puny indeed by comparison. The willingness fully to accept this strength of the client, with all the re-orientation of therapeutic procedure which it implies, is one of the ways in which client-centered therapy differs most sharply from other therapeutic approaches.
THE CLIENT-CENTERED NATURE OF THE THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP
The third distinctive feature of this type of therapy is the character of the relationship between therapist and client. Unlike other therapies in which the skills of the therapist are to be exercised upon the client. in this approach the skills of the therapist are focussed upon creating a psychological atmosphere in which the client can work. If the counselor can create a relationship permeated by warmth, understanding, safety from any type of attack, no matter how trivial, and basic acceptance of the person as he is, then the client will drop his natural defensiveness and use the situation. As we have puzzled over the characteristics of a successful therapeutic relationship, we have come to feel that the sense of communication is very important. If the client feels that he is actually communicating his present attitudes, superficial, confused, or conflicted as they may be, and that his communication is understood rather than evaluated in any way, then he is freed to communicate more deeply. A relationship in which the client thus feels that he is communicating is almost certain to be fruitful.
All of this means a drastic reorganization in the counselor’s thinking, particularly if he has previously utilized other approaches. He gradually learns that the statement that the time is to be “the client’s hour” means just that, and that his biggest task is to make it more and more deeply true.
Perhaps something of the characteristics of the relationship may be suggested by excerpts from a paper written by a young minister who has spent several months learning client-centered counseling procedures. [p. 420]
“Because the client-centered, nondirective counseling approach has been rather carefully defined and clearly illustrated, it gives the “Illusion of Simplicity.” The technique seems deceptively easy to master. Then you begin to practice. A word is wrong here and there. You don’t quite reflect feeling, but reflect content instead. It is difficult to handle questions; you are tempted to interpret. Nothing seems so serious that further practice won’t correct it. Perhaps you are having trouble playing two roles — that of minister and that of counselor. Bring up the question in class and the matter is solved again with a deceptive ease. But these apparently minor errors and a certain woodenness of response seem exceedingly persistent.
“Only gradually does it dawn that if the technique is true it demands a feeling of warmth. You begin to feel that the attitude is the thing. Every little word is not so important if you have the correct accepting and permissive attitude toward the client. So you bear down on the permissiveness and acceptance. You will permiss[sic] and accept and reflect the client, if it kills you!
[
§
]’But you still have those troublesome questions from the client. He simply doesn’t know the next step. He asks you to give him a hint, some possibilities, after all you are expected to know something, else why is he here! As a minister, you ought to have some convictions about what people should believe, how they should act. As a counselor, you should know something about removing this obstacle — you ought to have the equivalent of the surgeon’s knife and use it. Then you begin to wonder. The technique is good, but … does it go far enough! does it really work on clients? is it right to leave a person helpless, when you might show him the way out?
“Here it secms to me is the crucial point. “Narrow is the gate” and hard the path from here on. So one else can give satisfying answers and even the instructors seem frustrating because they appear not to be helpful in your specific case. For here is demanded of you what no other person can do or point out — and that is to rigorously scrutinize yourself and your attitudes towards others. Do you believe that all people truly have a creative potential in them? That each person is a unique individual and that he alone can work out his own individuality? Or do you really believe that some persons are of “negative value” and others are weak and must be led and taught by “wiser,” “stronger” people.
“You begin to see that there is nothing compartmentalized about this method of counseling. It is not just counseling, because it demands the most exhaustive, penetrating, and comprehensive consistency. In other methods you can shape tools, pick them up for use when you will. But when genuine acceptance and permissiveness are your tools it requires nothing less than the whole complete personality. And to grow oneself is the most demanding of all.”
He goes on to discuss the notion that the counselor must be restrained and “self-denying.” He concludes that this is a mistaken notion.
“Instead of demanding less of the counselor’s personality in the situation, client-centered counseling in some ways demands more. It demands discipline, not restraint. It calls for the utmost in sensitivity, appreciative awareness. channeled and disciplined. It demands that the counselor put all he has of these precious qualities into the situation, but in a disciplined, resfined manner. It is restraint only in the sense that the counselor does not express himself in certain areas that he may use himself in others.
“Even this is deceptive, however. It is not so much restraint in any area as it is a focusing, sensitizing one’s energies and personality in the direction of an appreciative and understanding attitude.”
As time has gone by we have come to put increasing stress upon the “client-centeredness” of the relationship, because it is more effective the more completely the counselor concentrates upon trying to understand the client as the client seems to himself. As I look back upon some of our earlier published cases — the case of Herbert Bryan in my book, or Snyder’s case of Mr. M. — I realize that we have gradually dropped the vestiges of subtle directiveness which are all too evident in those cases. We [p. 421] have come to recognize that if we can provide understanding of the way the client seems to himself at this moment, he can do the rest. The therapist must lay aside his preoccupation with diagnosis and his diagnostic shrewdness, must discard his tendency to make professional evaluations, must cease his endeavors to formulate an accurate prognosis, must give up the temptation subtly to guide the individual, and must concentrate on one purpose only; that of providing deep understanding and acceptance of the attitudes consciously held at this moment by the client as he explores step by step into the dangerous areas which he has been denying to consciousness.
I trust it is evident from this description that this type of relationship can exist only if the counselor is deeply and genuinely able to adopt these attitudes. Client-centered counseling, if it is to be effective, cannot be a trick or a tool. It is not a subtle way of guiding the client while pretending to let him guide himself. To be effective, it must be genuine. It is this sensitive and sincere “client-centeredness” in the therapeutic relationship that I regard as the third characteristic of nondirective therapy which sets it distinctively apart from other approaches.
SOME IMPLICATIONS
Although the client-centered approach had its origin purely within the limits of the psychological clinic, it is proving to have implications, often of a startling nature, for very diverse fields of effort. I should like to suggest a few of these present and potential implications.
In the field of psychotherapy itself, it leads to conclusions that seem distinctly heretical. It appears evident that training and practice in therapy should probably precede training in the field of diagnosis. Diagnostic knowledge and skill is not necessary for good therapy, a statement which sounds like blasphemy to many, and if the professional worker, whether psychiatrist, psychologist or caseworker, received training in therapy first he would learn psychological dynamics in a truly dynamic fashion, and would acquire a professional humility and willingness to learn from his client which is today all too rare.
The viewpoint appears to have implications for medicine. It has fascinated me to observe that when a prominent allergist began to use client-centered therapy for the treatment of non-specific allergies, he found not only very good therapeutic results, but the experience began to affect his whole medical practice. It has gradually meant the reorganization of his office procedure. He has given his nurses a new type of training in understanding the patient. He has decided to have all medical histories taken by a nonmedical person trained in nondirective techniques, in order to get a true picture of the client’s feelings and attitudes toward himself and his health, uncluttered by the bias and diagnostic evaluation which is almost inevitable when a medical person takes the history and unintentionally distorts the material by his premature judgments. He has found these histories much more helpful to the physicians than those taken by physicians.
The client-centered viewpoint has already been shown to have significant implications for the field of survey interviewing and public opinion study. Use of such techniques by Likert, Lazarsfeld, and others has meant the elimination of much of the factor of bias in such studies.
This approach has also, we believe, deep implications for the handling of social and group conflicts, as I have pointed out in another paper (9). Our work in applying a client-centered viewpoint to group therapy situations, while still in its early stages, leads us to feel that a significant clue to the constructive solution of interpersonal and intercultural frictions in the group may be in our hands. Application of these procedures to staff groups, to inter-racial groups, to groups with personal problems and tensions, is under way.
In the field of education, too, the client-centered approach is finding significant application. The work of Cantor, a description of which will soon be published, is outstanding in this connection, but a number of teachers are finding that these methods, designed for therapy, produce a new type of educational process, an independent learning which is highly desirable, and even a reorientation of individual direction which is very similar to the results of individual or group therapy.
Even in the realm of our philosophical orientation, the client-centered approach has its deep implications. I should like to indicate this by quoting briefly from a previous paper.
As we examine and try to evaluate our clinical experience with client-centered therapy, the [p. 422] phenomenon of the reorganization of attitudes and the redirection of behavior by the individual assumes greater and greater importance. This phenomenon seems to find inadequate explanation in terms of the determinism which is the predominant philosophical background of most psychological work. The capacity of the individual to reorganize his attitudes and behavior in ways not determined by external factors nor by previous elements in his own experience, but determined by his own insight into those factors, is an impressive capacity. It involves a basic spontaneity which we have been loathe to admit into our scientific thinking.
The clinical experience could be summarized by saying that the behavior of the human organism may be determined by the influences to which it has been exposed, but it may also be determined by the creative and integrative insight of the organism itself. This ability of the person to discover new meaning in the forces which impinge upon him and in the past experiences which have been controlling him, and the ability to alter consciously his behavior in the light of this new meaning, has a profound significance for our thinking which has not been fully realized. We need to revise the philosophical basis of our work to a point where it can admit that forces exist within the individual which can exercise a spontaneous and significant influence upon behavior which is not predictable through knowledge of prior influences and conditionings. The forces released through a catalytic process of therapy are not adequately accounted for by a knowledge of the individual’s previous conditionings, but only if we grant the presence of a spontaneous force within the organism which has the capacity of integration and redirection. This capacity for volitional control is a force which we must take into account in any psychological equation (9).
So we find an approach which began merely as a way of dealing with problems of human maladjustment forcing us into a revaluation of our basic philosophical concepts.
SUMMARY
I hope that throughout this paper I have managed to convey what is my own conviction, that what we now know or think we know about a client-centered approach is only a beginning, only the opening of a door beyond which we are beginning to see some very challenging roads, some fields rich with opportunity. It is the facts of our clinical and research experience which keep pointing forward into new and exciting possibilities. Yet whatever the future may hold, it appears already clear that we are dealing with materials of a new and significant nature, which demand the most openminded[sic] and thorough exploration. If our present formulations of those facts are correct, then we would say that some important elements already stand out; that certain basic attitudes and skills can create a psychological atmosphere which releases, frees, and utilizes deep strengths in the client; that these strengths and capacities are more sensitive and more rugged than hitherto supposed; and that they are released in an orderly and predictable process which may prove as significant a basic fact in social science as some of the laws and predictable processes in the physical sciences.
SELECTED REFERENCES
1. ALEXANDER, F. AND FRENCH, T. Psychoanalytic Therapy. New York: Ronald Press, 1946.
2. ALLEN, F. Psychotherapy with Children. New York: Norton, 1942.
3. CANTOR, N. Employee Counseling. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
4. CANTOR, N. The Dynamics of Learning. (unpublished mss.) University of Buffalo, 1943.
5. CURRAN, C. A. Personality Factors in Counseling. New York: Grune and Stratton, 1945.
6. RANK, O. Will Therapy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1936.
7. ROGERS, C. R. “Counseling”, Review of Educational Research. April 1945 (Vol. 15), pp. 135-163.
8. ROGERS, C. R. Counseling and Psychotherapy. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1942.
9. ROGERS, C`. R. The implications of nondirective therapy for the handling of social conflicts. Paper given to a seminar of the Bureau of Intercultural Education, New York City, Feb. 18, 1946.
10. ROGERS. C. R. AND WALLEN, J. L. Counseling with Returned Servicemen. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1946.
11. SNYDER, W. U. “An Investigation of the Nature of Non-Directive Psychotherapy.” Journal of General Psychology. Vo1. 33, 1945. pp.193-223.
12. TAFT, J. The Dynamics of Therapy in a Controlled Relationship. New York: Macmillan, 1933.
Footnote
[1] Paper given at a seminar of the staffs of the Menninger Clinic and the Topeka Veteran’s Hospital, Topeka, Kansas, May 15, 1946.
[*] Classics Editor’s note: Sometimes Rogers hyphenates this term, and sometimes not. I have rendered it as he does at each instance.
