282 Part III   Humanistic/Existential Theories

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. Maslow’s own
life story demonstrated his Jonah complex. Despite an IQ of 195, he was only an
average student, and, as a world-famous psychologist, he frequently experienced
panic when called on to deliver a talk.
Why do people run away from greatness and self-fulfillment? Maslow (1971,
1996) offered the following rationale. First, the human body is simply not strong
enough to endure the ecstasy of fulfillment for any length of time, just as peak
experiences and sexual orgasms would be overly taxing if they lasted too long.
Therefore, the intense emotion that accompanies perfection and fulfillment carries
with it a shattering sensation such as “This is too much” or “I can’t stand it anymore.”
Maslow (1971) listed a second explanation for why people evade greatness.
Most people, he reasoned, have private ambition to be great, to write a great novel,
to be a movie star, to become a world-famous scientist, and so on. 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?” As a defense against this grandiosity or “sinful pride,” they lower
their aspirations, feel stupid and humble, and adopt the self-defeating approach of
running away from the realization of their full potentials.
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.

Psychotherapy
To Maslow (1970), the aim of therapy would be for clients to embrace the Being-
values, that is, to value truth, justice, goodness, simplicity, and so forth. To accom-
plish this aim, clients must be free from their dependency on others so that their
natural impulse toward growth and self-actualization could become active. Psycho-
therapy cannot be value free but must take into consideration the fact that everyone
has an inherent tendency to move toward a better, more enriching condition,
namely self-actualization.
The goals of psychology follow from the client’s position on the hierarchy
of needs. Because physiological and safety needs are prepotent, people operating
on these levels will not ordinarily be motivated to seek psychotherapy. Instead,
they will strive to obtain nourishment and protection.
Most people who seek therapy have these two lower level needs relatively
well satisfied but have some difficulty achieving love and belongingness needs.
Therefore, psychotherapy is largely an interpersonal process. Through a warm,
loving, interpersonal relationship with the therapist, the client gains satisfaction of
love and belongingness needs and thereby acquires feelings of confidence and
self-worth. A healthy interpersonal relationship between client and therapist is
therefore the best psychological medicine. This accepting relationship gives clients
a feeling of being worthy of love and facilitates their ability to establish other
 Chapter 9   Maslow: Holistic-Dynamic Theory 283

healthy relationships outside of therapy. This view of psychotherapy is nearly iden-

tical to that of Carl Rogers, as we discuss in Chapter 10.

Related Research
As you just read, one of the most notable aspects of Maslow’s theory of personal-
ity is the concept of a hierarchy of needs. Some needs such as physiological
and safety needs are lower order needs, whereas needs like esteem and self-
actualization are higher order. Generally speaking, according to Maslow’s the-
ory the lower order needs must be met early in life, whereas the higher order
needs such as self-actualization tend to be fulfilled later in life.
Recently, researchers have tested this aspect of Maslow’s theory by measur-
ing need fulfillment in a sample of 1,749 people of all age groups (Reiss & Haver-
camp, 2006). In this study, participants completed a questionnaire that asked about
their fulfillment of needs. These needs were divided into two types of motivation:
lower motivation (e.g., eating and physical exercise) and higher motivation (e.g.,
honor, family, and idealism). The results supported Maslow’s theory. The research-
ers found that the lower motives were stronger in younger people, whereas the
higher motives were stronger in older people. Recall that in order to focus on
fulfilling the highest order needs such as esteem and self-actualization, people must
first have fulfilled the lower order needs. Therefore, as Maslow theorized and as
Reiss and Havercamp (2006) found, if people can secure the most basic needs early
in life, they have more time and energy to focus on achieving the highest reaches
of human existence later in life.

