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Hey Book Lover! Since the whole of Being is being perceived, all those laws obtain which would hold if the whole of the cosmos could be encompassed at once. Here the object is attended to simultaneously with attention to all else that is relevant. It is seen imbedded in its relationships with everything else in the world, and as part of the world. Normal figure-ground relationships hold, i.
Furthermore, in ordinary cognition, the object is seen not so much per se but as a member of a class, as an instance in a larger category. To a far greater degree than we ordinarily realize, cognition involves also placing on a continuum. It involves a kind of automatic comparing or judging or evaluating. It implies higher than, less than, better than, taller than, etc. I mean this in the sense in which Dorothy Lee 88 has described the way in which certain primitive peoples differ from us in their perceptions.
A person can be seen per se, in himself and by himself. He can be seen uniquely and idiosyncratically, as if he were the sole member of his class. But it is a very difficult task, far more difficult than we are ordinarily willing to admit. The healthy mother, perceiving her infant in love, approaches to this kind of perception of the uniqueness of the person. Her baby is not quite like anybody else in the world.
The caring minuteness with which a mother will gaze upon her infant again and again, or the lover at his beloved, or the connoisseur at his painting will surely produce a more complete perception than the usual casual rubricizing which passes illegitimately for perception.
While it is true that all human perception is in part a t product of the human being and is his creation to an extent, we can yet make some differentiation between the perception of external objects as relevant to human concerns and as irrelevant to human concerns. Self-actualizing people are more able to perceive the world as if it were independent not only of them but also of human beings in general.
This also tends to be true of the average human being in his highest moments, i. He can then more readily look upon nature as if it were there in itself and for itself, and not simply as if it were a- human playground put there for human purposes.
He can more easily refrain from projecting human purposes upon it. As one example, let us take the microscope which can reveal through histological slides either a world of per se beauty or else a world of threat, danger and pathology. A mosquito is a wondrous object if seen as an end-in-itself. The repeated, fascinated, experiencing of a face that we love or a painting that we admire makes us like it more, and permits us to see more and more of it in various senses.
This we may call intra-object richness. But this so far contrasts rather sharply with the more usual effects of repeated experiencing, i. The same seems to be true for good people and bad people, cruel or mean ones for instance. Seeing the good ones repeatedly seems to make them look better. Seeing the bad ones repeatedly tends to make them look worse. In this more usual kind of perception, where so frequently the initial perception is simply a classification into useful or not useful, dangerous or not dangerous, repeated looking makes it become more and more empty.
The task of normal perception which is so frequendy anxiety-based or D-motivation-determined, is fulfilled in the first viewing. Need-to-perceive then disappears, and thereafter the object or perosn, now that it has been catalogued, is simply no longer perceived. Poverty shows up in repeated experiencing; so, also, does richness.
Of course this implies that it is possible in some sense to perceive potentialities which are not yet actual. This is not as difficult a research problem as it sounds.
The Rorschach test in the hands of an expert is also a perception of potentialities which are not yet actualized. This is a testable hypothesis in principle. This is also the classical Freudian view It assumes that the world can be seen only from the vantage point of the interests of the perceiver and that the experience must be organized around the ego as a centering and determining point.
I might add that this is an old point of view in American psychology. My findings indicate that in the normal perceptions of selfactualizing people and in the more occasional peak experiences of average people, perception can be relatively ego-transcending, self-forgetful, egoless. It can be unmotivated, impersonal, desireless, unselfish, not needing, detached.
It can be objectcentered rather than ego-centered. It is as if they were perceiving something that had independent reality of its own, and was not dependent upon the beholder.
Some writers on aesthetics, mysticism, on motherhood and on love, e. This could remind us of some of the definitions of empathy and of identification, and, of course, opens up the possibilities of research in this direction. The peak-experience is felt as a self-validating, self-justify- ing moment which carries its own intrinsic value with it. That is to say it is an end in itself, what we may call an endexperience rather than a means-experience.