[§] Classics Editor’s note: Rogers is inconsistent in his use of quotation marks in this passage.
>Classics in the History of Psychology
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Carl R. Rogers (1947)
Address of the retiring President of the American Psychological Association the September 1947 Annual Meeting.
First published in American Psychologist, 2, 3
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Posted March 2000
In various fields of science rapid strides have been made when direct observation of significant processes has become possible. In medicine, when circumstances have permitted the physician to peer directly into the stomach of his patient, understanding of digestive processes has increased and the influence of emotional tension upon all aspects of that process has been more accurately observed and understood. In our work with nondirective therapy we often feel that we are having a psychological opportunity comparable to this medical experience — an opportunity to observe directly a number of the effective processes of personality. Quite aside from any question regarding nondirective therapy as therapy, here is a precious vein of observational material of unusual value for the study of personality.
Characteristics of the Observational Material
There are several ways in which the raw clinical data to which we have had access is unique in its value for understanding personality. The fact that these verbal expressions of inner dynamics are preserved by electrical recording makes possible a detailed analysis of a sort not heretofore possible. Recording has given us a microscope by which we may examine at leisure, and in minute detail, almost every aspect of what was, in its occurrence, a fleeting moment impossible of accurate observation.
Another scientifically fortunate characteristic of this material is the fact that the verbal productions of the client are biased to a minimal degree by the therapist. Material from client-centered interviews probably comes closer to being a “pure” expression of attitudes than has yet been achieved through other means. One can read through a complete recorded case or listen to it, without finding more than a half-dozen instances in which the therapist’s views on any point are evident. One would find it impossible to form an estimate as to the therapist’s views about personality dynamics. One could not determine his diagnostic views, his standards of behavior, his social class. The one value or standard held by the therapist which would exhibit itself in his tone of voice, responses, and activity, is a deep respect for the personality and attitudes of the client as a separate person. It is difficult to see how this would bias the content of the interview, except to permit deeper expression than the client would ordinarily allow himself. This almost complete lack of any distorting attitude is felt, and sometimes expressed by the client. One woman says:
It’s almost impersonal. I like you — of course I don’t know why I should like you or why I shouldn’t like you. It’s a peculiar thing. I’ve never had that relationship with anybody before and I’ve often thought about it…. A lot of times I walk out with a feeling of elation that you think highly of me, and of course at the same time I have the feeling that “Gee, he must think I’m an awful jerk” or something like that. But it doesn’t really-those feelings aren’t so deep that I can form an opinion one way or the other about you.
Here it would seem that even though she would like to discover some type of evaluational attitude, she is unable to do so. Published studies and research as yet unpublished bear out this point that counselor responses which are in any way evaluational or distorting as to content are at a minimum, thus enhancing the worth of such interviews for personality study.
The counselor attitude of warmth and understanding, well described by Snyder (9) and Rogers (8), also helps to maximize the freedom of expression by the individual. The client experiences sufficient interest in him as a person, and sufficient acceptance, to enable him to talk openly, not only about surface attitudes, but increasingly about intimate attitudes and feelings hidden even from himself. Hence in these recorded interviews we have material of very considerable depth so far as personality dynamics is concerned, along with a freedom from distortion.
Finally the very nature of the interviews and the techniques by which they are handled give us a rare opportunity to see to some extent through the eyes of another person-to perceive the world as it appears to him, to achieve at least partially, the internal frame of reference of another person. We see his behavior through his eyes, and also the psychological meaning which it had for him. We see also changes in personality and behavior, and the meanings which those changes have for the individual. We are admitted freely into the backstage of the person’s living where we can observe from within some of the dramas of internal change, which are often far more compelling and moving than the drama which is presented on the stage viewed by the public. Only a novelist or a poet could do justice to the deep struggles which we are permitted to observe from within the client’s own world of reality.
This rare opportunity to observe so directly and so clearly the inner dynamics of personality is a learning experience of the deepest sort for the clinician. Most of clinical psychology and psychiatry involves judgments about the individual, judgments which must, of necessity, be based on some framework brought to the situation by the clinician. To try continually to see and think with the individual, as in client-centered therapy, is a mindstretching experience in which learning goes on apace because the clinician brings to the interview no pre-determined yardstick by which to judge the material.
I wish in this paper to try to bring you some of the clinical observations which we have made as we have repeatedly peered through these psychological windows into personality, and to raise with you some of the questions about the organization of personality which these observations have forced upon us. I shall not attempt to present these observations in logical order, but rather in the order in which they impressed themselves upon our notice. What I shall offer is not a series of research findings, but only the first step in that process of gradual approximation which we call science, a description of some observed phenomena which appear to be significant, and some highly tentative explanations of these phenomena.
The Relation of the Organized Perceptual Field to Behavior
One simple observation, which is repeated over and over again in each successful therapeutic case, seems to have rather deep theoretical implications. It is that as changes occur in the perception of self and in the perception of reality, changes occur in behavior. In therapy, these perceptual changes are more often concerned with the self than with the external world. Hence we find in therapy that as the perception of self alters, behavior alters. Perhaps an illustration will indicate the type of observation upon which this statement is based.
A young woman, a graduate student whom we shall call Miss Vib, came in for nine interviews. If we compare the first interview with the last, striking changes are evident. Perhaps some features of this change may be conveyed by taking from the first and last interviews all the major statements regarding self, and all the major statements regarding current behavior. In the first interview, for example, her perception of herself may be crudely indicated by taking all her own statements about herself, grouping those which seem similar, but otherwise doing a minimum of editing, and retaining so far as possible, her own words. We then come out with this as the conscious perception of self which was hers at the outset of counseling.
I feel disorganized, muddled; I’ve lost all direction; my personal life has disintegrated.
I sorta experience things from the forefront of my consciousness, but nothing sinks in very deep; things don’t seem real to me; I feel nothing matters; I don’t have any emotional response to situations; I’m worried about myself.
I haven’t been acting like myself; it doesn’t seem like me; I’m a different person altogether from what I used to be in the past.
I don’t understand myself; I haven’t known what was happening to me.
I have withdrawn from everything, and feel all right only when I’m all alone and no one can expect me to do things.
I don’t care about my personal appearance.
I don’t know anything anymore.
I feel guilty about the things I have left undone.
I don’t think I could ever assume responsibility for anything.
If we attempt to evaluate this picture of self from an external frame of reference various diagnostic labels may come to mind. Trying to perceive it solely from the client’s frame of reference we observe that to the young woman herself she appears disorganized, and not herself. She is perplexed and almost unacquainted with what is going on in herself. She feels unable and unwilling to function in any responsible or social way. This is at least a sampling of the way she experiences or perceives herself.
Her behavior is entirely consistent with this picture of self. If we abstract all her statements describing her behavior, in the same fashion as we abstracted her statements about self, the following pattern emerges — a pattern which in this case was corroborated by outside observation.
I couldn’t get up nerve to come in before; I haven’t availed myself of help.
Everything I should do or want to do, I don’t do.
I haven’t kept in touch with friends; I avoid making the effort to go with them; I stopped writing letters home; I don’t answer letters or telephone calls; I avoid contacts that would be professionally helpful; I didn’t go home though I said I would.
I failed to hand in my work in a course though I had it all done: I didn’t even buy clothing that I needed; I haven’t even kept my nails manicured.
I didn’t listen to material we were studying; I waste hours reading the funny papers; I can spend the whole afternoon doing absolutely nothing.
The picture of behavior is very much in keeping with the picture of self, and is summed up in the statement that “Everything I should do or want to do, I don’t do.” The behavior goes on, in ways that seem to the individual beyond understanding and beyond control.
If we contrast this picture of self and behavior with the picture as it exists in the ninth interview, thirty-eight days later, we find both the perception of self and the ways of behaving deeply altered. Her statements about self are as follows:
I’m feeling much better; I’m taking more interest in myself.
I do have some individuality, some interests.
I seem to be getting a newer understanding of myself. I can look at myself a little better.
I realize I’m just one person, with so much ability, but I’m not worried about it; I can accept the fact that I’m not always right.
I feel more motivation, have more of a desire to go ahead.
I still occasionally regret the past, though I feel less unhappy about it; I still have a long ways to go; I don’t know whether I can keep the picture of myself I’m beginning to evolve.
I can go on learning — in school or out.
I do feel more like a normal person now; I feel more I can handle my life myself; I think I’m at the point where I can go along on my own.
Outstanding in this perception of herself are three things — that she knows herself, that she can view with comfort her assets and liabilities, and finally that she has drive and control of that drive.
In this ninth interview the behavioral picture is again consistent with the perception of self. It may be abstracted in these terms.
I’ve been making plans about school and about a job; I’ve been working hard on a term paper; I’ve been going to the library to trace down a topic of special interest and finding it exciting.
I’ve cleaned out my closets; washed my clothes.
I finally wrote my parents; I’m going home for the holidays.
I’m getting out and mixing with people: I am reacting sensibly to a fellow who is interested in me — seeing both his good and bad points.
I will work toward my degree; I’
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start looking for a job this week.
Her behavior, in contrast to the first interview, is now organized, forward-moving, effective, realistic and planful. It is in accord with the realistic and organized view she has achieved of her self.
It is this type of observation, in case after case, that leads us to say with some assurance that as perceptions of self and reality change, behavior changes. Likewise, in cases we might term failures, there appears to be no appreciable change in perceptual organization or in behavior.
What type of explanation might account for these concomitant changes in the perceptual field and the behavioral pattern? Let us examine some of the logical possibilities.
In the first place, it is possible that factors unrelated to therapy may have brought about the altered perception and behavior. There may have been physiological processes occurring which produced the change. There may have been alterations in the family relationships, or in the social forces, or in the educational picture or in some other area of cultural influence, which might account for the rather drastic shift in the concept of self and in the behavior.
There are difficulties in this type of explanation. Not only were there no known gross changes in the physical or cultural situation as far as Miss Vib was concerned, but the explanation gradually becomes inadequate when one tries to apply it to the many cases in which such change occurs. To postulate that some external factor brings the change and that only by chance does this period of change coincide with the period of therapy, becomes an untenable hypothesis.
Let us then look at another explanation, namely that the therapist exerted, during the nine hours of contact, a peculiarly potent cultural influence which brought about the change. Here again we are faced with several problems. It seems that nine hours scattered over five and one-half weeks is a very minute portion of time in which to bring about alteration of patterns which have been building for thirty years. We would have to postulate an influence so potent as to be classed as traumatic. This theory is particularly difficult to maintain when we find, on examining the recorded interviews, that not once in the nine hours did the therapist express any evaluation, positive or negative, of the client’s initial or final perception of self, or her initial or final mode of behavior. There was not only no evaluation, but no standards expressed by which evaluation might be inferred.
There was, on the part of the therapist, evidence of warm interest in the individual, and thoroughgoing acceptance of the self and of the behavior as they existed initially, in the intermediate stages, and at the conclusion of therapy. It appears reasonable to say that the therapist established certain definite conditions of interpersonal relations, but since the very essence of this relationship is respect for the person as he is at that moment, the therapist can hardly be regarded as a cultural force making for change.
We find ourselves forced to a third type of explanation, a type of explanation which is not new to psychology, but which has had only partial acceptance. Briefly it may be put that the observed phenomena of changes seem most adequately explained by the hypothesis that given certain psychological conditions, the individual has the capacity to reorganize his field of perception, including the way he perceives himself, and that a concomitant or a resultant of this perceptual reorganization is an appropriate alteration of behavior. This puts into formal and objective terminology a clinical hypothesis which experience forces upon the therapist using a client-centered approach. One is compelled through clinical observation to develop a high degree of respect for the ego-integrative forces residing within each individual. One comes to recognize that under proper conditions the self is a basic factor in the formation of personality and in the determination of behavior. Clinical experience would strongly suggest that the self is, to some extent, an architect of self, and the above hypothesis simply puts this observation into psychological terms.