Mindfulness and Self-Actualization

Mindfulness is a Buddhist concept that has begun to be examined in Western ther-
apeutic and scientific domains. It is a difficult concept to define, but one premier
researcher in the arena of mindfulness, Ellen Langer, defines the state as “the process
of drawing novel distinctions . . . . Actively drawing these distinctions keeps us ­situated
in the present” (Langer & Moldoveanu, 2000, p. 2). Mindful observers are open to
directly experiencing events, without judgment or elaboration. Put simply, to be
mindful is to be present and aware. Empirical studies have shown that mindfulness
is good for us; it is negatively correlated with depression and anxiety, and positively
correlated with positive affect and empathy (e.g., Brown & Ryan, 2003). Given that
Maslow viewed self-actualization as a pathway toward psychological health, Mark
Beitel and colleagues (2014) hypothesized that self-actualization and mindfulness
must be related, and they conducted an exploratory study to examine this relationship.
Maslow (1971) observed that self-actualizing people attend to the world in
ways that come very close to descriptions of mindfulness: intensely, with a contin-
ued freshness of appreciation, and an acceptance of things as they are. Furthermore,
the practice of mindfulness meditation likely brings with it moments much like
Maslow’s peak experiences—mystical and transcendent. Beitel and colleagues
(2014) gave 204 American undergraduate students both of the contemporary mea-
sures of self-actualization discussed earlier in this chapter. They completed the
BISA-R (Sumerlin & Bundrick, 1998), which, as you may recall, involves four fea-
tures of Maslow’s theorizing about the B-values: Autonomy, Core Self-Actualization,
284 Part III   Humanistic/Existential Theories

Comfort with Solitude, and Openness to Experience. They also completed the SISA,
derived from the Personal Orientation Inventory. In addition, the students completed
two measures of mindfulness. The first, the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness
Skills (KIMS; Baer et al., 2004), assesses four features of mindfulness: observing,
describing, acting with awareness, and accepting without judgment. The Mindful
Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS; Brown & Ryan, 2003) asks participants indirect
questions about being attentive and aware. This is because preliminary research
revealed that asking people to directly endorse mindfulness statements led to inflated
estimates. This scale, instead, asks questions about mindlessness, and hence gets at
people’s levels of mindfulness indirectly (e.g., “I find it difficult to stay focused on
what’s happening in the present”; “I rush through activities without being really
attentive to them”).
Results revealed a significant positive correlation between both the MAAS
mindfulness measure and the most general SISA self-actualization measure. So the
more mindful participants reported themselves to be, the higher they scored on the
general measure of self-actualization. Second, the relationships between the factors of
the BISA-R and the mindfulness measures revealed that the acceptance feature of
mindfulness and the autonomy feature of self-actualization were the driving factors
among all the variables of interest. The authors state: “The strong relationship
between acceptance and autonomy suggests that the highly non-judgmental, non
self-critical individual is also quite independent and self-confident in ways that support
self-actualization” (Beitel et al., 2014, p. 198). Several null findings in this study were
also interesting. One of them was that the mindfulness feature of non-judgmental
acceptance was not related to self-actualization generally nor to openness to experience.
Maslow’s theorizing around the self-actualization process seems to fit with this: mind-
ful practice may, in fact, be antithetical to the goal oriented features of the process of
engaging the B-values in self-actualization, because some judging of “good and bad”
or “right and wrong” is likely part and parcel of that self-development process.
Because this study was correlational in nature, we cannot say which comes
first. Do self-actualizers become more mindful? Or does the practice of mindful-
ness launch us into and support the process of self-actualizing? In any case, the
positive relationship between these two important constructs provides a fascinating
link between Buddhism and humanistic psychology. Future research will need to
explore the direction of causality between mindfulness and self-actualization.

Positive Psychology
Positive psychology is a relatively new field of psychology that combines an empha-
sis on hope, optimism, and well-being with scientific research and assessment. Many
of the questions examined by positive psychologists stem directly from humanistic
theorists such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers (see Chapter 10). Like Maslow
and Rogers, positive psychologists are critical of traditional psychology, which has
resulted in a model of the human being as lacking the positive features that make life
worth living. Hope, wisdom, creativity, future mindedness, courage, spirituality, respon-
sibility, and positive experiences are ignored (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000).
One area of positive psychology where Maslow’s ideas have been par-
ticularly influential is in the role of positive experiences in people’s lives.
 Chapter 9   Maslow: Holistic-Dynamic Theory 285