It is felt to be so valuable an experience, so great a revelation, that even to attempt to justify it takes away from its dignity and worth. Particularly with the moment of insight in the therapeutic situation does this become obvious. Its breaking through into consciousness is sometimes crushing to the person. Seeing is better than being blind , even when seeing hurts. The mystics have always affirmed this great value of the great mystic experience which may come only two or three times in a lifetime.
The contrast is very sharp with the ordinary experiences of life, especially in the West, and, most especially, for American psychologists. Everything is done for the sake of some further goal, in order to achieve something else. The apotheosis of this attitude is reached by John Dewey in his theory of value 38 a , in which he finds no ends at all but only means to ends.
Even this statement is not quite accurate because it implies the existence of ends. Rather to be quite accurate he implies that means are means to other means, which in turn are means, and so on ad infinitum.
The peak-experiences of pure delight are for my subjects among the ultimate goals of living and the ultimate validations and justifications for it.
That the psychologist should by-pass them or even be officially unaware of their existence, or what is even worse, in the objectivistic psychologies, deny a priori the possibility of their existence as objects for scientific study, is incomprehensible. In all the common peak-experiences which I have studied, there is a very characteristic disorientation in time and space. It would be accurate to say that in these moments the person is outside of time and space subjectively.
In the creative furor, the poet or artist becomes oblivious of his surroundings, and of the passage of time. Frequently he has to shake his head as if emerging from a daze to rediscover where he is. But more than this is the frequent report, especially by lovers, of the complete loss of extension in time. Not only does time pass in their ecstasies with a frightening rapidity so that a day may pass as if it were a minute but also a minute so intensely lived may feel like a day or a year.
It is as if they had, in a way, some place in another world in which time simultaneously stood still and moved with great rapidity. For our ordinary categories, this is of course a paradox and a contradiction. And yet this is what is reported and it is therefore a fact that we must take account of. The judgment of the passing of time in peak-experience must be very inaccurate. So, also, must consciousness of surroundings be much less accurate than in normal living.
The implications of my findings for a psychology of ' values are very puzzling and yet so uniform that it is necessary not only to report them but also to try somehow to understand them. To start at the end first, the peak-experience is only good and desirable, and is never experienced as evil or undesirable.
The experience is intrinsically valid; the experience is perfect, complete and needs nothing else. It is sufficient to itself.
It is felt as being intrinsically necessary and inevitable. It is just as good as it should be. The philosophical implications here are tremendous. Of course this is not a denial of evil or pain or death but rather a reconciliation with it, an understanding of its necessity.
If we could be godlike in this sense then we, too, out of universal understanding would never blame or condemn or be disappointed or shocked. But this is precisely the way in which self-actualizing people do at times react to the world, and in which all of us react in our peak moments. This is precisely the way in which all psychotherapists try to react to their patients. We must grant, of course, that this godlike, universally tolerant, B-amused and B-accepting attitude is extremely difficult to attain, probably even impossible in a pure form, and yet we know that this is a relative matter.
We can approximate it more closely or less closely and it would be foolish to deny the phenomenon simply because it comes rarely, temporarily, and impurely.
Though we can never be gods in this sense, we can be more godlike or less godlike, more often or less often. In any case, the contrast with our ordinary cognitions and reactions is very sharp.
Ordinarily we proceed under the aegis of means-values, i. We evaluate, control, judge, condemn or approve. We laugh-at rather than laugh-with. We react to the experience in personal terms and perceive the world in reference to ourselves and our ends, thereby making the world no more than means to our ends. We perceive then in a deficiency-motivated way and can therefore perceive only D-values.
This is different from perceiving the whole world, or that portion of it which in the peak experience we take as surrogate for the world. Then and only then can we perceive its values rather than our own.
These I call the values of Being, or for short, the B-values. Ultimately they are all facets of Being rather than parts of it. Not only is this, then, a demonstration of fusion and unity of the old trinity of the true, the good, the beautiful, etc. I have elsewhere reported my finding 97 that truth, goodness and beauty are in the average person in our culture only fairly well correlated with each other, and in the neurotic person even less so.