In support of this hypothesis it is noted in some cases that one of the concomitants of success in therapy is the realization on the part of the client that the self has the capacity for reorganization. Thus a student says:
You know I spoke of the fact that a person’s background retards one. Like the fact that my family life wasn’t good for me, and my mother certainly didn’t give me any of the kind of bringing up that I should have had. Well, I’ve been thinking that over. It’s true up to a point. But when you get so that you can see the situation, then it’s really up to you.
Following this statement of the relation of the self to experience many changes occurred in this young man’s behavior. In this, as in other cases, it appears that when the person comes to see himself as the perceiving, organizing agent, then reorganization of perception and consequent change in patterns of reaction take place.
On the other side of the picture we have frequently observed that when the individual has been authoritatively told that he is governed by certain factors or conditions beyond his control, it makes therapy more difficult, and it is only when the individual discovers for himself that he can organize his perceptions that change is possible. In veterans who have been given their own psychiatric diagnosis, the effect is often that of making the individual feel that he is under an unalterable doom, that he is unable to control the organization of his life. When however the self sees itself as capable of reorganizing its own perceptual field, a marked change in basic confidence occurs. Miss Nam, a student, illustrates this phenomenon when she says, after having made progress in therapy:
I think I do feel better about the future, too, because it’s as if I won’t be acting in darkness. It’s sort of, well, knowing somewhat why I act the way I do … and at least it isn’t the feeling that you’re simply out of your own control and the fates are driving you to act that way. If you realize it, I think you can do something more about it.
A veteran at the conclusion of counseling puts it more briefly and more positively: “My attitude toward myself is changed now to where I feel I can do something with my self and life.” He has come to view himself as the instrument by which some reorganization can take place.
There is another clinical observation which may be cited in support Of the general hypothesis that there is a close relationship between behavior and the way in which reality is viewed by the individual. It has many cases that behavior changes come about for the most part Imperceptibly and almost automatically, once the perceptual reorganization has taken place. A young wife who has been reacting violently to her maid, and has been quite disorganized in her behavior as a result of this antipathy says:
After I … discovered it was nothing more than that she resembled my mother, she didn’t bother me any more. Isn’t that interesting? She’s still the same.
Here is a clear statement indicating that though the basic perceptions have not changed, they have been differently organized, have acquired a new meaning, and that behavior changes then occur. Similar evidence is given by a client, a trained psychologist, who after completing a brief series of client-centered interviews, writes:
Another interesting aspect of the situation was in connection with the changes in some of my attitudes. When the change occurred, it was as if earlier attitudes were wiped out as completely as if erased from a blackboard…. When a situation which would formerly have provoked a given type of response occurred, it was not as if I was tempted to act in the way I formerly had but in some way found it easier to control my behavior. Rather the new type of behavior came quite spontaneously, and it was only through a deliberate analysis that I became aware that I was acting in a new and different way.
Here again it is of interest that the imagery is put in terms of visual perception and that as attitudes are “erased from the blackboard” behavioral changes take place automatically and without conscious effort.
Thus we have observed that appropriate changes in behavior occur when the individual acquires a different view of his world of experience, including himself; that this changed perception does not need to be dependent upon a change in the “reality,” but may be a product of internal reorganization; that in some instances the awareness of the capacity for reperceiving experience accompanies this process of reorganization; that the altered behavioral responses occur automatically and without conscious effort as soon as the perceptual reorganization has taken place, apparently as a result of this.
In view of these observations a second hypothesis may be stated, which is closely related to the first. It is that behavior is not directly influenced or determined by organic or cultural factors, but primarily (and perhaps only), by the perception of these elements. In other words the crucial element in the determination of behavior is the perceptual field of the individual. While this perceptual field is, to be sure, deeply influenced and largely shaped by cultural and physiological forces, it is nevertheless important that it appears to be only the field as it is perceived, which exercises a specific determining influence upon behavior. This is not a new idea in psychology, but its implications have not always been fully recognized.
It might mean, first of all, that if it is the perceptual field which determines behavior, then the primary object of study for psychologists would be the person and his world as viewed by the person himself. It could mean that the internal frame of reference of the person might well constitute the field of psychology, an idea set forth persuasively by Snygg and Combs in a significant manuscript as yet unpublished. It might mean that the laws which govern behavior would be discovered more deeply by turning our attention to the laws which govern perception.
Now if our speculations contain a measure of truth, if the specific determinant of behavior is the perceptual field, and if the self can reorganize that perceptual field, then what are the limits of this process? Is the reorganization of perception capricious, or does it follow certain laws? Are there limits to the degree of reorganization? If so, what are they? In this connection we have observed with some care the perception of one portion of the field of experience, the portion we call the self.
The Relation of the Perception of the Self to Adjustment
Initially we were oriented by the background of both lay and psychological thinking to regard the outcome of successful therapy as the solution of problems. If a person had a marital problem, a vocational problem, a problem of educational adjustment, the obvious purpose of counseling or therapy was to solve that problem. But as we observe and study the recorded accounts of the conclusion of therapy, it is clear that the most characteristic outcome is not necessarily solution of problems, but a freedom from tension, a different feeling about, and perception of, self. Perhaps something of this outcome may be conveyed by some illustrations.
Several statements taken from the final interview with a twenty year old young woman, Miss Mir, give indications of the characteristic attitude toward self, and the sense of freedom which appears to accompany it.
I’ve always tried to be what the others thought I should be, but now I am wondering whether I shouldn’t just see that I am what I am.
Well, I’ve just noticed such a difference. I find that when I feel things, even when I feel hate, I don’t care. I don’t mind. I feel more free somehow. I don’t feel guilty about things.
You know it’s suddenly as though a big cloud has been lifted off. I feel so much more content.
Note in these statements the willingness to perceive herself as she is, to accept herself “realistically,” to perceive and accept her “bad” attitudes as well as “good” ones. This realism seems to be accompanied by a sense of freedom and contentment. Miss Vib, whose attitudes were quoted earlier, wrote out her own feelings about counseling some six weeks after the interviews were over, and gave the statement to her counselor. She begins:
The happiest outcome of therapy has been a new feeling about myself. As I think of it, it might be the only outcome. Certainly it is basic to all the changes in my behavior that have resulted.
In discussing her experience in therapy she states:
I was coming to see myself as a whole. I began to realize that I am one person. This was an important insight to me. I saw that the former good academic achievement, job success, ease in social situations, and the present withdrawal, dejection, apathy and failure were all adaptive behavior, performed by me. This meant that I had to reorganize my feelings about myself, no longer holding to the unrealistic notion that the very good adjustment was the expression of the real “me” and this neurotic behavior was not. I came to feel that I am the same person, sometimes functioning maturely, and sometimes assuming a neurotic role in the face of what I had conceived as insurmountable problems. The acceptance of myself as one person gave me strength in the process of reorganization. Now I had a substratum, a core of unity on which to work
As she continues her discussion there are such statements as:
I am getting more happiness in being myself. I approve of myself more, and I have so much less anxiety.
As in the previous example, the outstanding aspects appear to be the realization that all of her behavior “belonged” to her, that she could accept both the good and bad features about herself and that doing so gave her a release from anxiety and a feeling of solid happiness. In both instances there is only incidental reference to the serious “problems” which had been initially discussed.
Since Miss Mir is undoubtedly above average intelligence and Miss Vib is a person with some psychological training, it may appear that such results are found only with the sophisticated individual. To counteract this opinion a quotation may be given from a statement written by a veteran of limited ability and education who had just completed counseling, and was asked to write whatever reactions he had to the experience. He says:
As for the consoleing [sic] I have had I can say this, It really makes a man strip his own mind bare, and when he does he knows then what he realy [sic] is and what he can do. Or at least thinks he knows himself party well. As for myself, I know that my ideas were a little too big for what I realy [sic] am, but now I realize one must try start out at his own level.
Now after four visits, I have a much clearer picture of myself and my future. It makes me feel a little depressed and disappointed, but on the other hand, it has taken me out of the dark, the load seems a lot lighter now, that is I can see my way now, I know what I want to do, I know about what I can do, so now that I can see my goal, I will be able to work a whole lot easyer [sic], at my own level.
Although the expression is much simpler one notes again the same two elements — the acceptance of self as it is, and the feeling of easiness, of lightened burden, which accompanies it.
As we examine many individual case records and case recordings, it appears to be possible to bring together the findings in regard to successful therapy by stating another hypothesis in regard to that portion of the perceptual field which we call the self. It would appear that when all of the ways in which the individual perceives himself — all perceptions of the qualities, abilities, impulses, and attitudes of the person, and all perceptions of himself in relation to others — are accepted into the organized conscious concept of the self, then this achievement is accompanied by feelings of comfort and freedom from tension which are experienced as psychological adjustment.
This hypothesis would seem to account for the observed fact that the comfortable perception of self which is achieved is sometimes more positive than before, sometimes more negative. When the individual permits all his perceptions of himself to be organized into one pattern, the picture is sometimes more flattering than he has held in the past, sometimes less flattering. It is always more comfortable.
It may be pointed out also that this tentative hypothesis supplies an operational type of definition, based on the client’s internal frame of reference, for such hitherto vague terms as “adjustment,” “integration,” and “acceptance of self.” They are defined in terms of perception, in a way which it should be possible to prove or disprove. When all of the organic perceptual experiences — the experiencing of attitudes, impulses, abilities and disabilities, the experiencing of others and of “reality” — when all of these perceptions are freely assimilated into an organized and consistent system, available to consciousness, then psychological adjustment or integration might be said to exist. The definition of adjustment is thus made an internal affair, rather than dependent upon an external “reality.”
Something of what is meant by this acceptance and assimilation of perceptions about the self may be illustrated from the case of Miss Nam, a student. Like many other clients she gives evidence of having experienced attitudes and feelings which are defensively denied because they are not consistent with the concept or picture she holds of herself. The way in which they are first fully admitted into consciousness, and then organized into a unified system may be shown by excerpts from the recorded interviews. She has spoken of the difficulty she has had in bringing herself to write papers for her university courses.
I just thought of something else which perhaps hinders me, and that is that again it’s two different feelings. When I have to sit down and do (a paper), though I have a lot of ideas, underneath I think I always have the feeling that I just can’t do it…. I have this feeling of being terrifically confident that I can do something, without being willing to put the work into it. At other times I’m practically afraid of what I have to do….
Note that the conscious self has been organized as “having a lot of ideas,” being “terrifically confident” but that “underneath,” in other words not freely admitted into consciousness, has been the experience of feeling “I just can’t do it.” She continues:
I’m trying to work through this funny relationship between this terrific confidence and then this almost fear of doing anything…. and I think the kind of feeling that I can really do things is part of an illusion I have about myself of being, in my imagination, sure that it will be something good and very good and all that, but whenever I get down to the actual task of getting started, it’s a terrible feeling of — well, incapacity, that I won’t get it done either the way I want to do it, or even not being sure how I want to do it.
Again the picture of herself which is present in consciousness is that of a person who is “very good,” but this picture is entirely out of line with the actual organic experience in the situation.
Later in the same interview she expresses very well the fact that her perceptions are not all organized into one consistent conscious self.
I’m not sure about what kind of a person I am — well, I realize that all of these are a part of me, but I’m not quite sure of how to make all of these things fall in line.
In the next interview we have an excellent opportunity to observe the organization of both of these conflicting perceptions into one pattern, with the resultant sense of freedom from tension which has been described above,
It’s very funny, even as I sit here I realize that I have more confidence in myself, in the sense that when I used to approach new situations I would have two very funny things operating at the same time. I had a fantasy that I could do anything, which was a fantasy which covered over all these other feelings that I really couldn’t do it, or couldn’t do it as well as I wanted to, and it’s as if now those two things have merged together, and it is more real, that a situation isn’t either testing myself or proving something to myself or anyone else. It’s just in terms of doing it. And 1 think I have done away both with that fantasy and that fear…. So I think I can go ahead and approach things — well, just sensibly.
