NOTES:

MASLOW: HOLISTIC DYNAMIC THEORY

Overview of Holistic-Dynamic Theory
 This theory is referred as such because it assumes that the whole person
is constantly being motivated by one need or another and that people have the potential
to grow toward psychological health, that is, self-actualization. To attain self-actualization,
people must satisfy lower level needs such as hunger, safety, love, and esteem. Only after they
are relatively satisfied in each of these needs can they reach self-actualization.
 Maslow’s theory with Allport, Rogers, May and others are sometimes thought as the
third force in psychology.
The first force was psychoanalysis and its modifications, the second was behaviorism and
its various forms. Maslow along with other theorists, accepted some of the tenets of both
psychoanalysis and behaviorism.
 In his mature theory, Maslow criticized both psychoanalysis and behaviorism for their
limited views of humanity and their inadequate understanding of the psychologically
healthy person. He believed that humans have a higher nature than either psychoanalysis
or behaviorism would suggest; and he spent the latter years of his life trying to discover
the nature of psychologically healthy individuals.

Biography of Abraham H. Maslow

 Abraham Harold (Abe) Maslow was born in Manhattan, New York, on April 1, 1908,
 Maslow spent his unhappy childhood in Brooklyn. As a child, Maslow’s life was filled
with intense feelings of shyness, inferiority, and depression.
 Maslow learned to hate and mistrust religion and to become a committed atheist.
 After Maslow graduated from Boys High School, his cousin and friend Will encouraged
him to apply to Cornell University, but lacking self-confidence, Maslow selected the less
prestigious City College of New York.
 Maslow’s father had wanted his oldest son to be a lawyer, and while attending City
College, Maslow enrolled in law school. However, he quitted, for he felt that law dealt
too much with evil people and was not sufficiently concerned with the good.
 He transferred to Cornell University in upstate New York partly to be closer to his cousin
Will. After one semester at Cornell, Maslow returned to the City College of New York, to
draw nearer to Bertha Goodman, his first cousin whom he was falling in love with. The
two were soon married.
 One semester before his marriage, Maslow had enrolled at the University of Wisconsin,
from which he received a BA degree in philosophy.
 In 1934, Maslow received his doctorate. He enrolled in medical school but quit.
 Maslow, a mediocre student during his days at City College and Cornell, scored 195 on
E.L. Thorndike’s intelligence test while working as his assistant.
 During the mid-1940s, Maslow’s health began to deteriorate, he suffered from a strange
illness that left him weak, faint, and exhausted.
  In 1951, Maslow took a position as chairman of the psychology department at the
recently established Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.
 Maslow suffered a severe but nonfatal heart attack in December of 1967 along with
work-related problems.
 He accepted an offer to join the Saga Administrative Corporation in Menlo Park,
California. He had no particular job there and was free to think and write as he wished.
He enjoyed that freedom, but on June 8, 1970, he suddenly collapsed and died of a
massive heart attack. He was 62.

Maslow’s View of Motivation

 Maslow’s theory of personality rests on several basic assumptions regarding motivation.

1. First, Maslow (1970) adopted a holistic approach to motivation: That is, the whole
person, not any single part or function, is motivated.
2. Second, motivation is usually complex, meaning that a person’s behavior may spring
from several separate motives.
3. Third assumption is that people are continually motivated by one need or another.
4. Another assumption is that all people everywhere are motivated by the same basic
needs.
5. A final assumption concerning motivation is that needs can be arranged on a
hierarchy.