I would now add that this is also true for other people in their peak experiences. Since it is felt to depend upon man for whatever reality it has, then if man were to disappear, it also would disappear. Its organizing frames of reference shift from the interests of the person to the demands of the situation, from the immediate in time to the past and the future and from the here to the there. In these senses experience and behavior are relative.
Peak experiences are from this point of view more absolute and less relative. It is certainly difficult and also dangerous scientifically to speak of relative and absolute, and I am aware that this is a semantic swamp. The concept of absolute has made difficulty partly because it has almost always been permeated with a static taint. Perception of an aesthetic object or a beloved face or a beautiful theory is a fluctuating, shifting process but this fluctuation of attention is strictly within the perception.
Its richness can be infinite and the continued gaze can go from one aspect of the perfection to another, now concentrating on one aspect of it, now on another.
Also it can be seen relatively in one moment, absolutely in the next. It can be both. Ordinary cognition is a very active process. It is char- acteristically a kind of shaping and selection by the beholder. In a word, he works at it Cognition is an energy-consuming process. It involves alertness, vigilance and tension and is, therefore, fatiguing. B-cognition is much more passive and receptive than active although, of course, it never can be completely so.
Krishnamurti 85 has an excellent phrase to describe my data. It can be humble before the experience, non-interfering, receiving rather than taking, it can let the percept be itself. It is gazing rather than looking, surrendering and submitting to the experience. I have also found useful a recent memorandum by John Shlien on the difference between passive listening and active, forceful listening.
He must not impose himself but rather let the words flow in upon him. Only so can their own shape and pattern be assimilated. As a matter of fact we may say that it is this criterion, of being able to be receiving and passive,, that marks off the good therapist from the poor one of whatever school. The poor therapist through a hundred years of clinical experience may find only repeated corroborations of the theories which he learned at the beginning of his career.
In the cognition of the peak-experience, the will does not interfere. It is held in abeyance. We cannot command the peak-experience. It happens to us. This sometimes has a touch of fear although pleasant fear of being overwhelmed. My subjects report this in such phrases as This is too much for me.
Not only my subjects but many writers on the various peak experiences have made the parallel with the experience of dying, that is, an eager dying. I could die now and it would be all right. Another paradox with which we must deal, difficult though it is, is found in the conflicting reports of perception of the world. In both cases the perception is of unity.
Probably the fact that the B-cognition of a painting or a person or a theory retains all the attributes of the whole of Being, i. This is the sense in which I shall use the terms abstract and concrete. That is, we mostly categorize, schematize, classify and abstract in our cognitive life. We do not so much cognize the nature of the world as it actually is, as we do the organization of our own inner world outlook. Since then I have found this same exceptional ability to pereceive the concrete in good artists and clinicians as well, even though not self-actualizing.
More recently I find this same ability in ordinary people in their peak moments. They are then more able to grasp the percept in its own concrete, idiosyncratic nature.
It is useful to understand the concrete perceiving which takes place in B-cognition as a perception of all aspects and attributes of the object simultaneously or in quick succession. Abstractions, to the extent that they are useful, are also false. In a word, to perceive an object abstractly means not to perceive some aspects of it. It clearly implies selection of some attributes, rejection of other attributes, creation or distortion of still others.
We make of it what we wish. We create it. We manufacture it. Furthermore, extremely important is the strong tendency in abstracting to relate the aspects of the object to our linguistic system. This makes special troubles because language is a secondary rather than a primary process in the Freudian sense, because it deals with external reality rather than psychic reality, with the conscious rather than the unconscious.
It is true that this lack can be corrected to some extent by poetic or rhapsodic language but in the last analysis much of experience is ineffable and can be put into no language at all. Let us take for example the perception of a painting or of a person. The moment that we say this man is, e. To a certain extent then, what we call knowing, i. He does not organize it; he simply stares at it. In the similar situation for the adult, to the extent that we can prevent ourselves from only abstracting, naming, placing, comparing, relating, to that extent will we be able to see more and more aspects of the many-sidedness of the person or of the painting.
