50 Psychology Classics (40 page)

Awareness of life as a series of choices—one way advances us toward personal growth, the other involves a regression.

Being aware that you have a self and listening to its voice, rather than the voice of a parent or society.

Deciding to be honest, and as a result taking responsibility for what you think and feel. The willingness to say “No, I don't like such and such,” even if it makes you unpopular.

Willingness to work and apply yourself in order make the most of your abilities. In whatever field you are in, to be among the best.

Real desire to uncover your psychological defenses and give them up.

Being willing to see other people in their best light, “under the aspect of eternity.”

What were the implications of studying only healthy, creative, fully realized people? Not surprisingly, Maslow concluded, “You get a different view of mankind.”

It is hard to see now what a revolution Maslow sparked in deciding on this focus, but remember that it occurred within a medical paradigm framed only on psychological illness. Maslow felt that psychology should rather be focused on “full humanness.” In this context, a neurotic person becomes simply a person who is “not yet fully actualized.” This may seem like a semantic difference, but it actually represented a sea change in psychology.

Why is it that we are all born with limitless potential, yet few people fulfill those possibilities? One of the reasons Maslow put forward is what he called the “Jonah complex.” The Biblical Jonah was a timid merchant who tried to resist God's call for him to go on an important mission. Maslow's complex refers to the “fear of one's greatness,” or avoiding our true destiny or calling.

Maslow observed that we fear our best as much as our worst. Perhaps it seems too frightening to have a mission in life, so instead we take on a series of jobs for survival's sake. We all have perfect moments in which we glimpse what we are truly capable of, when we know ourselves to be great. “And yet,” Maslow noted, “we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before these very same possibilities.”

He liked to ask his students questions such as “Which of you intends to become President?” or “Which of you will become an inspirational moral leader, like Albert Schweitzer?” When they would squirm or blush, he then posed the question, “If not you, then who else?” These were all people who were training to be psychologists, but Maslow asked them what the point was of learning to be a mediocre psychologist. Doing only as much as necessary to be competent, he told them, was a recipe for deep unhappiness in life. They would be evading their own capacities and possibilities. Maslow recalled Nietzsche's idea of the law of eternal recurrence; that is, that the life we lead has to be lived over and over again into eternity, like in the movie
Groundhog Day
. If we lived with this law in mind, we would only ever do what was really important.

Some people avoid seeking to be great because they fear being seen as grandiose, as wanting too much. Yet this can just become an excuse not to try. Instead, we adopt mock humility and set low aims for ourselves. The possibility of becoming remarkable shoots a thunderbolt of fear into many unremarkable people. They suddenly realize that they will attract attention. The Jonah complex is partly a fear of losing control, of the possibility that we might undergo a total transformation from the old person we were.

Maslow's suggestion was this: We need to balance grand aims with having our feet on the ground. Most people have too much of one and not enough of the other. If you study successful and self-realized people, you find that they have a blend of both; that is, they shoot for the sky, yet are also grounded in reality.

As an academic psychologist, Maslow was surprised when, in the 1960s, big business came knocking on his door. In a time of increasing competition to produce better products, companies sensed that work environments in which people were more creative and fulfilled would also be more productive. Maslow had written about “Eupsychia,” which was “the culture that would
be generated by 1,000 self-actualizing people on some sheltered island where they would not be interfered with.” While this was a utopia, his real-world solution of Eupsychian management aimed to achieve the psychological health and fulfillment of everyone in the workplace.

Over a quarter of
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
is devoted to the question of creativity, for this lay at the heart of Maslow's idea of the self-actualizing person. He distinguished between primary creativity—the flash of inspiration that “sees” a final product before it has been created—and secondary creativity—working out and developing the inspiration, seeing it through.

Maslow noted that because we live in a world that changes much more quickly than it did in the past, it is not enough to do things the way they have always been done. The best people will be willing to give up the past, and instead to study a problem as it is, without baggage. This feature, which he called “innocence,” was common in self-actualized people. Of this trait Maslow wrote: “The most mature people are the ones that can have the most fun... These are people who can regress at will, who can become childish and play with children and be close to them.”

He was keenly aware that such people are often the unconventional ones or troublemakers in an organization, and was frank in telling businesses that they had to somehow accommodate and value these individuals. Organizations are by nature conservative, but to survive and prosper they also needed to indulge in the creative flights of fancy that may foresee the need for, or produce, great new products or concepts. The ideal workplace would be like a reflection of the self-actualized person's creative nature—a childlike inspiration to create something truly new; and the maturity to see a vision through to reality.

As with many trailblazers, Maslow was not at all sure of his ground in terms of research methodology (he wrote, “Knowledge of low reliability is also a part of knowledge”), but his ideas breathed new life into psychology. As Henry Geiger points out in an introduction to
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
, as well as being highly respected academically Maslow's writings also sold in big numbers to the general public. They responded to the fact that, rather than being a crazy notion, self-actualization was actually a goal within most people's reach. It was not just for the “saints and the sages” and the great figures of history, but was everyone's birthright.

It is no surprise, therefore, that Maslow's ideas have been adapted for the world of work. While on the one hand the concept of self-actualization inspires us always to seek meaningful work above other rewards, being reminded of the Jonah complex can urge us to live up to our potential and think really big.

Born in 1908 in a poor part of Brooklyn, New York, Maslow was the oldest of seven children. Although his parents were uneducated Russian-Jewish immigrants, his father became a prosperous businessman who was eager for his shy but fiercely intelligent son to become a lawyer. Abraham did initially study law at City College of New York, but in 1928 transferred to the University of Wisconsin where his interested in psychology was awakened, and where he worked with the primate researcher Harry Harlow (see p 142). In the same year Maslow married Bertha Goodman, his cousin
.

In 1934 Maslow obtained his PhD in psychology, but returned to New York to do controversial work on the sex lives of college women with Edward Thorndike at Columbia University, where he also found a mentor in Alfred Adler (see p 14). He began a 14-year teaching post at Brooklyn College, where his mentors included European emigrés such as psychologist Eric Fromm, Karen Horney (see p 156), and anthropologist Margaret Mead. Maslow's
Principles of Abnormal Psychology
was published in 1941, and in 1943 came his famous journal article in
Psychological Review,
“A Theory of Motivation,” which introduced the concept of a hierarchy of needs
.