A description proposed for consensus.
These are the biological needs that are required for survival. If these foundational needs are not met, the human body cannot function at its optimal level. Maslow considered physiological needs as the most potent of all, because they separate life from death, and have the ability to make the other needs appear as non-existent.
If physiological needs are relatively well satisfied, a new set of needs emerges, which Maslow classifies as Safety Needs. These needs include:
If the previous two needs (physiological and safety) are well gratified, the next set of needs that would arise are love based needs:
Maslow says that all people (except for a few pathological exceptions) in our society have a need or desire for a stable and high evaluation of themselves. This evaluation of self would be based on real capacity, achievement and respect from others, it is comprised of the following:
A desire to be all one can be. Self-actualization needs can come in the forms of:
Self-actualizing people have an unusual ability to detect the spurious, the fake, and the dishonest in personality, and in general to judge people correctly and efficiently.
They can accept their own human nature, with all its shortcomings, with all its discrepancies from the ideal image without feeling real concern.
Their behavior is marked by simplicity and naturalness, and by lack of artificiality or straining for effect. His unconventionality is not superficial but essential or internal… and he is perhaps more human, more revealing of the original nature of the species.
Self-actualizing people are in general strongly focused on problems outside themselves… they are not generally much concerned about themselves… These individuals customarily have some mission in life, some task to fulfill, some problem outside themselves which enlists much of their energies.
For all my subjects it is true that they can be solitary without harm to themselves and without discomfort… it is true for almost all that they positively like solitude and privacy to a definite greater degree than the average person.
Self-actualized people are not dependent for their main satisfactions on the real world, or other people or culture or means to ends or, in general, on extrinsic satisfactions. Rather they are dependent for their own development and continued growth of their own potentialities.
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, however stale these experiences may have become to others… for such a person, any sunset may be as beautiful as the first one.
Feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one ever was before, the feeling of great ecstasy and wonder and awe, the loss of placing in time and space with, finally, the conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened. Peaking self-actualized people tend to live in a realm of being; of poetry, esthetics; symbols; transcendence, “religion” of the mystical, personal, non-institutional sort; and of end-experiences.
Self-actualizing people have for human beings in general a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection in spite of the occasional anger, impatience, or disgust… because of this they have a genuine desire to help the human race as if they were all members of a single family.
Self actualizing people have deeper and more profound interpersonal relations than any other adults (although not necessarily deeper than those of children.) They are capable of more fusion, greater love, more perfect identification, more obliteration of the ego boundaries than other people would consider possible.
All my subjects may be said to be democratic people in the deepest possible sense… they can be and are friendly with anyone of a suitable character regardless of class, education, political belief, race or color… it is as if they are not even aware of these differences.” (Maslow, 1970). These individuals often select friends of an elite nature, thought not elite in birthright, race or color; but rather eliteness of character, capacity and talent.
These individuals are strongly ethical, they have definite moral standards, they do right and do not do wrong. Needless to say, their notions of right and wrong and good and evil are often not the conventional ones.
“Their sense of humor is not of the ordinary type. They do not consider funny what the average man considers to be funny. They do not laugh at hostile humor or superiority humor… characteristically what they consider humor is more closely allied to philosophy than anything else… more akin to parables or fables.
Each one shows in one way or another a special kind of creativeness or originality or inventiveness that has certain peculiar characteristics… which is akin to the universal creativeness of unspoiled children.
“Self-actualizing people are not well adjusted (in the naive sense of approval of and identification with the culture). They get along with the culture in various ways, but of all of them it may be said that in a certain profound and meaningful sense they resist enculturation and maintain inner detachment from the culture in which they are immersed.