Particularly I must underline the ability to perceive the ineffable, that which cannot be put into words. Trying to force it into words changes it, and makes it something other than it is, something else like it, something similar, and yet something different than it itself.
It is this ability to perceive the whole and to rise above parts which characterizes cognition in the various peak experiences. What I had thought to be straight-line continua, whose extremes were polar to each other and as far apart as possible, turned out to be rather like circles or spirals, in which the polar extremes came together into a fused unity. So also do I find this as a strong tendency in the full cognition of the object.
These seem to be products of partial cognition, and fade away with cognition of the whole. That is to say if he can be fully understood, then everything falls into its necessary place and he can be aesthetically perceived and appreciated. All his conflicts and splits turn out to have a kind of sense or wisdom.
Even the concepts of sickness and of health may fuse and blur when we see the symptom as a pressure toward health, or see the neurosis as the healthiest possible solution at the moment to the problems of the individual.
The theologians have long struggled with the impossible task of reconciling sin and evil and pain in the world with the concept of an all-powerful, all-loving, all knowing God.
A subsidiary difficulty has been presented by the task of reconciling the necessity of rewards and punishments for good and evil with this concept of an all-loving, all-forgiving God. B-perception is a momentary thing ordinarily.
It is a peak, a high spot, an occasional achievement. It looks as if human beings perceive most of the time in a deficiency way. That is, they compare, they judge, they approve, they relate, they use. Much more often, however, we perceive him as a part of the universe and related to the rest of it in many complex ways. But these are precisely the attributes assigned to most conceptions of a god except for amusement— strangely lacking in most gods.
In such moments we can then be godlike in these attributes. It is extremely interesting to me that all people behave at times as if they wanted to be B-cognized see Chapter 9. They resent being classified, categorized, rubricized. If such an acceptor cannot be found among human beings, then the very strong tendency appears to project and create a godlike figure, sometimes a human one, sometimes supernatural.
It is neither for man nor is it against him. It just is impersonally what it is. He shrugs his shoulders and if evil is defined anthropocentrically, he simply accepts evil as he does the seasons and the storms. Perception in the peak moment tends strongly to be idiographic and non-classificatory. The percept, whether a person or the world or a tree or work of art, tends to be seen as a unique instance, and as the only member of its class.
This is in contrast to our normal nomothetic way of handling the world which rests essentially on generalization and on an Aristotelian division of the world into classes of various sorts, of which the object is an example or sample. One cannot compare two objects which have nothing in common.
Furthermore for two objects to have something in common means necessarily abstraction, e. Every whole person from this point of view or every painting or every bird or flower becomes the sole member of a class and must therefore be perceived idiographically This willingness to see all aspects of the object means greater validity of perception This too implies a greater openness of perception since fear distorts. It may be thought of as pure gratification, pure expression, pure elation or joy.
We have seen that in these various peak-experiences, the person tends to become more integrated, more individual, more spontaneous, more expressive, more easy and effortless, more courageous, more powerful, etc. But these are similar or almost the same as the list of B-values described in previous pages. There seems to be a kind of dynamic parallelism or isomorphism here between the inner and the outer.
This is to say that as the essential Being of the world is perceived by the person, so also does he concurrently come closer to his own Being to his own perfection, of being more perfectly himself. This interaction effect seems to be in both directions, for as he comes closer to his own Being or perfection for any reason, this thereby enables him more easily to see the B-values in the world.
As he becomes more unified, he tends to be able to see more unity in the world. As he becomes more strong, so is he more able to see strength and power in the world. Each makes the other more possible, just as depression makes the world look less good, and vice versa. He and the world become more like each other as they both move toward perfection or as they both move toward loss of perfection , This of course is testable.
It will be helpful to some readers if I now attempt briefly to put all of this in another frame of reference which is more familiar to many, the psychoanalytic. Secondary processes deal with the real world outside the unconscious and preconscious In the 6th grade, I was tuning in to two young men contending.