Hierarchy of Needs

 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs concept assumes that lower level needs must be satisfied or
at least relatively satisfied before higher level needs become motivators.
 The five needs composing this hierarchy are conative needs, meaning that they have a
striving or motivational character. The needs can be arranged on a hierarchy or staircase,
with each ascending step representing a higher need but one less basic to survival.
 Maslow (1970) listed the following needs in order of their prepotency: physiological,
safety, love and belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization.
1. Physiological Needs
 The most basic needs of any person are physiological needs, including food,
water, oxygen, maintenance of body temperature, and so on.
 People do not see beyond food, and as long as these need remains unsatisfied,
their primary motivation is to obtain something to eat.
 They are the only needs that can be completely satisfied or even overly satisfied.
A second characteristic peculiar to physiological needs is their recurring nature.
2. Safety Needs
 When people have partially satisfied their physiological needs, they become
motivated by safety needs, including physical security, stability, dependency,
protection, and freedom from threatening forces such as war, terrorism, illness,
fear, anxiety, danger, chaos, and natural disasters.
 Safety needs cannot be overly satiated.
 Children are more often motivated by safety needs because they live with such
threats as darkness, animals, strangers, and punishments from parents.
 Some adults also feel relatively unsafe because they retain irrational fears from
childhood. They spend far more energy than do healthy people trying to satisfy
safety needs, and when they are not successful in their attempts, they suffer from
what Maslow (1970) called basic anxiety.
3. Love and Belongingness Needs
 After people partially satisfy their physiological and safety needs, they become
motivated by love and belongingness needs, such as the desire for friendship; the
wish for a mate and children; the need to belong to a family, a club, a
neighborhood, or a nation.
 It also includes some aspects of sex and human contact as well as the need to both
give and receive love.
 People who have had their love and belongingness needs adequately satisfied
from early years do not panic when denied love.
 People who have never experienced love and belongingness, therefore, are
incapable of giving love.
 People who have received only a little amount of love have stronger needs for
affection and acceptance.
 Children need love in order to grow psychologically, and their attempts to satisfy
this need are usually straightforward and direct. Adults, too, need love, but their
attempts to attain it are sometimes cleverly disguised.
4. Esteem Needs
 This includes self-respect, confidence, competence, and the knowledge that others
hold them in high esteem.
 Maslow (1970) identified two levels of esteem needs—reputation and self-
esteem
 a. Reputation is the perception of the prestige, recognition, or fame a person has
achieved in the eyes of others.
b. Self-esteem is a person’s own feelings of worth and confidence. It is based on
real competence and not merely on others’ opinions.
5. Self-Actualization Needs
 Once esteem needs are met, people do not always move to the level of self-
actualization.
 Self-actualization needs include self-fulfillment, the realization of all one’s
potential, and a desire to become creative in the full sense of the word.
 Self-actualizers are not dependent on the satisfaction of either love or esteem
needs; they become independent from the lower level needs that gave them birth.
 Maslow identified three other categories of needs—aesthetic, cognitive, and
neurotic.
 Aesthetic Needs
 Aesthetic needs are not universal, but at least some people in every
culture seem to be motivated by the need for beauty and
aesthetically pleasing experiences.
 People with strong aesthetic needs desire beautiful and orderly
surroundings, and when these needs are not met, they become sick
in the same way that they become sick when their conative needs
are frustrated.
 Cognitive Needs
 This is the desire to know, to solve mysteries, to understand, and to
be curious.
 When cognitive needs are blocked, all needs on Maslow’s
hierarchy are threatened; that is, knowledge is necessary to satisfy
each of the five conative needs.
 Maslow (1968b, 1970) believed that healthy people desire to know
more, to theorize, to test hypotheses, to uncover mysteries, or to
find out how something works just for the satisfaction of knowing.
 People who have not satisfied their cognitive needs, who have been
consistently lied to, have had their curiosity stifled, or have been
denied information, become pathological, a pathology that takes
the form of skepticism, disillusionment, and cynicism.
 Neurotic Needs
 Neurotic needs lead only to stagnation and pathology.
 Neurotic needs are non-productive. They perpetuate an unhealthy
style of life and have no value in the striving for self-actualization.
 Neurotic needs are usually reactive; that is, they serve as
compensation for unsatisfied basic needs.
  It makes little difference for ultimate health whether a neurotic
need be gratified or frustrated.

General Discussion of Needs

 Maslow (1970) estimated that the hypothetical average person has his or her needs
satisfied to approximately these levels: physiological, 85%; safety, 70%; love and
belongingness, 50%; esteem, 40%; and self-actualization, 10%.
 The more a lower level need is satisfied, the greater the emergence of the next level need.
 Needs, therefore, emerge gradually, and a person may be simultaneously motivated by
needs from two or more levels.

