Abraham H.

Maslow and Hierarchy of Needs

"Wonderful possibilities, inscrutable depths" and "larger, more wonderful conception" of

human nature - this theme and tone reverberate throughout the whole body of Abraham H.
Maslow's life work as a psychologist.
He was writing to proclaim that humankind "has a higher nature and that this is part of its
essence-- or more simply, that human beings can be wonderful out of their own human and
biological nature.

He saw clearly as anyone the indisputable evidence that human nature is capable of every
conceivable kind of violence, viciousness, and cruelty. He was also, from his early youth, a very
astute observer of those evils of everyday life that surface routinely in ordinary social
interaction: belittlement, slander, guile, deception, manipulation, exploitation, extortion,
oppression -- the list could go on and on and still barely scratch the surface. Sigmund Freud
once observed, somewhat cynically, that "each of us will be well advised, on some suitable
occasion, to make a low bow to the deeply moral nature of mankind; it will help us to be
generally popular and much will be forgiven us for it." This "deeply moral nature" of humankind
is precisely what Maslow was aiming at throughout the whole span of his work. At the heart of
the larger and more wonderful conception of human nature that had been growing within him
since the early days of his youth was a deep belief-- in spite of all appearances to the contrary--
that "people are all decent underneath". When people appear to be something other than good
and decent, it is only because they are reacting to stress, pain, or the deprivation of basic needs
such as security, love and self-esteem.

At the heart of the theory of motivation lay two observations. First, we rarely if ever achieve a
state of motivational quiescence; in virtually every waking moment, we are host to one motive
or another, even though some motives might be so faint as to be scarcely noticed. Moreover, as
soon as one motive is satisfied, another immediately "pops up to take its place," as though it
had been lurking behind the scenes all the while, just waiting for its opportunity to take center
stage. When this next motive is satisfied, yet another moves in to replace it; and so on. The
second observation was that these various motives do not succeed one another at random. The
order of their succession is dictated by the fact that some motives are simply more biologically
urgent, that is, more intense than others, and the intensity itself derives from the fact that they
have a kind of built-in priority. In a word, human motives are hierarchically structured, and their
arrangement within the hierarchy is defined by their respective levels of
urgency/intensity/priority. As a convenient shorthand expression for these linked properties of
urgency, intensity and priority, Maslow coined the term "prepotent", along with its noun form,
"prepotency". In more general terms, when any two motives are demanding satisfaction at the
same time, the more prepotent, the more biologically urgent and clamorous motive takes
priority, and the less prepotent motive gets pushed back behind the scenes. Conversely, the
expression of any particular motive --even one as patently basic as hunger-- presupposes that
all greater prepotent needs have already been fairly well satisfied, at least for the time being.
The broader implication that Maslow saw in this hierarchical arrangement of motives went
straight back to the question of higher human motives. The orthodox theory had dismissed all
such motives as being secondary and derivative because they did not express themselves
universally within the species.

With his vision of hierarchical arrangement, Maslow now had a psychologically tenable basis for
explaining how a higher human motive, such as a desire for beauty, could be every bit as basic
and built into human nature as the need for food, eventhough it is regularly and strongly
expressed in only a relatively small portion of the species. He extended the explanation to
include love, justice, kindness, and all the other items that one might want to list among the
higher human motives. The fact that these higher motives do not appear as universally as the
more clamorous motives of hunger, thirst, and the like, does not mean that they are merely
secondary and derivative; it means only that they are less prepotent. We would "never have
the desire to compose music or create mathematical systems, or to adorn our homes," or to
seek beauty in any other way, "if our stomachs were empty most of the time, or if we were
continually dying of thirst, or if we were continually threatened by an always impending
catastrophe.."
But, give any particular person, or people in general, freedom from hunger and thirst and threat
of impeding catastrophe -- that is, satisfy all of the more prepotent motives-- and the higher
human motives will come to the fore and take their turn on stage. Have they only now come
into existence? No; they have been there all the while. They are rooted deeply in the very core
of human nature, but, heretofore they have been eclipsed by the more biologically urgent
motives.

Although the levels of basic needs mentioned up to this point are very diverse, ranging from the
sheer gut-drives of hunger, thirst, and so on, up through the more distinctively human needs
for love and self-esteem, they all have one very important characteristic in common: They are
all needs for something; they are motivational dynamisms activated by deficiency. All such
deficiency motives have in common the fact that they color our perceptions of reality. They also
distort our dealings with reality by causing us to make demands on it: "Feed me! Love me!
Respect me!" The greater our need for food or safety or affection or self-esteem, the more we
will see and treat the items of reality, including ourselves and other people, in accordance with
their respective abilities to facilitate or obstruct the satisfaction of that need.

Suppose, now, that we were able to find a person for whom all the basic deficiency motives had
become well and stably satisfied. What would be the characteristics of such a person? Such a
person will no longer be making deficiency motivated demands on reality, and will no longer be
driven by deficiency-motivated fears and suspicions. Hence, the interaction with oneself, with
other persons, and with the world at-large will be more accepting, more capable of love and
appreciation, and, over-all, just plain more enjoyable. This is the centermost part of what
Maslow described as self-actualization, and it marks the point where an entirely different kind
of motivation emerges in the life of the person. Up to this point, all motivation is deficiency
motivation that expresses itself as a striving to acquire or attain whatever is defining the
deficiency. What comes from this new level of motivation is not a striving but an unfolding of all
those "wonderful possibilities" that, Maslow believed, were somewhere deep within the core of
human nature all along.

And now he had his explanation for why these potentialities, presumed to be present in all
human beings, manifest themselves in only a few. Most of us spend most of our lives in thrall to
one or another of the more prepotent levels of deficiency motivation. The higher and
distinctively human possibilities remain locked away, masked, eclipsed, unable to express
themselves. Maslow gave us a brief composite description of what he envisioned as the
characteristics of persons in whom this unfolding process is well underway. The basic outlines
are published in Motivation and Personality and its extension Towards a Psychology of Being.

Reference:

Toward A Psychology Of Being, 3rd Edition by Abraham H. Maslow