Although, this opened my eyes as I had been pondering, as do numerous youngsters, as to my situation throughout everyday life. This book is situated in existentialistic reasoning a convention that is conformed to the free presence of the person as a dependable being.
However, effortlessly, pleasantly, serenely, in a completely mindful state and fit for tolerating what your identity is, as you seem to be, without the need of concern or bargain. This was an intriguing book, and however, I can perceive any reason why individuals have talked about it respectfully for a considerable length of time.
We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. Written in the style of Fritjof Capra's The Turning Point, an outline for instilling balanced spiritual progress throughout the Western world shares recommendations for promoting a prosperous global civilization that fulfills humanity's physical, psychological and spiritual needs.
With essays on biology, synergy, creativity, cognition, self-actualization, and the hierarchy of needs, this work is a wide-ranging synthesis of Maslow's inspiring and influential ideas. All rights reserved.
This engaging, comprehensive introduction to the field of personality psychology integrates discussion of personality theories, research, assessment techniques, and applications of specific theories. The Psychology of Personality introduces students to many important figures in the field and covers both classic and contemporary issues and research. The second edition reflects significant changes in the field but retains many of the special features that made it a textbook from which instructors found easy to teach and students found easy to learn.
Fuller traces the history of alternative spiritual practices in America including astrology, Transcendentalism, and channeling. The term theory, itself, has been conceived of in various ways in the psychological literature. Increase in problem-centering. Increased detachment and desire for privacy. Increased autonomy, and resistance to enculturation. Greater freshness of appreciation, and richness of emotional reaction.
Higher frequency of peak experiences. Increased identification with the human species. Changed the clinician would say, improved interpersonal relations. More democratic character structure.
Greatly increased creativeness. Certain changes in the value system. Furthermore, in this book are described also the limitations imposed upon the definition by unavoidable shortcomings in sampling and in availability of data. One major difficulty with this conception as so far presented is its somewhat static character.
If we define growth as the various processes which bring the person toward ultimate self-actualization, then this conforms better with the observed fact that it is going on all the time in the life history. One passes into the other and is a necessary prerequisite for it. For instance, not all physiological needs are deficits, e.
This approach is understandable in animal psychology and in the behaviorism which is so heavily based upon work with animals. It may be that animals have only deficiency needs. Whether or not this turns out to be so, in any case we have treated animals as if this were so for the sake of objectivity.
After all, this whole psychology is based upon experience with sick people, people who in fact suffer from bad experiences with their needs, and with their gratifications and frustrations.
It is no wonder that such people should fear or even loathe their impulses which have made so much trouble for them and which they handle so badly, and that a usual way of handling them is repression.
This derogation of desire and need has, of course, been a constant theme throughout the history of philosophy, theology and psychology. To put it as succinctly as possible, these people all find desire or impulse to be a nuisance or even a threat and therefore will try generally to get rid of it, to deny it or to avoid it. This contention is sometimes an accurate report of what is the case. The physiological needs, the needs for safety, for love, for respect, for information are in fact often nuisances for many people, psychic troublemakers, and problem-creators, especially for those who have had unsuccessful experiences at gratifying them and for those who cannot now count on gratification.
For example, if one has in general enjoyed food and if good food is now available, the emergence of appetite into consciousness is welcomed instead of dreaded. But some characteristics are general to all of them. And one is that these impulses are desired and welcomed, are enjoyable and pleasant, that the person wants more of them rather than less, and that if they constitute tensions, they are pleasurable tensions.
It is simply inaccurate to speak in such instances of tensionreduction, implying thereby the getting rid of an annoying state. For these states are not annoying. The drive or need presses toward its own elimination.
Its only striving is toward cessation, toward getting rid of itself, toward a state of not wanting. Angyal, Goldstein, G. Allport, C. Buhler, Schachtel and others have effectively criticized this essentially circular position. Why do people improve? Get wiser? What does zest in living mean? The latter theory speaks simply of removing tension which implies that zero tension is best. Homeostasis means coming not to a zero but to an optimum level.