Maslow referred to extremely positive experiences that involve a sense of awe,

wonder, and reverence as peak experiences. While such experiences are more
common among self-actualizers, they can be experienced to various degrees by
other people as well. Recently, researchers have investigated the potential ben-
efits that come from reexperiencing, through writing or thinking, such positive
experiences. In one such study, participants were instructed to write about a
positive experience or experiences for 20 minutes each day for 3 consecutive
days (Burton & King, 2004). Instructions given to participants before starting
were derived directly from Maslow’s writings on peak experiences, and they
asked participants to write about their “happiest moments, ecstatic moments,
moments of rapture, perhaps from being in love, from listening to music or
suddenly ‘being hit’ by a book or painting or from some great creative moment”
(p. 155). Experiencing such positive awe-inspiring events will undoubtedly
enhance positive emotion, and, as this study tested, perhaps simply recalling such
events from the past by writing about them can also enhance positive emotion.
The experience of positive emotion is generally a good thing and has been
­associated with enhanced coping resources, better health, creativity, and prosocial
behaviors (Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005). Therefore, Burton and King
predicted that writing about these peak or intensely positive experiences would
be associated with better physical health in the months following the writing
exercise. Indeed, Burton and King (2004) found that those who wrote about pos-
itive experiences, compared to those in a control condition who wrote about non-
emotional topics such as a description of their bedroom, visited the doctor fewer
times for illness during the 3 months after writing.
Positive psychology focuses on how positive experiences affect one’s per-
sonality and one’s life. Moreover, an important quality of self-actualizing people
is their capacity to have “peak experiences”—feeling unified with the universe and
more humble and powerful at the same time. Maslow also mentioned awe as part
of the peak experience. In the last 10 to 15 years, research on the nature and
experience of the positive emotion of awe has begun to garner serious scientific
attention (Keltner & Haidt, 2003; Shiota, Keltner, & Mossman, 2007). Awe is
defined as experiencing the feelings of vastness and expansiveness while at the
same time needing to alter or accommodate one’s perceptions of the world (that
is, it changes how we view ourselves in the world) (Keltner & Haidt, 2003).
In a series of three experimental studies, Rudd and colleagues (2012) examined
how the experience of awe affects people’s sense of how much time they have and
whether they would donate their time as well as their preference of experience over
material things and how satisfied they feel about their lives. They predicted that awe
would increase people’s sense that they have time for things, make them more gen-
erous with their time, increase their preference for experience over material things,
and would boost their sense of satisfaction with life. In three separate experiments,
they randomly assigned half the participants to experience awe. In the first study awe
was induced by showing participants a 60-second video of people experiencing vast
and mentally overwhelming realistic scenes such as waterfalls, whales, and astronauts
in space. In the second study awe was induced by having people reflect upon and
then write when they had “a response to things perceived as vast and overwhelming
and alters the way you understand the world” (Rudd et al., 2012, p. 4). In the third
286 Part III   Humanistic/Existential Theories

study awe was induced by having participants read a story of going up the Eiffel
Tower and then seeing Paris from hundreds of feet above ground. Each of these
procedures resulted in significant increases in participants’ experience of awe.
As predicted, people who experienced awe expanded their sense of having
time, increased their willingness to donate their time (but had no effect on their
willingness to donate money) for pro-social causes. Finally, the experience of awe
increases (at least temporarily) one’s overall satisfaction with one’s life.
These studies demonstrate the importance of reflecting and reliving the most
positive or “peak” experiences in our lives. Recall from earlier in the chapter that
Abraham Maslow predicted that peak experiences often have a lasting impact on
people’s lives. The recent research in the area of positive psychology reviewed in
this section certainly supports this aspect of Maslow’s theory.

Critique of Maslow
Maslow’s search for the self-actualizing person did not end with his empirical stud-
ies. In his later years, he would frequently speculate about self-actualization with
little evidence to support his suppositions. Although this practice opens the door for
criticizing Maslow, he was unconcerned about desacralized, or orthodox, science.
Nevertheless, we use the same criteria to evaluate holistic-dynamic personal-
ity theory as we do with the other theories. First, how does Maslow’s theory rate
on its ability to generate research? On this criterion, we rate Maslow’s theory a
little above average. Self-actualization remains a popular topic with researchers,
and the tests of self-actualization have facilitated efforts to investigate this illusive
concept. However, Maslow’s notions about metamotivation, the hierarchy of needs,
the Jonah complex, and instinctoid needs have received less research interest.
On the criterion of falsifiability, we must rate Maslow’s theory low. Research-
ers remained handicapped in their ability to falsify or confirm Maslow’s means of
identifying self-actualizing people. Maslow said that his self-actualizing people
refused to take any tests that might assess self-actualization. If this is true, then
the various inventories that purport to measure self-actualization may be incapable
of identifying the truly self-actualizing person. However, if researchers wish to
follow Maslow’s lead and use personal interviews, they will have few guidelines
to direct them. Because Maslow failed to provide an operational definition of self-
actualization and a full description of his sampling procedures, researchers cannot
be certain that they are replicating Maslow’s original study or that they are iden-
tifying the same syndrome of self-actualization. Maslow left future researchers with
few clear guidelines to follow when attempting to replicate his studies on self-
actualization. Lacking operational definitions of most of Maslow’s concepts,
researchers are able to neither verify nor falsify much of his basic theory.
Nevertheless, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs framework gives his theory excel-
lent flexibility to organize what is known about human behavior. Maslow’s theory
is also quite consistent with common sense. For example, common sense suggests
that a person must have enough to eat before being motivated by other matters.
Starving people care little about political philosophy. Their primary motivation is
to obtain food, not to sympathize with one political philosophy or another. Simi-
larly, people living under threat to their physical well-being will be motivated
 Chapter 9   Maslow: Holistic-Dynamic Theory 287