Reversed Order of Needs

 Even though needs are generally satisfied in the hierarchical order, occasionally they are
reversed.
 For some people, the drive for creativity (a self-actualization need) may take precedence
over safety and physiological needs.
 Reversals, however, are usually more apparent than real, and some seemingly obvious
deviations in the order of needs are not variations at all.

Unmotivated Behavior
 Some behaviors are not motivated. In other words, not all determinants are motives.
 Some behavior is not caused by needs but by other factors such as conditioned reflexes,
maturation, or drugs.
 Much of what Maslow (1970) called “expressive behavior” is unmotivated.

Expressive and Coping Behavior

 Maslow (1970) distinguished between expressive behavior (which is often
unmotivated) and coping behavior (which is always motivated and aimed at satisfying
a need).
 Expressive behavior
 It is often an end in itself and serves no other purpose than to be. It is frequently
unconscious and usually takes place naturally and with little effort. It has no goals
or aim but is merely the person’s mode of expression.
 Expressive behavior is usually unlearned, spontaneous, and determined by forces
within the person rather than by the environment.
 Coping behavior
 Ordinarily conscious, effortful, learned, and determined by the external
environment.
 It involves the individual’s attempts to cope with the environment.
  Coping behavior serves some aim or goal (although not always conscious or
known to the person), and it is always motivated by some deficit need (Maslow,
1970).

Deprivation of Needs
 Lack of satisfaction of any of the basic needs leads to some kind of pathology.
 Deprivation of physiological needs results in malnutrition, fatigue, loss of energy,
obsession with sex, and so on.
 Threats to one’s safety lead to fear, insecurity, and dread.
 When love needs go unfulfilled, a person becomes defensive, overly aggressive, or
socially timid.
 Lack of esteem results in the illnesses of self-doubt, self-depreciation, and lack of
confidence.
 Deprivation of self-actualization needs also leads to pathology, or more accurately,
metapathology, Maslow (1967) defined as the absence of values, the lack of fulfillment,
and the loss of meaning in life.

Instinctoid Nature of Needs

 Maslow (1970) hypothesizes that some human needs are innately determined even
though they can be modified by learning. He called these needs instinctoid needs.
 The thwarting of instinctoid needs produces pathology.
 Instinctoid needs are persistent and their satisfaction leads to psychological health.
 Instinctoid needs are species-specific.
 Though difficult to change, instinctoid needs can be molded, inhibited, or altered by
environmental influences.

Comparison of Higher and Lower Needs

 Important similarities and differences exist between higher level needs (love, esteem,
and self-actualization) and lower level needs (physiological and safety).
 First, higher level needs are later on the phylogenetic or evolutionary scale. Also,
higher needs appear later during the course of individual development
 Second, higher level needs produce more happiness and more peak experiences,
although satisfaction of lower level needs may produce a degree of pleasure.
Hedonistic pleasure, however, is usually temporary and not comparable to the quality
of happiness produced by the satisfaction of higher needs.
 Also, the satisfaction of higher-level needs is more subjectively desirable to those
people who have experienced both higher and lower level needs.

Self-Actualization
  Maslow’s ideas on self-actualization began soon after he received his PhD, when he
became puzzled about why two of his teachers in New York City—anthropologist
Ruth Benedict and psychologist Max Wertheimer—were so different from average
people. To Maslow, these two people represented the highest level of human
development, and he called this level “self-actualization.”

Maslow’s Quest for the Self-Actualizing Person

 Maslow faced handicaps in his quest for whom he now called the “self-actualizing
person.” First, he was trying to find a personality syndrome that had never been
clearly identified. Second, many of the people he believed to be self-actualizing
refused to participate in his search.
 Maslow decided to take a different approach—he began reading biographies of
famous people to see if he could find self-actualizing people among the saints, sages,
national heroes, and artists.
 While learning about the lives of some famous and great people, Maslow suddenly
had an “Aha” experience. Rather than asking “What makes Max Wertheimer and
Ruth Benedict self-actualizing?” he turned the question around and asked, “Why are
we not all self-actualizing?”
 Maslow continued his quest for the self-actualizing person. To facilitate his search, he
identified a syndrome for psychological health. After selecting a sample of potentially
healthy individuals, he carefully studied those people to build a personality syndrome.
Next, he refined his original definition and then reselected potential self-actualizers,
retaining some, eliminating others, and adding new ones. Maslow (1970) continued
this cyclical process to a third or fourth selection group or until he was satisfied that
he had refined a vague, unscientific concept into a precise and scientific definition of
the self-actualizing person.