No longer is it necessary for this client to “cover over” experiences. Instead the picture of herself as very able, and the experienced feeling of complete inability, have now been brought together into one integrated pattern of self as a person with real, but imperfect abilities. Once the self is thus accepted the inner energies making for self-actualization are released and she attacks her life problems more efficiently.
Observing this type of material frequently in counseling experience would lead to a tentative hypothesis of maladjustment, which like the other hypothesis suggested, focuses on the perception of self. It might be proposed that the tensions called psychological maladjustment exist when the organized concept of self (conscious or available to conscious awareness) is not in accord with the perceptions actually experienced.
This discrepancy between the concept of self and the actual perceptions seems to be explicable only in terms of the fact that the self concept resists assimilating into itself any percept which is inconsistent with its present organization. The feeling that she may not have the ability to do a paper is inconsistent with Miss Nam’s conscious picture of herself as a very able and confident person, and hence, though fleetingly perceived, is denied organization as a part of her self, until this comes about in therapy.
The Conditions of Change of Self Perception
If the way in which the self is perceived has as close and significant a relationship to behavior as has been suggested, then the manner in which this perception may be altered becomes a question of importance. If a reorganization of self-perceptions brings a change in behavior; if adjustment and maladjustment depend on the congruence between perceptions as experienced and the self as perceived, then the factors which permit a reorganization of the perception of self are significant.
Our observations of psychotherapeutic experience would seem to indicate that absence of any threat to the self-concept is an important item in the problem. Normally the self resists incorporating into itself those experiences which are inconsistent with the functioning of self. But a point overlooked by Lecky and others is that when the self is free from any threat of attack or likelihood of attack, then it is possible for the self to consider these hitherto rejected perceptions, to make new differentiations, and to reintegrate the self in such a way as to include them.
An illustration from the case of Miss Vib may serve to clarify this point. In her statement written six weeks after the conclusion of counseling Miss Vib thus describes the way in which unacceptable percepts become incorporated into the self. She writes:
In the earlier interviews I kept saying such things as, “I am not acting like myself,” “I never acted this way before.” What I meant was that this withdrawn, untidy, and apathetic person was not myself. Then I began to realize that I was the same person, seriously withdrawn, etc. now, as I had been before. That did not happen until after I had talked out my self-rejection, shame, despair, and doubt, in the accepting situation of the interview. The counselor was not startled or shocked. I was telling him of all these things about myself which did not fit into my picture of a graduate student, a teacher, a sound person. He responded with complete acceptance and warm interest without heavy emotional overtones. Here was a sane, intelligent person wholeheartedly accepting this behavior that seemed so shameful to me. I can remember an organic feeling of relaxation. I did not have to keep up the struggle to cover up and hide this shameful person.
Note how clearly one can See here the whole range of denied perceptions of self, and the fact that they could be considered as a part of self only in a social situation which involved no threat to the self, in which another person, the counselor, becomes almost an alternate self and looks with understanding and acceptance upon these same perceptions. She continues:
Retrospectively, it seems to me that what I felt as “warm acceptance without emotional overtones” was what I needed to work through my difficulties…. The counselor’s impersonality with interest allowed me to talk out my feelings. The clarification in the interview situation presented the attitude to me as a “ding an sich” which I could look at, manipulate, and put in place. In organizing my attitudes, I was beginning to organize me.
Here the nature of the exploration of experience, of seeing it as experience and not as a threat to self, enables the client to reorganize her perceptions of self, which as she says was also “reorganizing me.”
If we attempt to describe in more conventional psychological terms the nature of the process which culminates in an altered organization and integration of self in the process of therapy it might run as follows. The individual is continually endeavoring to meet his needs by reacting to the field of experience as he perceives it, and to do that more efficiently by differentiating elements of the field and reintegrating them into new patterns. Reorganization of the field may involve the reorganization of the self as well as of other parts of the field. The self, however, resists reorganization and change. In everyday life individual adjustment by means of reorganization of the field exclusive of the self is more common and is less threatening to the individual. Consequently, the individual’s first mode of adjustment is the reorganization of that part of the field which does not include the self.
Client-centered therapy is different from other life situations inasmuch as the therapist tends to remove from the individual’s immediate world all those aspects of the field which the individual can reorganize except the self. The therapist, by reacting to the client’s feelings and attitudes rather than to the objects of his feelings and attitudes, assists the client in bringing from background into focus his own self, making it easier than ever before for the client to perceive and react to the self. By offering only understanding and no trace of evaluation, the therapist removes himself as an object of attitudes, becoming only an alternate expression of the client’s self. The therapist by providing a consistent atmosphere of permissiveness and understanding removes whatever threat existed to prevent all perceptions of the self from emerging into figure. Hence in this situation all the ways in which the self has been experienced can be viewed openly, and organized into a complex unity.
It is then this complete absence of any factor which would attack the concept of self, and second, the assistance in focusing upon the perception of self, which seems to permit a more differentiated view of self and finally the reorganization of self.
Relationship to Current Psychological Thinking
Up to this point, these remarks have been presented as clinical observations and tentative hypotheses, quite apart from any relationship to past or present thinking in the field of psychology. This has been intentional. It is felt that it is the function of the clinician to try to observe, with an open-minded attitude, the complexity of material which comes to him, to report his observations, and in the light of this to formulate hypotheses and problems which both the clinic and the laboratory may utilize as a basis for study and research.
Yet, though these are clinical observations and hypotheses, they have, as has doubtless been recognized, a relationship to some of the currents of theoretical and laboratory thinking in psychology. Some of the observations about the self bear a relationship to the thinking of G. H. Mead (7) about the “I” and the “me.” The outcome of therapy might be described in Mead’s terms as the increasing awareness of the “I,” and the organization of the “me’s” by the “I.” The importance which has been given in this paper to the self as an organizer of experience and to some extent as an architect of self, bears a relationship to the thinking of Allport (1) and others concerning the increased place which we must give to the integrative function of the ego. In the stress which has been given to the present field of experience as the determinant of behavior, the relationship to Gestalt psychology, and to the work of Lewin (6) and his students is obvious. The theories of Angyal (2) find some parallel in our observations. His view that the self represents only a small part of the biological organism which has reached symbolic elaboration, and that it often attempts the direction of the organism on the basis of unreliable and insufficient information, seems to be particularly related to the observations we have made. Lecky’s posthumous book (4), small in size but large in the significance of its contribution, has brought a new light on the way in which the self operates, and the principle of consistency by which new experience is included in or excluded from the self. Much of his thinking runs parallel to our observations. Snygg and Combs (11) have recently attempted a more radical and more complete emphasis upon the internal world of perception as the basis for all psychology, a statement which has helped to formulate a theory in which our observations fit.
It is not only from the realm of theory but also from the experimental laboratory that one finds confirmation of the line of thinking which has been proposed. Tolman (
12
) has stressed the need of thinking as a rat if fruitful experimental work is to be done. The work of Snygg (
10
) indicates that rat behavior may be better predicted by inferring the rat’s field of perception than by viewing him as an object. Krech (Krechevsky, 3) showed in a brilliant study some years ago that rat learning can only be understood if we realize that the rat is consistently acting upon one hypothesis after another. Leeper (5) has summarized the evidence from a number of experimental investigations, showing that animal behavior cannot be explained by simple S-R mechanisms, but only by recognizing that complex internal processes of perceptual organization intervene between the stimulus and the behavioral response. Thus there are parallel streams of clinical observation, theoretical thinking, and laboratory experiment, which all point up the fact that for an effective psychology we need a much more complete understanding of the private world of the individual, and need to learn ways of entering and studying that world from within.
Implications
It would be misleading however if I left you with the impression that the hypotheses I have formulated in this paper, or those springing from the parallel psychological studies I have mentioned, are simply extensions of the main stream of psychological thinking, additional bricks in the edifice of psychological thought. We have discovered with some surprise that our clinical observations, and the tentative hypotheses which seem to grow out of them, raise disturbing questions which appear to cast doubt on the very foundations of many of our psychological endeavors, particularly in the fields of clinical psychology and personality study. To clarify what is meant, I should like to restate in more logical order the formulations I have given, and to leave with you certain questions and problems which each one seems to raise.
If we take first the tentative proposition that the specific determinant of behavior is the perceptual field of the individual, would this not lead, if regarded as a working hypothesis, to a radically different approach in clinical psychology and personality research? It would seem to mean that instead of elaborate case histories full of information about the person as an object, we would endeavor to develop ways of seeing his situation, his past, and himself, as these objects appear to him. We would try to see with him, rather than to evaluate him. It might mean the minimizing of the elaborate psychometric procedures by which we have endeavored to measure or value the individual from our own frame of reference. It might mean the minimizing or discarding of all the vast series of labels which we have painstakingly built up over the years. Paranoid, preschizophrenic, compulsive, constricted — terms such as these might become irrelevant because they are all based in thinking which takes an external frame of reference. They are not the ways in which the individual experiences himself. If we consistently studied each individual from the internal frame of reference of that individual, from within his own perceptual field, it seems probable that we should find generalizations which could be made, and principles which were operative, but we may be very sure that they would be of a different order from these externally based judgments about individuals.
Let us look at another of the suggested propositions. If we took seriously the hypothesis that integration and adjustment are internal conditions related to the degree of acceptance or nonacceptance of all perceptions, and the degree of organization of these perceptions into one consistent system, this would decidedly affect our clinical procedures. It would seem to imply the abandonment of the notion that adjustment is dependent upon the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the environment, and would demand concentration upon those processes which bring about self-integration within the person. It would mean a minimizing or an abandoning of those clinical procedures which utilize the alteration of environmental forces as a method of treatment. It would rely instead upon the fact that the person who is internally unified has the greatest likelihood of meeting environmental problems constructively, either as an individual or in cooperation with others.
If we take the remaining proposition that the self, under proper conditions, is capable of reorganizing, to some extent, its own perceptual field, and of thus altering behavior, this too seems to raise disturbing questions. Following the path of this hypothesis would appear to mean a shift in emphasis in psychology from focusing upon the fixity of personality attributes and psychological abilities, to the alterability of these same characteristics. It would concentrate attention upon process rather than upon fixed status. Whereas psychology has, in personality study, been concerned primarily with the measurement of the fixed qualities of the individual, and with his past in order to explain his present, the hypothesis here suggested would seem to concern itself much more with the personal world of the present in order to understand the future, and in predicting that future would be concerned with the principles by which personality and behavior are altered, as well as the extent to which they remain fixed.
Thus we find that a clinical approach, client-centered therapy, has led us to try to adopt the client’s perceptual field as the basis for genuine understanding. In trying to enter this internal world of perception, not by introspection, but by observation and direct inference, we find ourselves in a new vantage point for understanding personality dynamics, a vantage point which opens up some disturbing vistas. We find that behavior seems to be better understood as a reaction to this reality-as-perceived. We discover that the way in which the person sees himself, and the perceptions he dares not take as belonging to himself, seem to have an important relationship to the inner peace which constitutes adjustment. We discover within the person, under certain conditions, a capacity for the restructuring and the reorganization of self, and consequently the reorganization of behavior, which has profound social implications. We see these observations, and the theoretical formulations which they inspire, as a fruitful new approach for study and research in various fields of psychology.
