Term Paper on "Humanistic Existential Model vs. Cognitive Behavioural"

Term Paper 13 pages (3835 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Maslow's Models

In his experiments with monkeys early in his career, Abraham Maslow, a leading American psychologist, noticed that certain needs are stronger or more basic than others. Food, water, air and sex are basic needs that men and animals require to survive, but air is the strongest or most important, followed by water, food and then sex (Boeree 1970). He figured that motivation derives from these basic needs for survival, which are physiological in nature, and from them, he derived a hierarchy of needs. He arranged these needs under five broad categories, i.e. physiological, safety and security, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization, whereby one category cannot be achieved unless the previous one is satisfied. Until it is satisfied, motivation is fixated at that level. Maslow proposed that all motivation is towards self-actualization (Boerre).

Physiological needs cover everything required by organic survival against death, not restricted to air, water, food, and sex and are numerous (Simone et al. 1987), depending on the description. These include protein, salt, sugar, minerals, vitamins, a normal pH balance, a given temperature, sleep, activity, elimination of wastes, the avoidance of pain and even Vitamin C (Boeree 1970). When these organic needs are constantly satisfied, the organism or person becomes free and motivated to pursue and fulfill the next higher category of needs.

In the second category are needs for safety and a sense of security, stability, dependency, protection, freedom from fear and anxiety. When physical and biological needs are met, the individual looks out of himself and seeks for protection in his environment (Simone et al. 1987). He wants to live under safe and secure circumstances, looks for a stable environmental structure, a safe neighborhood, job security, insurance and retirement plans. If these needs are satisfied, the person proceeds to the next higher category. Otherwise, his motivation remains in that unsatisfied or incompletely satisfied category.

Needs for belongingness and love evolve around giving and receiving affection. If these are not gratified sufficiently, the person will hunger for relationships with people in general (Boeree 1970), specifically for a place in a family. If the needs are not filled, the person will react intensely to the absence of friends, a mate or children and go to extreme ends to fill them. Achieving this belonging becomes the most important of all his pursuits. When he was in the physiological phase, love did not seem too real or important. But now he is most besieged by loneliness, rejection, friendlessness or not having a family or roots. The feeling of belonging is his foremost motivation. This is experienced in everyday life, not only by a desire to marry and have a family, but also by becoming part of a community, an organization or a career (Boeree 1970)

With the first three categories of needs fulfilled, the person now seeks the need to be valued or esteemed by others. The need may be a desire to become strong, to achieve, to become adequate, to master, and gain confidence, or to gain reputation or prestige. Every detail points to esteem by others, status, fame and glory, dominance, dignity and importance (Simone et al. 1987). The person wants to develop self-confidence, a sense of worth, strength, capability and usefulness to the world. When the need is frustrated, the person develops a sense of inferiority, weakness and helplessness.

Maslow pointed to a lower need and a higher need for self-esteem (Boeree 1970). A person with the lower kind of need for self-esteem seeks the respect of others, status, fame, glory, recognition, attention, reputation, appreciation or mastery and dominance over others. The higher form involves the need for self-respect, as in a feeling of self-confidence, achievement, independence and freedom. The difference is that a person who has already achieved self-respect, it is difficult to lose (Boeree 1970). Maslow believed that most psychological and safety problems occur in this stage in the form of low self-esteem and inferiority complexes. Physical and environmental needs are no problem with advanced countries today and the need for belonging and love is relatively attained as well. But most troubles begin with the difficulty of obtaining other people's esteem.

Maslow described the four categories or levels of need as deficit needs or D-needs. They are deficit needs in that a person feels the need if it is not satisfied or filled (Boerre 1970) adequately, but feels nothing at all when it is met adequately. The person inherently seeks homeostasis or balance, not just in the biological or physiological level, but also in the psychological or emotional level. Maslow viewed all the four levels of needs as survival requirements, so that even love and esteem become necessary for the maintenance of health as instinctively as genetic structures. He suggested that strong and unresolved conflicts in any phase or category, during which a person feels extreme insecurity, can fixate that person or develop neurosis in him. These conflicts include extreme hunger in childhood, the death or loss of a family member, severe neglect or abuse (Boeree). Neurosis can turn up later in life when a person performs unexplainable compulsions or obsessions without warranted causes for them, like checking out on locked doors, keeping the kitchen well-stocked and seeking reassurances of one's importance. Neurosis is a psychological malfunction or disorder.

The last level or category of needs is vastly different from the first four. Maslow believed that meeting all the first four levels can still produce a different kind of restlessness and discontent until and unless a person becomes what he is fit to do or become. This is the self-actualization category (Simone et al. 1987), where the person comes to an ultimate fulfillment. A musician, for example, reaches self-actualization when he or she makes music, when an artist paints or writes, when he or she becomes true to himself or herself or true nature. Maslow later redefined this category as a function of peak experiences (Simone et al.), wherein one is taken out of himself or herself, feels very small or very large with nature or God and part of the infinite (Boeree 1970). Peak experiences create so much impact as to change a person. They are also called mystical experiences among religious and philosophical sectors

Maslow also called it growth motivation, as opposed to deficit motivation, and B. Or being needs, as differentiated from D. Or deficit needs. Self-actualization does not require balance or homeostasis, as do deficit needs (Boeree 1970). Deficit needs stop when satisfied and the person graduates to a higher level, but self-actualization increases as it is fed. It establishes a continuous desire to fulfill one's potential, or the most and the best that one can be. Maslow argued that actualizing oneself requires that all preceding and lower needs must be adequately met. The hungry must first be adequately fed, the unloved be unconditionally loved, and the emotionally insecure sufficiently assured that he or she is worthwhile before they can begin to approach and realize their potentials. Frank and stark conditions of increasing unrest, poverty, crime and disease in the world suggest that not too many have come to this level, where Maslow proposed only two per cent of human beings belong (Boeree).

Maslow experimented on an initial group of self-actualizers through a method called biographical analysis. These self-actualizers included Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Benedict Spinoza, Albert Schweitzer, Aldous Huxley and 12 others living during Maslow's time. He studied their biographies, works, actions and words and, from these, developed a list of common qualities among them and uncommon among average individuals (Boeree 1970). He found that these prominent figures were reality-centered, problem-centered, and perceived means and ends differently; had a different way of relating with others, a fresh and un-hostile sense of humor. Maslow's experiment showed that a self-actualizer enjoys or is comfortable with aloneness or solitude, has few close friendships and relationships in contrast with those who demand or form many but shallow relationships; has and enjoys autonomy and independence; shows respect and appreciation for others as he or she respects and appreciates himself or herself; and is humble (Boerre). As already mentioned, the self-actualizer has frequent peak experiences, which set him or her apart from the ordinary person quite distinctively.

By his hierarchy of needs, Maslow maintained that the human personality is so constructed that his ultimate fulfillment and existence depend on the adequate satisfaction of each category of needs in that exact chronology or timetable. The more need categories fulfilled, the nearer the person gets to the fullness of his existence, hence Maslow's humanist-existential approach to personality development. In counseling, a person's past is recorded, analyzed and evaluated in search for fixations in any of the stages, as these fixations are the motivations of that person's behavior, whether conscious or unconscious. Maslow's method gives greatest focus on his physical, psychological and social needs as a person and his or her right to become the most and best of what he or she can be (Simone et al. 1987, Boeree 1970).

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