Criteria for Self-Actualization

1. First, they were free from psychopathology.
2. Second, these self-actualizing people had progressed through the hierarchy of needs and
therefore lived above the subsistence level of existence and had no ever-present threat to
their safety.
3. Third was the embracing of the B-values. His self-actualizing people felt comfortable
with and even demanded truth, beauty, justice, simplicity, humor, and each of the other
B-values.
4. The final criterion for reaching self-actualization was “full use and exploitation of talents,
capacities, potentialities, etc.”

Values of Self-Actualizers
  Maslow (1971) held that self-actualizing people are motivated by the “eternal verities,”
what he called B-values.
 These “Being” values are indicators of psychological health and are opposed to
deficiency needs, which motivate non-self-actualizers. He distinguished between ordinary
need motivation and the motives of self-actualizing people, which he called
metamotivation.

Metamotivation is characterized by expressive rather than coping behavior and is associated

with the B-values.

 Maslow (1964, 1970) identified 14 B-values, but the exact number is not important
because ultimately all become one, or at least all are highly correlated. These values
distinguish self-actualizing people from those whose psychological growth is stunted
after they reach esteem needs.
 The values of self-actualizing people include truth, goodness, beauty, wholeness or the
transcendence of dichotomies, aliveness or spontaneity, uniqueness, perfection,
completion, justice and order, simplicity, richness or totality, effortlessness, playfulness
or humor, and self-sufficiency or autonomy.
 Maslow (1970) hypothesized that when people’s metaneeds are not met or deprivation of
any of the B-values results in metapathology, or the lack of a meaningful philosophy of
life.