References
1. Allport, Grdon W. The ego in contemporary psychology. Psychol. Rev., 1943, 50, 451-478.
2. Angyal, Andras. Foundations for a science of personality. New York. Commonwealth Fund, 1941.
3. Krechevsky, I. Hypotheses in rats. Psychol. Rev., 1932, 39, 516-532.
4. Lecky, Prescott. Self-consistency: A theory of personality. New York. Island Press, 1945.
5. Leeper, Robert. The experimental psychologists as reluctant dragons. Paper presented at APA meeting, September 1946.
6. Lewin, Kurt. A dynamic theory of personality. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1935.
7. Mead,George H. Mind, self, and society. Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1934.
8. Rogers, Carl R. Significant aspects of client-centered therapy. Amer. Psychologist, 1946, 1, 415-422.
9. Snyder, W. U. “Warmth” in nondirective counseling. J. abnorm. soc. Psychol., 1946, 41, 491-495.
10. Snygg, Donald. Mazes in which rats take the longer path to food. J. Psychol., 1936, 1, 153-166.
11. Snygg, Donald, & Combs, Arthur W. Book manuscript, loaned to present author. In process of publication. New York. Harper and Bros.
12. Tolman, E. C. The determiners of behavior at a choice point. Psychol. Rev., 1938, 45, 1-41.
Classics in the History
of Psychology
An internet resource developed by
Christopher D. Green
York University, Toronto, Ontario
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A. H. Maslow (
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Originally Published in Psychological Review,
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Posted August 2000
[
p. 370] I. INTRODUCTION
In a previous paper (13) various propositions were
presented which would have to be included in any theory of human motivation
that could lay claim to being definitive. These conclusions may be briefly
summarized as follows:
1. The integrated wholeness of the organism must be one of
the foundation stones of motivation theory.
2. The hunger drive (or any other physiological drive) was rejected
as a centering point or model for a definitive theory of motivation. Any
drive that is somatically based and localizable was shown to be atypical
rather than typical in human motivation.
3. Such a theory should stress and center itself upon ultimate or basic
goals rather than partial or superficial ones, upon ends rather than means
to these ends. Such a stress would imply a more central place for unconscious
than for conscious motivations.
4. There are usually available various cultural paths to the same goal.
Therefore conscious, specific, local-cultural desires are not as fundamental
in motivation theory as the more basic, unconscious goals.
5. Any motivated behavior, either preparatory or consummatory, must
be understood to be a channel through which many basic needs may be simultaneously
expressed or satisfied. Typically an act has more than one motivation.
6. Practically all organismic states are to be understood as motivated
and as motivating.
7. Human needs arrange themselves in hierarchies of pre-potency. That
is to say, the appearance of one need usually rests on the prior satisfaction
of another, more pre-potent need. Man is a perpetually wanting animal.
Also no need or drive can be treated as if it were isolated or discrete;
every drive is related to the state of satisfaction or dissatisfaction
of other drives.
8
. Lists of drives will get us nowhere for various theoretical
and practical reasons. Furthermore any classification of motivations [p.
371] must deal with the problem of levels of specificity or generalization
the motives to be classified.
9. Classifications of motivations must be based upon goals rather than
upon instigating drives or motivated behavior.
10
. Motivation theory should be human-centered rather than animal-centered.
11
. The situation or the field in which the organism reacts must be
taken into account but the field alone can rarely serve as an exclusive
explanation for behavior. Furthermore the field itself must be interpreted
in terms of the organism. Field theory cannot be a substitute for motivation
theory.
12
. Not only the integration of the organism must be taken into account,
but also the possibility of isolated, specific, partial or segmental reactions.
It has since become necessary to add to these another affirmation.
13. Motivation theory is not synonymous with behavior theory. The motivations
are only one class of determinants of behavior. While behavior is almost
always motivated, it is also almost always biologically, culturally and
situationally determined as well.
The present paper is an attempt to formulate a positive theory of motivation
which will satisfy these theoretical demands and at the same time conform
to the known facts, clinical and observational as well as experimental.
It derives most directly, however, from clinical experience. This theory
is, I think, in the functionalist tradition of James and Dewey, and is
fused with the holism of Wertheimer (19), Goldstein
(6), and Gestalt Psychology, and with the dynamicism
of Freud (4) and Adler (1). This fusion
or synthesis may arbitrarily be called a ‘general-dynamic’ theory.
It is far easier to perceive and to criticize the aspects in motivation
theory than to remedy them. Mostly this is because of the very serious
lack of sound data in this area. I conceive this lack of sound facts to
be due primarily to the absence of a valid theory of motivation. The present
theory then must be considered to be a suggested program or framework for
future research and must stand or fall, not so much on facts available
or evidence presented, as upon researches to be done, researches suggested
perhaps, by the questions raised in this paper.[p. 372]
II. THE BASIC NEEDS
The ‘physiological’ needs. — The needs that are usually taken
as the starting point for motivation theory are the so-called physiological
drives. Two recent lines of research make it necessary to revise our customary
notions about these needs, first, the development of the concept of homeostasis,
and second, the finding that appetites (preferential choices among foods)
are a fairly efficient indication of actual needs or lacks in the body.
Homeostasis refers to the body’s automatic efforts to maintain a constant,
normal state of the blood stream. Cannon (2) has described this process
for (1) the water content of the blood, (2) salt content, (3) sugar content,
(4) protein content, (5) fat content, (6) calcium content, (7) oxygen content,
(8) constant hydrogen-ion level (acid-base balance) and (9) constant temperature
of the blood. Obviously this list can be extended to include other minerals,
the hormones, vitamins, etc.
Young in a recent article (
21
) has summarized the
work on appetite in its relation to body needs. If the body lacks some
chemical, the individual will tend to develop a specific appetite or partial
hunger for that food element.
Thus it seems impossible as well as useless to make any list of fundamental
physiological needs for they can come to almost any number one might wish,
depending on the degree of specificity of description. We can not identify
all physiological needs as homeostatic. That sexual desire, sleepiness,
sheer activity and maternal behavior in animals, are homeostatic, has not
yet been demonstrated. Furthermore, this list would not include the various
sensory pleasures (tastes, smells, tickling, stroking) which are probably
physiological and which may become the goals of motivated behavior.
In a previous paper (13) it has been pointed out
that these physiological drives or needs are to be considered unusual rather
than typical because they are isolable, and because they are localizable
somatically. That is to say, they are relatively independent of each other,
of other motivations [p. 373] and of the organism as a whole, and secondly,
in many cases, it is possible to demonstrate a localized, underlying somatic
base for the drive. This is true less generally than has been thought (exceptions
are fatigue, sleepiness, maternal responses) but it is still true in the
classic instances of hunger, sex, and thirst.
It should be pointed out again that any of the physiological needs and
the consummatory behavior involved with them serve as channels for all
sorts of other needs as well. That is to say, the person who thinks he
is hungry may actually be seeking more for comfort, or dependence, than
for vitamins or proteins. Conversely, it is possible to satisfy the hunger
need in part by other activities such as drinking water or smoking cigarettes.
In other words, relatively isolable as these physiological needs are, they
are not completely so.
Undoubtedly these physiological needs are the most pre-potent of all
needs. What this means specifically is, that in the human being who is
missing everything in life in an extreme fashion, it is most likely that
the major motivation would be the physiological needs rather than any others.
A person who is lacking food, safety, love, and esteem would most probably
hunger for food more strongly than for anything else.
If all the needs are unsatisfied, and the organism is then dominated
by the physiological needs, all other needs may become simply non-existent
or be pushed into the background. It is then fair to characterize the whole
organism by saying simply that it is hungry, for consciousness is almost
completely preempted by hunger. All capacities are put into the service
of hunger-satisfaction, and the organization of these capacities is almost
entirely determined by the one purpose of satisfying hunger. The receptors
and effectors, the intelligence, memory, habits, all may now be defined
simply as hunger-gratifying tools. Capacities that are not useful for this
purpose lie dormant, or are pushed into the background. The urge to write
poetry, the desire to acquire an automobile, the interest in American history,
the desire for a new pair of shoes are, in the extreme case, forgotten
or become of sec-[p.374]ondary importance. For the man who is extremely
and dangerously hungry, no other interests exist but food. He dreams food,
he remembers food, he thinks about food, he emotes only about food, he
perceives only food and he wants only food. The more subtle determinants
that ordinarily fuse with the physiological drives in organizing even feeding,
drinking or sexual behavior, may now be so completely overwhelmed as to
allow us to speak at this time (but only at this time) of pure hunger drive
and behavior, with the one unqualified aim of relief.
Another peculiar characteristic of the human organism when it is dominated
by a certain need is that the whole philosophy of the future tends also
to change. For our chronically and extremely hungry man, Utopia can be
defined very simply as a place where there is plenty of food. He tends
to think that, if only he is guaranteed food for the rest of his life,
he will be perfectly happy and will never want anything more. Life itself
tends to be defined in terms of eating. Anything else will be defined as
unimportant. Freedom, love, community feeling, respect, philosophy, may
all be waved aside as fripperies which are useless since they fail to fill
the stomach. Such a man may fairly be said to live by bread alone.
It cannot possibly be denied that such things are true but their generality
can be denied. Emergency conditions are, almost by definition, rare in
the normally functioning peaceful society. That this truism can be forgotten
is due mainly to two reasons. First, rats have few motivations other than
physiological ones, and since so much of the research upon motivation has
been made with these animals, it is easy to carry the rat-picture over
to the human being. Secondly, it is too often not realized that culture
itself is an adaptive tool, one of whose main functions is to make the
physiological emergencies come less and less often. In most of the known
societies, chronic extreme hunger of the emergency type is rare, rather
than common. In any case, this is still true in the United States. The
average American citizen is experiencing appetite rather than hunger when
he says “I am [p. 375] hungry.” He is apt to experience sheer life-and-death
hunger only by accident and then only a few times through his entire life.
Obviously a good way to obscure the ‘higher’ motivations, and to get
a lopsided view of human capacities and human nature, is to make the organism
extremely and chronically hungry or thirsty. Anyone who attempts to make
an emergency picture into a typical one, and who will measure all of man’s
goals and desires by his behavior during extreme physiological deprivation
is certainly being blind to many things. It is quite true that man lives
by bread alone — when there is no bread. But what happens to man’s desires
when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled?
At once other (and ‘higher’) needs emerge and these, rather than
physiological hungers, dominate the organism. And when these in turn are
satisfied, again new (and still ‘higher’) needs emerge and so on. This
is what we mean by saying that the basic human needs are organized into
a hierarchy of relative prepotency.
One main implication of this phrasing is that gratification becomes
as important a concept as deprivation in motivation theory, for it releases
the organism from the domination of a relatively more physiological need,
permitting thereby the emergence of other more social goals. The physiological
needs, along with their partial goals, when chronically gratified cease
to exist as active determinants or organizers of behavior. They now exist
only in a potential fashion in the sense that they may emerge again to
dominate the organism if they are thwarted. But a want that is satisfied
is no longer a want. The organism is dominated and its behavior organized
only by unsatisfied needs. If hunger is satisfied, it becomes unimportant
in the current dynamics of the individual.
This statement is somewhat qualified by a hypothesis to be discussed
more fully later, namely that it is precisely those individuals in whom
a certain need has always been satisfied who are best equipped to tolerate
deprivation of that need in the future, and that furthermore, those who
have been de-[p. 376]prived in the past will react differently to current
satisfactions than the one who has never been deprived.
The safety needs. — If the physiological needs are relatively
well gratified, there then emerges a new set of needs, which we may categorize
roughly as the safety needs. All that has been said of the physiological
needs is equally true, although in lesser degree, of these desires. The
organism may equally well be wholly dominated by them. They may serve as
the almost exclusive organizers of behavior, recruiting all the capacities
of the organism in their service, and we may then fairly describe the whole
organism as a safety-seeking mechanism. Again we may say of the receptors,
the effectors, of the intellect and the other capacities that they are
primarily safety-seeking tools. Again, as in the hungry man, we find that
the dominating goal is a strong determinant not only of his current world-outlook
and philosophy but also of his philosophy of the future. Practically everything
looks less important than safety, (even sometimes the physiological needs
which being satisfied, are now underestimated). A man, in this state, if
it is extreme enough and chronic enough, may be characterized as living
almost for safety alone.