mostly to secure safety, and people who have physiological and safety needs rela-
tively satisfied will strive to be accepted and to establish a love relationship.
Does Maslow’s theory serve as a guide to the practitioner? On this criterion,
we rate the theory as highly useful. For example, psychotherapists who have clients
with threatened safety needs must provide a safe and secure environment for those
clients. Once clients have satisfied their safety needs, the therapist can work to
provide them with feelings of love and belongingness. Likewise, personnel manag-
ers in business and industry can use Maslow’s theory to motivate workers. The
theory suggests that increases in pay cannot satisfy any needs beyond the physio-
logical and safety levels. Because physiological and safety needs are already largely
gratified for the average worker in the United States, wage increases per se will not
permanently increase worker morale and productivity. Pay raises can satisfy higher
level needs only when workers see them as recognition for a job well done. Maslow’s
theory suggests that business executives should allow workers more responsibility
and freedom, tap into their ingenuity and creativity in solving problems, and encour-
age them to use their intelligence and imagination on the job.
Is the theory internally consistent? Unfortunately, Maslow’s arcane and often
unclear language makes important parts of his theory ambiguous and inconsistent.
Apart from the problem of idiosyncratic language, however, Maslow’s theory ranks
high on the criterion of internal consistency. The hierarchy of needs concept fol-
lows a logical progression, and Maslow hypothesized that the order of needs is the
same for everyone, although he does not overlook the possibility of certain rever-
sals. Aside from some deficiencies in his scientific methods, Maslow’s theory has
a consistency and precision that give it popular appeal.
Is Maslow’s theory parsimonious, or does it contain superfluous fabricated
concepts and models? At first glance, the theory seems quite simplistic. A hierar-
chy of needs model with only five steps gives the theory a deceptive appearance
of simplicity. A full understanding of Maslow’s total theory, however, suggests a
far more complex model. Overall, the theory is moderately parsimonious.

Concept of Humanity
Maslow believed that all of us can be self-actualizing; our human nature
carries with it a tremendous potential for being a Good Human Being. If we
have not yet reached this high level of functioning, it is because we are in
some manner crippled or pathological. We fail to satisfy our self-actualization
needs when our lower level needs become blocked: that is, when we cannot
satisfy our needs for food, safety, love and belongingness, and esteem. This
insight led Maslow to postulate a hierarchy of basic needs that must be
regularly satisfied before we become fully human.
Maslow concluded that true human nature is seen only in self-actuaized
people, and that “there seems no intrinsic reason why everyone should not
be this way. Apparently, every baby has possibilities for self-actualization,
but most get it knocked out of them” (Lowry, 1973, p. 91). In other words,
288 Part III   Humanistic/Existential Theories