Some long-time vector, or directional tendency, must be invoked to make any sense of development through the lifetime This theory must be put down as an inadequate description even of deficiency motivation.
However, when we examine people who are predominantly growth-motivated, the coming-to-rest conception of motivation becomes completely useless.
In such people gratification breeds increased rather than decreased motivation, heightened rather than lessened excitement. The appetites become intensified and heightened. The appetite for growth is whetted rather than allayed by gratification. Growth is, in itself, a rewarding and exciting process, e.
Activity can be enjoyed either intrinsically, for its own sake, or else have worth and value only because it is instrumental in bringing about a desired gratification. More frequently, it is simply not enjoyed at all, but only the goal is enjoyed. This is similar to that attitude toward life which values it less for its own sake than because one goes to Heaven at the end of it. But it also comes from the ability of healthy people to transform meansactivity into end-experience, so that even instrumental activity is enjoyed as if it were end activity Growth motivation may be long-term in character.
Allport particularly has stressed this point. Planfulness and looking into the future, he points out, are of the central stuff or healthy human nature. As such they distinguish human from animal becoming, and adult from infant becoming. If I may phrase what I am groping for here in a generalized way, it is this: satisfying deficiencies avoids illness; growth satisfactions produce positive health.
I must grant that this will be difficult to pin down for research purposes at this time. I have tried to express this as a contrast between living fully and preparing to live fully, between growing up and being grown. This is a crucial necessity for breaking through subjective ethical relativity and is a prerequisite for a scientific value theory.
Growth is instead a continued, more or less steady upward or forward development. The more one gets, the more one wants, so that this kind of wanting is endless and can never be attained or satisfied. They too are the same. The deficits, i. However, in both cases this is just where real development of individuality can begin, for once satiated with these elementary, species-wide necessities, each tree and each person proceeds to develop in his own style, uniquely, using these necessities for his own private purposes.
This means considerable dependence on the environment. A person in this dependent position cannot really be said to be governing himself, or in control of his own fate. This is the same as saying that he must adapt and adjust by being flexible and responsive and by changing himself to fit the external situation. Because of this, the deficiency-motivated man must be more afraid of the environment, since there is always the possibility that it may fail or disappoint him. We now know that this kind of anxious dependence breeds hostility as well.
All of which adds up to a lack of freedom, more or less, depending on the good fortune or bad fortune of the individual. Far from needing other people, growth-motivated people may actually be hampered by them. The determinants which govern them are now primarily inner ones, rather than social or environmental.
They are less anxious for honors, prestige and rewards. Autonomy or relative independence of environment means also relative independence of adverse external circumstances, such as ill fortune, hard knocks, tragedy, stress, deprivation.
This dependency colors and limits interpersonal relations. To see people primarily as need-gratifiers or as sources of supply is an abstractive act. He is loved because he is love-worthy rather than because he gives out love.
This is what will be discussed below as unneeding love, e. Since, for instance, the adolescent girl needs admiration per se, it therefore makes little difference who supplies this admiration; one admiration-supplier is about as good as another.
So also for the Iove-supplier or the safety-supplier. The more growth-motivated the person is the more problem-centered can he be, and the more he can leave self-consciousness behind him as he deals with the objective world. Neurosis can be seen as a deficiency-disease. Because this is so, a basic necessity for cure is supplying what has been lacking or making it possible for the patient to do this himself.
Since these supplies come from other people, ordinary therapy must be interpersonal. But this fact has been badly over-generalized. And yet it is unwise to forget that frequently the problems and the conflicts of the growth-motivated person are solved by himself by turning inward in a meditative way, i.
In the later stages of growth the person is essentially alone and can rely only upon himself. Who shall then lift him to the seventy-fifth percentile? Or the one hundredth? And are we not likely to need new principles and techniques to do this with? Change becomes much less an acquisition of habits or associations one by one, and much more a total change of the total person, i. The most important learning experiences reported to me by my subjects were very frequently single life experiences such as tragedies, deaths, traumata, conversions, and sudden insights, which forced change in the life-outlook of the person and consequently in everything that he did.