Characteristics of Self-Actualizing People

 Maslow believed that all humans have the potential for self-actualization. To be self-
actualizing, Maslow believed, people must be regularly satisfied in their other needs and
must also embrace the B-values.
 Maslow (1970) listed 15 tentative qualities that characterize self-actualizing people
to at least some degree.
1. More Efficient Perception of Reality
 Self-actualizing people can more easily detect phoniness in
others. They can discriminate between the genuine and the
fake not only in people but also in literature, art, and music.
 Also, self-actualizing people are less afraid and more
comfortable with the unknown.
2. Acceptance of Self, Others, and Nature
 Self-actualizing people can accept themselves the way they
are.
 In similar fashion, they accept others and have no
compulsive need to instruct, inform, or convert.
 They accept nature, including human nature, as it is and do
not expect perfection either in themselves or in others.
3. Spontaneity, Simplicity, and Naturalness
 Self-actualizing people are spontaneous, simple, and
natural.
 They ordinarily live simple lives in the sense that they have
no need to erect a complex veneer designed to deceive the
world. They are unpretentious and not afraid or ashamed to
express joy, awe, elation, sorrow, anger, or other deeply felt
emotions.
4. Problem-Centering
 A fourth characteristic of self-actualizing people is their
interest in problems outside themselves.
 This interest allows self-actualizers to develop a mission in
life, a purpose for living that spreads beyond self-
aggrandizement.
 Self-actualizing people extend their frame of reference far
beyond self. They are concerned with eternal problems and
adopt a solid philosophical and ethical basis for handling
these problems.
5. The Need for Privacy
 Self-actualizing people have a quality of detachment that
allows them to be alone without being lonely.
 Self-actualizing people may be seen as aloof or
uninterested, but in fact, their disinterest is limited to minor
matters.
6. Autonomy
 Self-actualizing people are autonomous and depend on
themselves for. Autonomy can be achieved only through
satisfactory relations with others
 Self-actualizing people have confidence they are loved and
accepted without conditions or qualifications, which is a
powerful force in contributing to feelings of self-worth.
Once that confidence is attained, a person no longer
depends on others for self-esteem.
7. Continued Freshness of Appreciation
 Maslow (1970) wrote that “self-actualizing people have the
wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly
and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure,
wonder, and even ecstasy”
8. The Peak Experience
 Maslow (1971) stated that “most people, or almost all
people, have peak experiences, or ecstasies”
  Peak experiences are experiences that were mystical in
nature and that somehow gave them a feeling of
transcendence.
 Not all peak experiences are of equal intensity; some are
only mildly sensed, others moderately felt, and some are
quite intensely experienced.
 Maslow (1964) says, “The peak experience is seen only as
beautiful, good, desirable, worthwhile, etc., and is never
experienced as evil or undesirable” (p. 63).
9. Gemeinschaftsgefühl
 Self-actualizing people possess Gemeinschaftsgefühl,
Adler’s term for social interest, community feeling, or a
sense of oneness with all humanity. Maslow found that his
self-actualizers had a kind of caring attitude toward other
people.
 Self-actualizers may become angry, impatient, or disgusted
with others; but they retain a feeling of affection for human
beings in general.
10. Profound Interpersonal Relations
 Self-actualizers have a nurturant feeling toward people in
general, but their close friendships are limited to only a
few.
 They have no frantic need to be friends with everyone, but
the few important interpersonal relationships they do have
are quite deep and intense.
11. The Democratic Character Structure
 They could be friendly and considerate with other people
regardless of class, color, age, or gender, and in fact, they
seemed to be quite unaware of superficial differences
among people.
 Self-actualizers have a desire and an ability to learn from
anyone. In a learning situation, they recognize how little
they know in relation to what they could know.
12. Discrimination Between Means and Ends
 Self-actualizing people have a clear sense of right and
wrong conduct and have little conflict about basic values.
 They set their sights on ends rather than means and have an
unusual ability to distinguish between the two.
 Maslow (1970) described his self-actualizing people by
saying that “they can often enjoy for its own sake the
getting to some place as well as the arriving. It is
 occasionally possible for them to make out of the most
trivial and routine activity an intrinsically enjoyable game.”
13. Philosophical Sense of Humor
 Self-actualizing people may poke fun at themselves, but not
masochistically so. They make fewer tries at humor than
others, but their attempts serve a purpose beyond making
people laugh. They amuse, inform, point out ambiguities,
provoke a smile rather than a guffaw.
 The humor of a self-actualizing person is intrinsic to the
situation rather than contrived; it is spontaneous rather than
planned.
14. Creativeness
 All self-actualizing people studied by Maslow were
creative in some sense of the word.
 Maslow suggested that creativity and self-actualization may
be one and the same.
 Not all self-actualizers are talented or creative in the arts,
but all are creative in their own way. They have a keen
perception of truth, beauty, and reality— ingredients that
form the foundation of true creativity.

15. Resistance to Enculturation

 Self-actualizing people have a sense of detachment from
their surroundings and are able to transcend a particular
culture.
 They are autonomous, following their own standards of
conduct and not blindly obeying the rules of others.
 Self-actualizing people do not waste energy fighting against
insignificant customs and regulations of society.
 Maslow (1970) hypothesized, they are “less enculturated,
less flattened out, less molded” (p. 174).

Love, Sex, and Self-Actualization

 Before people can become self-actualizing, they must satisfy their love and
belongingness needs.
 Self-actualizing people do not love because they expect something in return. They simply
love and are loved. Their love is never harmful. It is the kind of love that allows lovers to
be relaxed, open, and non-secretive (Maslow, 1970).