self-actualizing people are not ordinary people with something added, but
rather ordinary people with nothing taken away. That is, if food, safety, love,
and esteem are not taken away from people, then those people will move
naturally toward self-actualization.
Maslow was generally optimistic and hopeful about humans, but he
recognized that people are capable of great evil and destruction. Evil, how-
ever, stems from the frustration or thwarting of basic needs, not from the
essential nature of people. When basic needs are not met, people may steal,
cheat, lie, or kill.
Maslow believed that society, as well as individuals, can be improved,
but growth for both is slow and painful. Nevertheless, these small forward steps
seem to be part of humanity’s evolutionary history. Unfortunately, most people
“are doomed to wish for what they do not have” (Maslow, 1970, p. 70). In other
words, although all people have the potential for self-actualization, most will
live out their lives struggling for food, safety, or love. Most societies, Maslow
believed, emphasize these lower level needs and base their educational and
political systems on an invalid concept of humanity.
Truth, love, beauty, and the like are instinctoid and are just as basic to
human nature as are hunger, sex, and aggression. All people have the
potential to strive toward self-actualization, just as they have the motivation
to seek food and protection. Because Maslow held that basic needs are
structured the same for all people and that people satisfy these needs at
their own rate, his holistic-dynamic theory of personality places moderate
emphasis on both uniqueness and similarities.
From both a historical and an individual point of view, humans are an
evolutionary animal, in the process of becoming more and more fully human.
That is, as evolution progresses, humans gradually become more motivated
by metamotivations and by the B-values. High level needs exist, at least as
potentiality, in everyone. Because people aim toward self-actualization,
Maslow’s view can be considered teleological and purposive.
Maslow’s view of humanity is difficult to classify on such dimensions
as determinism versus free choice, conscious versus unconscious, or bio-
logical ­versus social determinants of personality. In general, the behavior of
people motivated by physiological and safety needs is determined by out-
side forces, whereas the behavior of self-actualizing people is at least par-
tially shaped by free choice.
On the dimension of consciousness versus unconsciousness, Maslow
held that self-actualizing people are ordinarily more aware than others of
what they are doing and why. However, motivation is so complex that people
may be driven by several needs at the same time, and even healthy people
are not always fully aware of all the reasons underlying their behavior.
As for biological versus social influences, Maslow would have insisted
that this dichotomy is a false one. Individuals are shaped by both biology and
society, and the two cannot be separated. Inadequate genetic endowment
does not condemn a person to an unfulfilled life, just as a poor social envi-
ronment does not preclude growth. When people achieve self-actualization,
they experience a wonderful synergy among the biological, social, and
 Chapter 9   Maslow: Holistic-Dynamic Theory 289

spiritual aspects of their lives. Self-actualizers receive more physical enjoy-

ment from the sensuous pleasures; they experience deeper and richer inter-
personal relationships; and they receive pleasure from spiritual qualities such
as beauty, truth, goodness, justice, and perfection.

Key Terms and Concepts

∙ Maslow assumed that motivation affects the whole person; it is
complete, often unconscious, continual, and applicable to all people.
∙ People are motivated by four dimensions of needs: conative (willful
striving), aesthetic (the need for order and beauty), cognitive (the need
for curiosity and knowledge), and neurotic (an unproductive pattern of
relating to other people).
∙ The conative needs can be arranged on a hierarchy, meaning that one
need must be relatively satisfied before the next need can become active.
∙ The five conative needs are physiological, safety, love and
belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization.
∙ Occasionally, needs on the hierarchy can be reversed, and they are
frequently unconscious.
∙ Coping behavior is motivated and is directed toward the satisfaction of
basic needs.
∙ Expressive behavior has a cause but is not motivated; it is simply one’s
way of expressing oneself.
∙ Conative needs, including self-actualization, are instinctoid; that is, their
deprivation leads to pathology.
∙ The frustration of self-actualization needs results in metapathology and a
rejection of the B-values.
∙ Acceptance of the B-values (truth, beauty, humor, etc.) is the criterion
that separates self-actualizing people from those who are merely healthy
but mired at the level of esteem.
∙ The characteristics of self-actualizers include (1) a more efficient
perception of reality; (2) acceptance of self, others, and nature; (3)
spontaneity, simplicity, and naturalness; (4) a problem-centered approach to
life; (5) the need for privacy; (6) autonomy; (7) freshness of appreciation;
(8) peak experiences; (9) social interest; (10) profound interpersonal
relations; (11) a democratic attitude; (12) the ability to discriminate means
from ends; (13) a philosophical sense of humor; (14) creativeness; and
(15) resistance to enculturation.
∙ In his philosophy of science, Maslow argued for a Taoistic attitude, one
that is noninterfering, passive, receptive, and subjective.
∙ The Personal Orientation Inventory (POI) is a standardized test designed
to measure self-actualizing values and behavior.
∙ The Jonah complex is the fear of being or doing one’s best.
∙ Psychotherapy should be directed at the need level currently being
thwarted, in most cases love and belongingness needs.
CHAPTER 10

Rogers: Person-
Centered Theory

⬥ Overview of Client-Centered Theory

⬥ Biography of Carl Rogers
⬥ Person-Centered Theory
Basic Assumptions
The Self and Self-Actualization
Awareness
Becoming a Person
Barriers to Psychological Health
⬥ Psychotherapy
Conditions
Process Rogers © Carl Rogers Memorial Library,
Center for Studies of the Person
Outcomes
⬥ The Person of Tomorrow
⬥ Philosophy of Science ⬥ Related Research
⬥ The Chicago Studies Self-Discrepancy Theory
Hypotheses Motivation and Pursuing One’s Goals
Method ⬥ Critique of Rogers
Findings ⬥ Concept of Humanity
Summary of Results ⬥ Key Terms and Concepts

290