Although in this paper we are interested primarily in the needs of the
adult, we can approach an understanding of his safety needs perhaps more
efficiently by observation of infants and children, in whom these needs
are much more simple and obvious. One reason for the clearer appearance
of the threat or danger reaction in infants, is that they do not inhibit
this reaction at all, whereas adults in our society have been taught to
inhibit it at all costs. Thus even when adults do feel their safety to
be threatened we may not be able to see this on the surface. Infants will
react in a total fashion and as if they were endangered, if they are disturbed
or dropped suddenly, startled by loud noises, flashing light, or other
unusual sensory stimulation, by rough handling, by general loss of support
in the mother’s arms, or by inadequate support.[1][p.
377]
In infants we can also see a much more direct reaction to bodily illnesses
of various kinds. Sometimes these illnesses seem to be immediately and
per
se threatening and seem to make the child feel unsafe. For instance,
vomiting, colic or other sharp pains seem to make the child look at the
whole world in a different way. At such a moment of pain, it may be postulated
that, for the child, the appearance of the whole world suddenly changes
from sunniness to darkness, so to speak, and becomes a place in which anything
at all might happen, in which previously stable things have suddenly become
unstable. Thus a child who because of some bad food is taken ill may, for
a day or two, develop fear, nightmares, and a need for protection and reassurance
never seen in him before his illness.
Another indication of the child’s need for safety is his preference
for some kind of undisrupted routine or rhythm. He seems to want a predictable,
orderly world. For instance, injustice, unfairness, or inconsistency in
the parents seems to make a child feel anxious and unsafe. This attitude
may be not so much because of the injustice per se or any particular
pains involved, but rather because this treatment threatens to make the
world look unreliable, or unsafe, or unpredictable. Young children seem
to thrive better under a system which has at least a skeletal outline of
rigidity, In which there is a schedule of a kind, some sort of routine,
something that can be counted upon, not only for the present but also far
into the future. Perhaps one could express this more accurately by saying
that the child needs an organized world rather than an unorganized or unstructured
one.
The central role of the parents and the normal family setup are indisputable.
Quarreling, physical assault, separation, divorce or death within the family
may be particularly terrifying. Also parental outbursts of rage or threats
of punishment directed to the child, calling him names, speaking to him
harshly, shaking him, handling him roughly, or actual [p. 378] physical
punishment sometimes elicit such total panic and terror in the child that
we must assume more is involved than the physical pain alone. While it
is true that in some children this terror may represent also a fear of
loss of parental love, it can also occur in completely rejected children,
who seem to cling to the hating parents more for sheer safety and protection
than because of hope of love.
Confronting the average child with new, unfamiliar, strange, unmanageable
stimuli or situations will too frequently elicit the danger or terror reaction,
as for example, getting lost or even being separated from the parents for
a short time, being confronted with new faces, new situations or new tasks,
the sight of strange, unfamiliar or uncontrollable objects, illness or
death. Particularly at such times, the child’s frantic clinging to his
parents is eloquent testimony to their role as protectors (quite apart
from their roles as food-givers and love-givers).
From these and similar observations, we may generalize and say that
the average child in our society generally prefers a safe, orderly, predictable,
organized world, which he can count, on, and in which unexpected, unmanageable
or other dangerous things do not happen, and in which, in any case, he
has all-powerful parents who protect and shield him from harm.
That these reactions may so easily be observed in children is in a way
a proof of the fact that children in our society, feel too unsafe (or,
in a word, are badly brought up). Children who are reared in an unthreatening,
loving family do not ordinarily react as we have described above (
17
).
In such children the danger reactions are apt to come mostly to objects
or situations that adults too would consider dangerous.[2]
The healthy, normal, fortunate adult in our culture is largely satisfied
in his safety needs. The peaceful, smoothly [p. 379] running, ‘good’ society
ordinarily makes its members feel safe enough from wild animals, extremes
of temperature, criminals, assault and murder, tyranny, etc. Therefore,
in a very real sense, he no longer has any safety needs as active motivators.
Just as a sated man no longer feels hungry, a safe man no longer feels
endangered. If we wish to see these needs directly and clearly we must
turn to neurotic or near-neurotic individuals, and to the economic and
social underdogs. In between these extremes, we can perceive the expressions
of safety needs only in such phenomena as, for instance, the common preference
for a job with tenure and protection, the desire for a savings account,
and for insurance of various kinds (medical, dental, unemployment, disability,
old age).
Other broader aspects of the attempt to seek safety and stability in
the world are seen in the very common preference for familiar rather than
unfamiliar things, or for the known rather than the unknown. The tendency
to have some religion or world-philosophy that organizes the universe and
the men in it into some sort of satisfactorily coherent, meaningful whole
is also in part motivated by safety-seeking. Here too we may list science
and philosophy in general as partially motivated by the safety needs (we
shall see later that there are also other motivations to scientific, philosophical
or religious endeavor).
Otherwise the need for safety is seen as an active and dominant mobilizer
of the organism’s resources only in emergencies, e. g., war, disease,
natural catastrophes, crime waves, societal disorganization, neurosis,
brain injury, chronically bad situation.
Some neurotic adults in our society are, in many ways, like the unsafe
child in their desire for safety, although in the former it takes on a
somewhat special appearance. Their reaction is often to unknown, psychological
dangers in a world that is perceived to be hostile, overwhelming and threatening.
Such a person behaves as if a great catastrophe were almost always impending,
i.e., he is usually responding as if to an emergency. His safety needs
often find specific [p. 380] expression in a search for a protector, or
a stronger person on whom he may depend, or perhaps, a Fuehrer.
The neurotic individual may be described in a slightly different way
with some usefulness as a grown-up person who retains his childish attitudes
toward the world. That is to say, a neurotic adult may be said to behave
‘as if’ he were actually afraid of a spanking, or of his mother’s disapproval,
or of being abandoned by his parents, or having his food taken away from
him. It is as if his childish attitudes of fear and threat reaction to
a dangerous world had gone underground, and untouched by the growing up
and learning processes, were now ready to be called out by any stimulus
that would make a child feel endangered and threatened.[3]
The neurosis in which the search for safety takes its dearest form is
in the compulsive-obsessive neurosis. Compulsive-obsessives try frantically
to order and stabilize the world so that no unmanageable, unexpected or
unfamiliar dangers will ever appear (
14
); They hedge
themselves about with all sorts of ceremonials, rules and formulas so that
every possible contingency may be provided for and so that no new contingencies
may appear. They are much like the brain injured cases, described by Goldstein
(6), who manage to maintain their equilibrium by avoiding
everything unfamiliar and strange and by ordering their restricted world
in such a neat, disciplined, orderly fashion that everything in the world
can be counted upon. They try to arrange the world so that anything unexpected
(dangers) cannot possibly occur. If, through no fault of their own, something
unexpected does occur, they go into a panic reaction as if this unexpected
occurrence constituted a grave danger. What we can see only as a none-too-strong
preference in the healthy person, e. g., preference for the familiar,
becomes a life-and-death. necessity in abnormal cases.
The love needs. — If both the physiological and the safety needs
are fairly well gratified, then there will emerge the love and affection
and belongingness needs, and the whole cycle [p. 381] already described
will repeat itself with this new center. Now the person will feel keenly,
as never before, the absence of friends, or a sweetheart, or a wife, or
children. He will hunger for affectionate relations with people in general,
namely, for a place in his group, and he will strive with great intensity
to achieve this goal. He will want to attain such a place more than anything
else in the world and may even forget that once, when he was hungry, he
sneered at love.
In our society the thwarting of these needs is the most commonly found
core in cases of maladjustment and more severe psychopathology. Love and
affection, as well as their possible expression in sexuality, are generally
looked upon with ambivalence and are customarily hedged about with many
restrictions and inhibitions. Practically all theorists of psychopathology
have stressed thwarting of the love needs as basic in the picture of maladjustment.
Many clinical studies have therefore been made of this need and we know
more about it perhaps than any of the other needs except the physiological
ones (14).
One thing that must be stressed at this point is that love is not synonymous
with sex. Sex may be studied as a purely physiological need. Ordinarily
sexual behavior is multi-determined, that is to say, determined not only
by sexual but also by other needs, chief among which are the love and affection
needs. Also not to be overlooked is the fact that the love needs involve
both giving and receiving love.[4]
The esteem needs. — All people in our society (with a few pathological
exceptions) have a need or desire for a stable, firmly based, (usually)
high evaluation of themselves, for self-respect, or self-esteem, and for
the esteem of others. By firmly based self-esteem, we mean that which is
soundly based upon real capacity, achievement and respect from others.
These needs may be classified into two subsidiary sets. These are, first,
the desire for strength, for achievement, for adequacy, for confidence
in the face of the world, and for independence and freedom.[5]
Secondly, we have what [p. 382] we may call the desire for reputation or
prestige (defining it as respect or esteem from other people), recognition,
attention, importance or appreciation.[6] These needs
have been relatively stressed by Alfred Adler and his followers, and have
been relatively neglected by Freud and the psychoanalysts. More and more
today however there is appearing widespread appreciation of their central
importance.
Satisfaction of the self-esteem need leads to feelings of self-confidence,
worth, strength, capability and adequacy of being useful and necessary
in the world. But thwarting of these needs produces feelings of inferiority,
of weakness and of helplessness. These feelings in turn give rise to either
basic discouragement or else compensatory or neurotic trends. An appreciation
of the necessity of basic self-confidence and an understanding of how helpless
people are without it, can be easily gained from a study of severe traumatic
neurosis (8).[7]
The need for self-actualization. — Even if all these needs are
satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent
and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what
he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet
must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be,
he must be. This need we may call self-actualization.
This term, first coined by Kurt Goldstein, is being used in this paper
in a much more specific and limited fashion. It refers to the desire for
self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized
in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire
to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable
of becoming.[p. 383]
The specific form that these needs will take will of course vary greatly
from person to person. In one individual it may take the form of the desire
to be an ideal mother, in another it may be expressed athletically, and
in still another it may be expressed in painting pictures or in inventions.
It is not necessarily a creative urge although in people who have any capacities
for creation it will take this form.
The clear emergence of these needs rests upon prior satisfaction of
the physiological, safety, love and esteem needs. We shall call people
who are satisfied in these needs, basically satisfied people, and it is
from these that we may expect the fullest (and healthiest) creativeness.[8]
Since, in our society, basically satisfied people are the exception, we
do not know much about self-actualization, either experimentally or clinically.
It remains a challenging problem for research.
The preconditions for the basic need satisfactions. — There
are certain conditions which are immediate prerequisites for the basic
need satisfactions. Danger to these is reacted to almost as if it were
a direct danger to the basic needs themselves. Such conditions as freedom
to speak, freedom to do what one wishes so long as no harm is done to others,
freedom to express one’s self, freedom to investigate and seek for information,
freedom to defend one’s self, justice, fairness, honesty, orderliness in
the group are examples of such preconditions for basic need satisfactions.
Thwarting in these freedoms will be reacted to with a threat or emergency
response. These conditions are not ends in themselves but they are almost
so since they are so closely related to the basic needs, which are apparently
the only ends in themselves. These conditions are defended because without
them the basic satisfactions are quite impossible, or at least, very severely
endangered.[p. 384]
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. Such a statement is a partial
solution of the general problems of curiosity, the search for knowledge,
truth and wisdom, and the ever-persistent urge to solve the cosmic mysteries.