Philosophy of Science
  Maslow (1966) believed that value-free science does not lead to the proper study of
human personality.
 Maslow argued for a different philosophy of science, a humanistic, holistic approach that
is not value free and that has scientists who care about the people and topics they
investigate.
 Maslow agreed with Allport (see Chapter 13) that psychological science should place
more emphasis on the study of the individual and less on the study of large groups.
Subjective reports should be favored over rigidly objective ones, and people should be
allowed to tell about themselves in a holistic fashion instead of the more orthodox
approach that studies people in bits and pieces.
 His observation of a cold and calloused procedure done by surgeons in medical school
led Maslow to originate the concept of desacralization: that is, the type of science that
lacks emotion, joy, wonder, awe, and rapture.
 Maslow believed that orthodox science has no ritual or ceremony; and he called for
scientists to put values, creativity, emotion, and ritual back into their work. Scientists
must be willing to resacralize science or to instill it with human values, emotion, and
ritual.
 Maslow (1966) argued for a Taoistic attitude for psychology, one that would be
noninterfering, passive, and receptive.
 Maslow insisted that psychologists must themselves be healthy people, able to tolerate
ambiguity and uncertainty. They must be intuitive, nonrational, insightful, and
courageous enough to ask the right questions. They must also be willing to flounder, to be
imprecise, to question their own procedures, and to take on the important problems of
psychology.

Measuring Self-Actualization

 Everett L. Shostrom (1974) developed the Personal Orientation Inventory

(POI) in an attempt to measure the values and behaviors of self-actualizing
people.
 This inventory consists of 150 forced-choice items, such as (a) “I can feel
comfortable with less than a perfect performance” versus (b) “I feel
uncomfortable with anything less than a perfect performance”; and (a) “ Two
people will get along best if each concentrates on pleasing the other” versus (b)
“Two people can get along best if each person feels free to express himself.
 Respondents are asked to choose either statement (a) or statement (b), but they
may leave the answer blank if neither statement applies to them or if they do not
know anything about the statement.
The POI has 2 major scales and 10 subscales.
1. The first major scale—the Time Competence/Time Incompetence
scale—measures the degree to which people are present oriented.
 2. The second major scale—the Support scale—is “designed to
measure whether an individual’s mode of reaction is
characteristically ‘self-oriented’ or ‘other’ oriented” (Shostrom,
1974, p. 4).
3. The 10 subscales assess levels of (1) self-actualization values, (2)
flexibility in applying values, (3) sensitivity to one’s own needs
and feelings, (4) spontaneity in expressing feelings behaviorally,
(5) self-regard, (6) self-acceptance, (7) positive view of humanity,
(8) ability to see opposites of life as meaningfully related, (9)
acceptance of aggression, and (10) capacity for intimate contact.
 High scores on the 2 major scales and the 10 subscales indicate some level of self-
actualization; low scores do not necessarily suggest pathology but give clues concerning
a person’s self-actualizing values and behaviors.
 Alvin Jones and Rick Crandall (1986) created the Short Index of Self-Actualization,
It borrows 15 items from the POI that are most strongly correlated with the total
self-actualization score. Items on the Short Index are on a 6-point Likert scale
(from strongly disagree to strongly agree).
 A third measure of self-actualization is the Brief Index of Self-Actualization, developed
by John Sumerlin and Charles Bundrick (1996, 1998).
This inventory yields four factors: (I) Core Self-Actualization, or the full use of
one’s potentials; (II) Autonomy; (III) Openness to Experience; and (IV) Comfort
with Solitude.

The Jonah Complex

 According to Maslow (1970), everyone is born with a will toward health, a tendency to
grow toward self-actualization, but few people reach it. Growth toward normal, healthy
personality can be blocked at each of the steps in the hierarchy of needs.
 Another obstacle that often blocks people’s growth toward self-actualization is the Jonah
complex, or the fear of being one’s best.
 The Jonah complex is characterized by attempts to run away from one’s destiny just as
the biblical Jonah tried to escape from his fate
 The Jonah complex, which is found in nearly everyone, represents a fear of success, a
fear of being one’s best, and a feeling of awesomeness in the presence of beauty and
perfection.

Why do people run away from greatness and self-fulfillment?

 First, the human body is simply not strong enough to endure the ecstasy of fulfillment for
any length of time.
  Second, most people, he reasoned, have private ambition to be great. however, when they
compare themselves with those who have accomplished greatness, they are appalled by
their own arrogance: “Who am I to think I could do as well as this great person?”
 Although the Jonah complex stands out most sharply in neurotic people, nearly everyone
has some timidity toward seeking perfection and greatness. People allow false humility to
stifle creativity, and thus they prevent themselves from becoming self-actualizing.