For instance, I think that our understanding of perception and therefore of the perceived world will be much changed and enlarged if we study carefully the distinction between needinterested and need-disinterested or desireless perception.
It is as if less developed people lived in an Aristotelian world in which classes and concepts have sharp boundaries and are mutually exclusive and incompatible, e. A is A and everything else is not-A in the Aristotelian logic, and never the twain shall meet. But seen by self-actualizing people is the fact that A and not-A interpenetrate and are one, that any person is simultaneously good and bad, male and female, adult and child. One cannot place a whole person on a continuum, only an abstracted aspect of a person.
Wholenesses are non-comparable. We may not be aware when we perceive in a need-determined way. But we certainly are aware of it when we ourselves are perceived in this way, e. We want to be taken for ourselves, as complete and whole individuals. We dislike being perceived as useful objects or as tools. Especially when the structure of the person or object seen is difficult, subtle, and not obvious is this difference in style of perception most important.
Especially then must the perceiver have respect for the nature of the object. Perception must then be gentle, delicate, unintruding, undemanding, able to fit itself passively to the nature of things as water gently soaks into crevices. The stress is the same. Do we see the real, concrete world or do we see our own system of rubrics, motives, expectations and abstractions which we have projected onto the real world?
Or, to put it very bluntly, do we see or are we blind? It is a hole which has to be filled, an emptiness into which love is poured. If the pathology is not too severe and if it is caught early enough, replacement therapy can cure. Love hunger is a deficiency disease, like salt hunger or the avitaminoses.
The healthy person, not having this deficiency, does not need to receive love except in steady, small, maintenance doses and he may even do without these for periods of time. But clinical study of healthier people, who have been love-need-satiated, show that although they need less to receive love, they are more able to give love. In this sense, they' are more loving people. I have already described in a preliminary fashion 97 the contrasting dynamics of B-love love for the Being of another person, unneeding love, unselfish love and D-love deficiencylove, love need, selfish love.
B-love is welcomed into consciousness, and is completely enjoyed. Since it is non-possessive, and is admiring rather than needing, it makes no trouble and is practically always pleasuregiving. It can never be sated; it may be enjoyed without end. It usually grows greater rather than disappearing.
It is intrinsically enjoyable. It is end rather than means. The therapeutic and psychogogic effects of experiencing B-love are very profound and widespread.
Similar are the characterological effects of the relatively pure love of a healthy mother for her baby, or the perfect love of their God that some mystics have described 69, D-love can be gratified.
In B-love there is a minimum of anxiety-hostility. There can, of course, be anxiety-for-the-other. In D-love one must always expect some degree of anxiety-hostility. The truest, most penetrating perception of the other is made possible by B-love. It is as much a cognitive as an emotional-conative reaction, as I have already emphasized 97, p. Finally, I may say that B-love, in a profound but testable sense, creates the partner. It gives him a self-image, it gives him self-acceptance, a feeling of love-worthiness, ail of which permit him to grow.
For once we accept the notion of growth, many questions of detail arise. Just how does growth take place? Why do children grow or not grow? How do they know in which direction to grow? How do they get off in the direction of pathology? After all, the concepts of self-actualization, growth and self are all high-level abstractions.
We need to get closer to actual processes, to raw data, to concrete, living happenings. These are far goals. They are living, not preparing to live. How can they manage, just being, spontaneously, not trying to grow, seeking only to enjoy the present activity, nevertheless to move forward step by step? How can we reconcile the facts of Being with the facts of Becoming? Growth is not in the pure case a goal out ahead, nor is self-actualization, nor is the discovery of Self.
The laws of deficiencymotivation and of purposeful coping do not hold for growth, for spontaneity, for creativeness. The danger with a pure Being-psychology is that it may tend to be static, not accounting for the facts of movement, direction and growth. It is self-justifying, self-validating. We do it for the same reason that we choose one dessert over another. I have already described this as a basic mechanism for falling in love, or for choosing a friend, i.