We must therefore introduce another hypothesis and speak of degrees
of closeness to the basic needs, for we have already pointed out that any
conscious desires (partial goals) are more or less important as they are
more or less close to the basic needs. The same statement may be made for
various behavior acts. An act is psychologically important if it contributes
directly to satisfaction of basic needs. The less directly it so contributes,
or the weaker this contribution is, the less important this act must be
conceived to be from the point of view of dynamic psychology. A similar
statement may be made for the various defense or coping mechanisms. Some
are very directly related to the protection or attainment of the basic
needs, others are only weakly and distantly related. Indeed if we wished,
we could speak of more basic and less basic defense mechanisms, and then
affirm that danger to the more basic defenses is more threatening than
danger to less basic defenses (always remembering that this is so only
because of their relationship to the basic needs).
The desires to know and to understand. — So far, we have mentioned
the cognitive needs only in passing. Acquiring knowledge and systematizing
the universe have been considered as, in part, techniques for the achievement
of basic safety in the world, or, for the intelligent man, expressions
of self-actualization. Also freedom of inquiry and expression have been
discussed as preconditions of satisfactions of the basic needs. True though
these formulations may be, they do not constitute definitive answers to
the question as to the motivation role of curiosity, learning, philosophizing,
experimenting, etc. They are, at best, no more than partial answers.[p.
385]
This question is especially difficult because we know so little about
the facts. Curiosity, exploration, desire for the facts, desire to know
may certainly be observed easily enough. The fact that they often are pursued
even at great cost to the individual’s safety is an earnest of the partial
character of our previous discussion. In addition, the writer must admit
that, though he has sufficient clinical evidence to postulate the desire
to know as a very strong drive in intelligent people, no data are available
for unintelligent people. It may then be largely a function of relatively
high intelligence. Rather tentatively, then, and largely in the hope of
stimulating discussion and research, we shall postulate a basic desire
to know, to be aware of reality, to get the facts, to satisfy curiosity,
or as Wertheimer phrases it, to see rather than to be blind.
This postulation, however, is not enough. Even after we know, we are
impelled to know more and more minutely and microscopically on the one
hand, and on the other, more and more extensively in the direction of a
world philosophy, religion, etc. The facts that we acquire, if they are
isolated or atomistic, inevitably get theorized about, and either analyzed
or organized or both. This process has been phrased by some as the search
for ‘meaning.’ We shall then postulate a desire to understand, to systematize,
to organize, to analyze, to look for relations and meanings.
Once these desires are accepted for discussion, we see that they too
form themselves into a small hierarchy in which the desire to know is prepotent
over the desire to understand. All the characteristics of a hierarchy of
prepotency that we have described above, seem to hold for this one as well.
We must guard ourselves against the too easy tendency to separate these
desires from the basic needs we have discussed above, i.e., to make
a sharp dichotomy between ‘cognitive’ and ‘conative’ needs. The desire
to know and to understand are themselves conative, i.e., have a striving
character, and are as much personality needs as the ‘basic needs’ we have
already discussed (19).[p. 386]
III. FURTHER CHARACTERISTICS OF THE BASIC NEEDS
The degree of fixity of the hierarchy of basic needs. — We have
spoken so far as if this hierarchy were a fixed order but actually it is
not nearly as rigid as we may have implied. It is true that most of the
people with whom we have worked have seemed to have these basic needs in
about the order that has been indicated. However, there have been a number
of exceptions.
(1) There are some people in whom, for instance, self-esteem seems to
be more important than love. This most common reversal in the hierarchy
is usually due to the development of the notion that the person who is
most likely to be loved is a strong or powerful person, one who inspires
respect or fear, and who is self confident or aggressive. Therefore such
people who lack love and seek it, may try hard to put on a front of aggressive,
confident behavior. But essentially they seek high self-esteem and its
behavior expressions more as a means-to-an-end than for its own sake; they
seek self-assertion for the sake of love rather than for self-esteem itself.
(2) There are other, apparently innately creative people in whom the
drive to creativeness seems to be more important than any other counter-determinant.
Their creativeness might appear not as self-actualization released by basic
satisfaction, but in spite of lack of basic satisfaction.
(3) In certain people the level of aspiration may be permanently deadened
or lowered. That is to say, the less pre-potent goals may simply be lost,
and may disappear forever, so that the person who has experienced life
at a very low level, i. e., chronic unemployment, may continue to
be satisfied for the rest of his life if only he can get enough food.
(4) The so-called ‘psychopathic personality’ is another example of permanent
loss of the love needs. These are people who, according to the best data
available (9), have been starved for love in the earliest
months of their lives and have simply lost forever the desire and the ability
to give and to receive affection (as animals lose sucking or pecking reflexes
that are not exercised soon enough after birth).[p. 387]
(5) Another cause of reversal of the hierarchy is that when a need has
been satisfied for a long time, this need may be underevaluated. People
who have never experienced chronic hunger are apt to underestimate its
effects and to look upon food as a rather unimportant thing. If they are
dominated by a higher need, this higher need will seem to be the most important
of all. It then becomes possible, and indeed does actually happen, that
they may, for the sake of this higher need, put themselves into the position
of being deprived in a more basic need. We may expect that after a long-time
deprivation of the more basic need there will be a tendency to reevaluate
both needs so that the more pre-potent need will actually become consciously
prepotent for the individual who may have given it up very lightly. Thus,
a man who has given up his job rather than lose his self-respect, and who
then starves for six months or so, may be willing to take his job back
even at the price of losing his a self-respect.
(6) Another partial explanation of apparent reversals is seen
in the fact that we have been talking about the hierarchy of prepotency
in terms of consciously felt wants or desires rather than of behavior.
Looking at behavior itself may give us the wrong impression. What we have
claimed is that the person will want the more basic of two needs when deprived
in both. There is no necessary implication here that he will act upon his
desires. Let us say again that there are many determinants of behavior
other than the needs and desires.
(7) Perhaps more important than all these exceptions are the ones that
involve ideals, high social standards, high values and the like. With such
values people become martyrs; they give up everything for the sake of a
particular ideal, or value. These people may be understood, at least in
part, by reference to one basic concept (or hypothesis) which may be called
‘increased frustration-tolerance through early gratification’. People who
have been satisfied in their basic needs throughout their lives, particularly
in their earlier years, seem to develop exceptional power to withstand
present or future thwarting of these needs simply because they have strong,[p.
388] healthy character structure as a result of basic satisfaction. They
are the ‘strong’ people who can easily weather disagreement or opposition,
who can swim against the stream of public opinion and who can stand up
for the truth at great personal cost. It is just the ones who have loved
and been well loved, and who have had many deep friendships who can hold
out against hatred, rejection or persecution.
I say all this in spite of the fact that there is a certain amount of
sheer habituation which is also involved in any full discussion of frustration
tolerance. For instance, it is likely that those persons who have been
accustomed to relative starvation for a long time, are partially enabled
thereby to withstand food deprivation. What sort of balance must be made
between these two tendencies, of habituation on the one hand, and of past
satisfaction breeding present frustration tolerance on the other hand,
remains to be worked out by further research. Meanwhile we may assume that
they are both operative, side by side, since they do not contradict each
other, In respect to this phenomenon of increased frustration tolerance,
it seems probable that the most important gratifications come in the first
two years of life. That is to say, people who have been made secure and
strong in the earliest years, tend to remain secure and strong thereafter
in the face of whatever threatens.
Degree of relative satisfaction. — So far, our theoretical discussion
may have given the impression that these five sets of needs are somehow
in a step-wise, all-or-none relationships to each other. We have spoken
in such terms as the following: “If one need is satisfied, then another
emerges.” This statement might give the false impression that a need must
be satisfied 100 per cent before the next need emerges. In actual fact,
most members of our society who are normal, are partially satisfied in
all their basic needs and partially unsatisfied in all their basic needs
at the same time. A more realistic description of the hierarchy would be
in terms of decreasing percentages of satisfaction as we go up the hierarchy
of prepotency, For instance, if I may assign arbitrary figures for the
sake of illustration, it is as if the average citizen [p. 389] is satisfied
perhaps 85 per cent in his physiological needs, 70 per cent in his safety
needs, 50 per cent in his love needs, 40 per cent in his self-esteem needs,
and 10 per cent in his self-actualization needs.
As for the concept of emergence of a new need after satisfaction of
the prepotent need, this emergence is not a sudden, saltatory phenomenon
but rather a gradual emergence by slow degrees from nothingness. For instance,
if prepotent need A is satisfied only 10 per cent: then need B may not
be visible at all. However, as this need A becomes satisfied 25 per cent,
need B may emerge 5 per cent, as need A becomes satisfied 75 per cent need
B may emerge go per cent, and so on.
Unconscious character of needs. — These needs are neither necessarily
conscious nor unconscious. On the whole, however, in the average person,
they are more often unconscious rather than conscious. It is not necessary
at this point to overhaul the tremendous mass of evidence which indicates
the crucial importance of unconscious motivation. It would by now be expected,
on a priori grounds alone, that unconscious motivations would on the whole
be rather more important than the conscious motivations. What we have called
the basic needs are very often largely unconscious although they may, with
suitable techniques, and with sophisticated people become conscious.
Cultural specificity and generality of needs. — This classification
of basic needs makes some attempt to take account of the relative unity
behind the superficial differences in specific desires from one culture
to another. Certainly in any particular culture an individual’s conscious
motivational content will usually be extremely different from the conscious
motivational content of an individual in another society. However, it is
the common experience of anthropologists that people, even in different
societies, are much more alike than we would think from our first contact
with them, and that as we know them better we seem to find more and more
of this commonness, We then recognize the most startling differences to
be superficial rather than basic, e. g., differences in style of
hair-dress, clothes, tastes in food, etc. Our classification of basic [p.
390] needs is in part an attempt to account for this unity behind the apparent
diversity from culture to culture. No claim is made that it is ultimate
or universal for all cultures. The claim is made only that it is relatively
more
ultimate, more universal, more basic, than the superficial conscious desires
from culture to culture, and makes a somewhat closer approach to common-human
characteristics, Basic needs are more common-human than superficial
desires or behaviors.
Multiple motivations of behavior. — These needs must be understood
not to be exclusive or single determiners of certain kinds of behavior.
An example may be found in any behavior that seems to be physiologically
motivated, such as eating, or sexual play or the like. The clinical psychologists
have long since found that any behavior may be a channel through which
flow various determinants. Or to say it in another way, most behavior is
multi-motivated. Within the sphere of motivational determinants any behavior
tends to be determined by several or all of the basic needs simultaneously
rather than by only one of them. The latter would be more an exception
than the former. 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
one’s self of one’s masculinity, or to make a conquest, to feel powerful,
or to win more basic affection. As an illustration, I may point out that
it would be possible (theoretically if not practically) to analyze a single
act of an individual and see in it the expression of his physiological
needs, his safety needs, his love needs, his esteem needs and self-actualization.
This contrasts sharply with the more naive brand of trait psychology in
which one trait or one motive accounts for a certain kind of act, i.
e., an aggressive act is traced solely to a trait of aggressiveness.
Multiple determinants of behavior. — Not all behavior is determined
by the basic needs. We might even say that not all behavior is motivated.
There are many determinants of behavior other than motives.[9]
For instance, one other im-[p. 391]portant class of determinants is the
so-called ‘field’ determinants. Theoretically, at least, behavior may be
determined completely by the field, or even by specific isolated external
stimuli, as in association of ideas, or certain conditioned reflexes. If
in response to the stimulus word ‘table’ I immediately perceive a memory
image of a table, this response certainly has nothing to do with my basic
needs.
Secondly, we may call attention again to the concept of ‘degree of closeness
to the basic needs’ or ‘degree of motivation.’ Some behavior is highly
motivated, other behavior is only weakly motivated. Some is not motivated
at all (but all behavior is determined).