REFERENCE:

Feist G. & Feist J. 2008. Theories of Personality 7th Edition. United States of
America: The McGraw−Hill Companies, Inc.

REFLECTION
Just like what Abraham Maslow stated in his Holistic Dynamic Theory, as a human being, I do
have physiological or biological needs, the need to be safe and secured, need for affection and
belonginess, to be appreciated, and if possible, has needs for realization of one’s potential. I
agree with Maslow that it is not necessarily mean that those needs identified by him is of fixed
sequence.
In fact, in this time of pandemic, the world as it is faced with a life-threatening COVID-19 virus,
many people are prioritizing their safety needs even over physiological needs. Some are forced
to stay home even to the expense of giving up their jobs just to satisfy their safety needs. One of
which is me with my family. During the Enhanced Community Quarantine, my older siblings
who used to be working as a janitress and as a mechanic in order to sustain the needs of our
family were forced to leave their jobs behind with fear to be infected by the said deadly virus. As
our parents told us once, “We can earn money anytime we want to, but we cannot anymore
restore life once it’s gone.” We did endure a life with uncertainty of whether we will have some
food to eat the next day or clean water to drink. We made sure every family member will be safe.
Even my siblings who were stranded in Luzon, do the same thing as well. Their scenario is
worse than we had because of the same reason, our need for safety.
As we are currently threatened by this infectious and deadly virus and its disease, some of our
needs are deprived. This causes many individuals mild to severe depression. I, myself suffer
from a mild depression these past months of lockdown because of tomorrow’s uncertainty and
feeling useless and doing nothing productive, the situation of my siblings in Luzon, our situation
in our house with scarce resources, and our safety needs are compromised. Hence, with our
needs, it motivates us to do some things in order to satisfy whatever our needs are, may it be
physiological, security, belongingness, esteem, or self-actualization.
Another thing that I can relate about Maslow’s theory is that of what he believes in: “People who
have never experienced love and belongingness, therefore, are incapable of giving love.” I am
often being asked why I can forgive and not be mad even to those who have done evil things
unto me. I always told them that I myself do not know the reason. I was even told that I may be
is pretentious because I show no rage against those people. With that, there are times especially
when I am alone, I would shed tears being judged and talked that way. Good thing, I was able to
read the theory of Maslow and that my long-time question was then answered. On the contrary,
earlier this year, a friend of mine show some signs of depression and to the point where she even
desperately asked her boyfriend for them to live together under a roof and settle a family. She
came from a broken family and an institution took care of her since her parents got separated and
had to live with a drunkard father. It became known to me that my behavior is because I was able
to feel sufficient love and affection from my very own family and that the behavior of my friend
who have stronger needs for affection or acceptance is because he received only a little amount
of love and that it is not from her biological family. It actually remains a big question in our
OIKOS community the reason why she opted to choose to leave the life behind where her needs
are secured and provided for her in exchange of strong need for love and belongingness. Having
read the theory, my puzzled mind became even more oriented of a possible reason of her
decision.

APPLICATION

The theory of personality proposed by Abraham Maslow is very much of use in the social work
profession. Not just that it can be used to analyze the clients’ behavior but can be also a reference
to identify the necessary interventions needed by the clients to solve their problems and enhance
their social functioning.

The hierarchy of needs is the widely used reference in identifying and categorizing the needs of
individual/s, family, groups, and community almost in all areas of profession especially to social
work. The needs identified by Maslow applies to everyone and with its help, it will then be easy
for the social workers to analyze and collect the information they need about their clients. It can
also be a source of information in identifying whether the client’s behavior is pathological or not.
In return, the social workers will be also having the necessary knowledge how they can help
those clients suffering from such state.

This theory is also a good source of nourishment for the soul for the social workers, not just for
the clients since it contains information that are helpful for one to become an effective extender
of help and service, particularly the “Fifteen (15) Tentative Qualities of Self-actualized People”
listed by Abraham. The fact that as social workers, we have to acquire necessary qualities, so we
can share it to our clients better. As they say, “We cannot give what we do not have.” And that,
we have to have such good qualities for us to effectively partake it to the clients.