In this way, we learn what we are good at, what we really like or dislike, what our tastes and judgments and capacities are. In a word, this is the way in which we discover the Self and answer the ultimate questions Who am I? What am I? The steps and the choices are taken out of pure spontaneity, from within outward. Even when he is non-purposeful, non-coping, expressive, spontaneous, not motivated by any deficiency of the ordinary sort, he tends to try out his powers, to reach out, to be absorbed, fascinated, interested, to play, to wonder, to manipulate the world.
Spontaneous, creative experience can and does happen without expectations, plans, foresight, purpose, or goal. Then arise the inevitable questions. What holds him back? What prevents growth?
Wherein lies the conflict? What is the alternative to growth forward? Why is it so hard and painful for some to grow forward? Here we must become more fully aware of the fixative and regressive power of ungratified deficiency-needs, of the attractions of safety and security, of the functions of defense and protection against pain, fear, loss, and threat, of the need for courage in order to grow ahead. Every human being has both sets of forces within him. I can put all this together in a schema, which though very simple, is also very powerful, both heuristically and theoretically.
This basic dilemma or conflict between the defensive forces and the growth trends I conceive to be existential, imbedded in the deepest nature of the human beL.
Enhancing the growthward vectors, e. Minimizing the fears of growth, c. Minimizing the safetyward vectors, i. Maximizing the fears of safety, defensiveness, pathology and regression. Safety has both anxieties and delights; growth has both anxieties and delights.
We grow forward when the delights of growth and anxieties of safety are greater than the anxieties of growth and the delights of safety. So far it sounds like a truism. Young called a hedonic factor, over and above need-reduction, in order to explain the results so far obtained in free-choice experimentation. For example, saccharin is not need-reducing in any way and yet white rats will choose it over plain water.
Its useless taste must have something to do with it. Furthermore, observe that subjective delight in the experience is something that we can attribute to any organism, e. The possibility that then opens for us is very enticing for the theorist. Perhaps all these high-level concepts of Self, Growth, Self-realization, and Psychological Health can fall into the same system of explanation with appetite experiments in animals, free choice observations in infant feeding and in occupational choice, and the rich studies of homeostasis We rest here on the faith that if free choice is really free and if the chooser is not too sick or frightened to choose, he will choose wisely, in a healthy and growthward direction, more often than not.
We must know much more than we do about the reasons for bad and unwise choices, at the constitutional level and at the level of psychodynamics. There is another reason why my systematizing side likes this notion of growth-through-delight. I criticize the classical Freudians for tending in the extreme instance to pathologize everything and for not seeing clearly enough the healthward possibilities in the human being, for seeing everything through brown-colored glasses.
But the growth school in the extreme instance is equally vulnerable, for they tend to see through rose-colored glasses and generally slide over the problems of pathology, of weakness, of failure to grow.
Then he dares a little excursion, continually reassuring himself that the mother-security is intact. These excursions get more and more extensive. In this way, the child can explore a dangerous and unknown world. If suddenly the mother were to disappear, he would be thrown into anxiety, would cease to be interested in exploring the world, would wish only the return of safety, and might even lose his abilities, e. I think we may safely generalize this example.
Assured safety permits higher needs and impulses to emerge and to grow towards mastery. To endanger safety, means regression backward to the more basic foundation.
What this means is that in the choice between giving up safety or giving up growth, safety will ordinarily win out. Safety needs are prepotent over growth needs. This means an expansion of our basic formula. In general, only a child who feels safe dares to grow forward healthily. His safety needs must be gratified.
The more safety needs are gratified, the less valence they have for the child, the less they will beckon, and lower his courage. Now, how can we know when the child feels safe enough to dare to choose the new step ahead? Ultimately, the only way in which we can know is by his choices, which is to say only he can ever really know the right moment when the beckoning forces ahead overbalance the beckoning forces behind, and courage outweighs fear.
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