Another important point [10] is that there is a basic
difference between expressive behavior and coping behavior (functional
striving, purposive goal seeking). An expressive behavior does not try
to do anything; it is simply a reflection of the personality. A stupid
man behaves stupidly, not because he wants to, or tries to, or is motivated
to, but simply because he is what he is. The same is true when I speak
in a bass voice rather than tenor or soprano. The random movements of a
healthy child, the smile on the face of a happy man even when he is alone,
the springiness of the healthy man’s walk, and the erectness of his carriage
are other examples of expressive, non-functional behavior. Also the style
in which a man carries out almost all his behavior, motivated as well as
unmotivated, is often expressive.
We may then ask, is all behavior expressive or reflective of
the character structure? The answer is ‘No.’ Rote, habitual, automatized,
or conventional behavior may or may not be expressive. The same is true
for most ‘stimulus-bound’ behaviors. It is finally necessary to stress
that expressiveness of behavior, and goal-directedness of behavior are
not mutually exclusive categories. Average behavior is usually both.
Goals as centering principle in motivation theory. — It will
be observed that the basic principle in our classification has [p. 392]
been neither the instigation nor the motivated behavior but rather the
functions, effects, purposes, or goals of the behavior. It has been proven
sufficiently by various people that this is the most suitable point for
centering in any motivation theory.[11]
Animal- and human-centering. — This theory starts with the human
being rather than any lower and presumably ‘simpler’ animal. Too many of
the findings that have been made in animals have been proven to be true
for animals but not for the human being. There is no reason whatsoever
why we should start with animals in order to study human motivation. The
logic or rather illogic behind this general fallacy of ‘pseudo-simplicity’
has been exposed often enough by philosophers and logicians as well as
by scientists in each of the various fields. It is no more necessary to
study animals before one can study man than it is to study mathematics
before one can study geology or psychology or biology.
We may also reject the old, naive, behaviorism which assumed that it
was somehow necessary, or at least more ‘scientific’ to judge human beings
by animal standards. One consequence of this belief was that the whole
notion of purpose and goal was excluded from motivational psychology simply
because one could not ask a white rat about his purposes. Tolman (
18
)
has long since proven in animal studies themselves that this exclusion
was not necessary.
Motivation and the theory of psychopathogenesis. — The conscious
motivational content of everyday life has, according to the foregoing,
been conceived to be relatively important or unimportant accordingly as
it is more or less closely related to the basic goals. A desire for an
ice cream cone might actually be an indirect expression of a desire for
love. If it is, then this desire for the ice cream cone becomes extremely
important motivation. If however the ice cream is simply something to cool
the mouth with, or a casual appetitive reaction, then the desire is relatively
unimportant. Everyday conscious desires are to be regarded as symptoms,
as [p. 393] surface indicators of more basic needs. If we were to
take these superficial desires at their face value me would find ourselves
in a state of complete confusion which could never be resolved, since we
would be dealing seriously with symptoms rather than with what lay behind
the symptoms.
Thwarting of unimportant desires produces no psychopathological results;
thwarting of a basically important need does produce such results. Any
theory of psychopathogenesis must then be based on a sound theory of motivation.
A conflict or a frustration is not necessarily pathogenic. It becomes so
only when it threatens or thwarts the basic needs, or partial needs that
are closely related to the basic needs (10).
The role of gratified needs. — It has been pointed out above
several times that our needs usually emerge only when more prepotent needs
have been gratified. Thus gratification has an important role in motivation
theory. Apart from this, however, needs cease to play an active determining
or organizing role as soon as they are gratified.
What this means is that, e. g., a basically satisfied person
no longer has the needs for esteem, love, safety, etc. The only sense in
which he might be said to have them is in the almost metaphysical sense
that a sated man has hunger, or a filled bottle has emptiness. If we are
interested in what actually motivates us, and not in what has, will,
or might motivate us, then a satisfied need is not a motivator. It must
be considered for all practical purposes simply not to exist, to have disappeared.
This point should be emphasized because it has been either overlooked or
contradicted in every theory of motivation I know.[12]
The perfectly healthy, normal, fortunate man has no sex needs or hunger
needs, or needs for safety, or for love, or for prestige, or self-esteem,
except in stray moments of quickly passing threat. If we were to say otherwise,
we should also have to aver that every man had all the pathological reflexes,
e.
g., Babinski, etc., because if his nervous system were damaged, these
would appear.
It is such considerations as these that suggest the bold [p. 394] postulation
that a man who is thwarted in any of his basic needs may fairly be envisaged
simply as a sick man. This is a fair parallel to our designation as ‘sick’
of the man who lacks vitamins or minerals. Who is to say that a lack of
love is less important than a lack of vitamins? Since we know the pathogenic
effects of love starvation, who is to say that we are invoking value-questions
in an unscientific or illegitimate way, any more than the physician does
who diagnoses and treats pellagra or scurvy? If I were permitted this usage,
I should then say simply that a healthy man is primarily motivated by his
needs to develop and actualize his fullest potentialities and capacities.
If a man has any other basic needs in any active, chronic sense, then he
is simply an unhealthy man. He is as surely sick as if he had suddenly
developed a strong salt-hunger or calcium hunger.[13]
If this statement seems unusual or paradoxical the reader may be assured
that this is only one among many such paradoxes that will appear as we
revise our ways of looking at man’s deeper motivations. When we ask what
man wants of life, we deal with his very essence.
IV. SUMMARY
(1) There are at least five sets of goals, which we may call basic needs.
These are briefly physiological, safety, love, ‘esteem, and self-actualization.
In addition, we are motivated by the desire to achieve or maintain the
various conditions upon which these basic satisfactions rest and by certain
more intellectual desires.
(2) These basic goals are related to each other, being arranged in a
hierarchy of prepotency. This means that the most prepotent goal will monopolize
consciousness and will tend of itself to organize the recruitment of the
various capacities of the organism. The less prepotent needs are [p. 395]
minimized, even forgotten or denied. But when a need is fairly well satisfied,
the next prepotent (‘higher’) need emerges, in turn to dominate the conscious
life and to serve as the center of organization of behavior, since gratified
needs are not active motivators.
Thus man is a perpetually wanting animal. Ordinarily the satisfaction
of these wants is not altogether mutually exclusive, but only tends to
be. The average member of our society is most often partially satisfied
and partially unsatisfied in all of his wants. The hierarchy principle
is usually empirically observed in terms of increasing percentages of non-satisfaction
as we go up the hierarchy. Reversals of the average order of the hierarchy
are sometimes observed. Also it has been observed that an individual may
permanently lose the higher wants in the hierarchy under special conditions.
There are not only ordinarily multiple motivations for usual behavior,
but in addition many determinants other than motives.
(3) Any thwarting or possibility of thwarting of these basic human goals,
or danger to the defenses which protect them, or to the conditions upon
which they rest, is considered to be a psychological threat. With a few
exceptions, all psychopathology may be partially traced to such threats.
A basically thwarted man may actually be defined as a ‘sick’ man, if we
wish.
(4) It is such basic threats which bring about the general emergency
reactions.
(5) Certain other basic problems have not been dealt with because of
limitations of space. Among these are (a) the problem of values
in any definitive motivation theory, (b) the relation between appetites,
desires, needs and what is ‘good’ for the organism, (c) the etiology
of the basic needs and their possible derivation in early childhood, (d)
redefinition of motivational concepts, i. e., drive, desire, wish,
need, goal, (e) implication of our theory for hedonistic theory,
(f) the nature of the uncompleted act, of success and failure, and
of aspiration-level, (g) the role of association, habit and conditioning,
(h) relation to the [p. 396] theory of inter-personal relations,
(i) implications for psychotherapy, (j) implication for theory
of society, (k) the theory of selfishness, (l) the relation between
needs and cultural patterns, (m) the relation between this theory
and Alport’s theory of functional autonomy. These as well as certain other
less important questions must be considered as motivation theory attempts
to become definitive.
Notes
[
1] As the child grows up, sheer knowledge and familiarity
as well as better motor development make these ‘dangers’ less and less
dangerous and more and more manageable. Throughout life it may be said
that one of the main conative functions of education is this neutralizing
of apparent dangers through knowledge, e. g., I am not afraid of
thunder because I know something about it.
[
2] A ‘test battery’ for safety might be confronting
the child with a small exploding firecracker, or with a bewhiskered face;
having the mother leave the room, putting him upon a high ladder, a hypodermic
injection, having a mouse crawl up to him, etc. Of course I cannot seriously
recommend the deliberate use of such ‘tests’ for they might very well harm
the child being tested. But these and similar situations come up by the
score in the child’s ordinary day-to-day living and may be observed. There
is no reason why those stimuli should not be used with, far example, young
chimpanzees.
[
3] Not all neurotic individuals feel unsafe. Neurosis
may have at its core a thwarting of the affection and esteem needs in a
person who is generally safe.
[
4] For further details see (
12)
and (
16
, Chap. 5).
[
5] Whether or not this particular desire is universal
we do not know. The crucial question, especially important today, is “Will
men who are enslaved and dominated inevitably feel dissatisfied and rebellious?”
We may assume on the basis of commonly known clinical data that a man who
has known true freedom (not paid for by giving up safety and security but
rather built on the basis of adequate safety and security) will not willingly
or easily allow his freedom to be taken away from him. But we do not know
that this is true for the person born into slavery. The events of the next
decade should give us our answer. See discussion of this problem in (
5).
[
6] Perhaps the desire for prestige and respect from
others is subsidiary to the desire for self-esteem or confidence in oneself.
Observation of children seems to indicate that this is so, but clinical
data give no clear support for such a conclusion.
[
7] For more extensive discussion of normal self-esteem,
as well as for reports of various researches, see (
11).
[
8] Clearly creative behavior, like painting, is like
any other behavior in having multiple, determinants. It may be seen in
‘innately creative’ people whether they are satisfied or not, happy or
unhappy, hungry or sated. Also it is clear that creative activity may be
compensatory, ameliorative or purely economic. It is my impression (as
yet unconfirmed) that it is possible to distinguish the artistic and intellectual
products of basically satisfied people from those of basically unsatisfied
people by inspection alone. In any case, here too we must distinguish,
in a dynamic fashion, the overt behavior itself from its various motivations
or purposes.
[
9] I am aware that many psychologists md psychoanalysts
use the term ‘motivated’ and ‘determined’ synonymously, e. g., Freud.
But I consider this an obfuscating usage. Sharp distinctions are necessary
for clarity of thought, and precision in experimentation.
[
10] To be discussed fully in a subsequent publication.
[
11] The interested reader is referred to the very
excellent discussion of this point in Murray’s Explorations in Personality
(
15
).
[
12] Note that acceptance of this theory necessitates
basic revision of the Freudian theory.
[
13] If we were to use the word ‘sick’ in this way,
we should then also have to face squarely the relations of man to his society.
One clear implication of our definition would be that (1) since a man is
to be called sick who is basically thwarted, and (2) since such basic thwarting
is made possible ultimately only by forces outside the individual, then
(3) sickness in the individual must come ultimately from sickness in the
society. The ‘good’ or healthy society would then be defined as one that
permitted man’s highest purposes to emerge by satisfying all his prepotent
basic needs.
References
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& Faber, 1938.
2. CANNON, W. B. Wisdom of the body. New York:
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3. FREUD, A. The ego and the mechanisms of defense.
London: Hogarth, 1937.
4. FREUD, S. New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis.
New York: Norton, 1933.
5. FROMM, E. Escape from freedom. New York:
Farrar and Rinehart, 1941.
6. GOLDSTEIN, K. The organism. New York: American
Book Co., 1939.
7. HORNEY, K. The neurotic personality of our time.
New York: Norton, 1937.
8. KARDINER, A. The traumatic neuroses of war.
New York: Hoeber, 1941.
9. LEVY, D. M. Primary affect hunger. Amer.
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