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Summary:

“This is precisely what happens in people that I call self-actualizing. The simplest way to describe them is as psychologically healthy people. It is exactly  what we find in such people. When we pick out from the population the healthiest 1 per cent or fraction of 1 per cent, then these people have in the course of their lifetime, sometimes with the benefit of therapy, sometimes without, been able to put together these two worlds (B-realm and D-realm), and to live comfortably in both of them.”

-Abraham Maslow

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RELEVANT QUESTIONS

Eight ways in which one self-actualizes:

  1. “Self-actualization means experiencing fully, vividly, selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption. It means experiencing without the self-consciousness of the adolescent. At this moment of experiencing, the person is wholly and fully human. This is a self-actualizing moment. This is a moment when the self is actualizing itself.”

  2. “Let us think of life as a process of choices, one after another. At each point there is a progression choice and a regression choice. There may be a movement toward defense, toward safety, toward being afraid; but over on the other side, there is the growth choice. To make the growth choice instead of the fear choice a dozen times a day is to move a dozen times a day toward self-actualization. Self-actualization is an ongoing process; it means making each of the many single choices about whether to lie or be honest, whether to steal or not to steal at a particular point, and it mans to make each of these choices as a growth choice. This is movement toward self-actualization.”

  3. “To talk of self-actualization implies that there is a self to be actualized. A human being is not a tabula rasa, not a lump of clay or Plasticine. He is something which is already there, at least a ‘cartilaginous’ structure of some kind. A human being is, at minimum, his temperament, his biochemical balances, and so on. There is a self, and what I have sometimes referred to as ‘listening to the impulse voices’ means letting the self emerge.”

4. “When in doubt, be honest rather than not. I am covered by that phrase ‘when in doubt,’ so that we need not argue too much about diplomacy. Frequently, when we are in doubt we are not honest. Clients are not honest much of the time. They are playing games and posing. They do not take easily to the suggestion to be honest. Looking within oneself for many of the answers implies taking responsibility. That is in itself a great step toward actualization. This matter of responsibility has been little studied. It doesn’t turn up in our textbooks, for who can investigate responsibility in white rats? Yet it is an almost tangible part of psychotherapy. In psychotherapy, one can see it, can feel it, can know the moment of responsibility. Then there is a clear knowing of what it feels like. This is one of the great steps. **Each time one takes responsibility, this is an actualizing of the self.”**

5. “We have talked so far of experiencing without self-awareness, of making the growth choice rather than the fear choice, of listening to the impulse voices, and of being honest and taking responsibility. All these are steps toward self-actualization, and all of them guarantee better life choices. A person who does each of these little things each time the choice point comes will find that they add up to better choices about what is constitutionally right for him. He comes to know what his destiny is, who his wife or husband will be, what his mission in life will be. One cannot choose wisely for a life unless he dares to listen to himself, his own self, at each moment in life, and to say calmly, ‘No, I don’t like such and such.’“

6. “Self-actualization is not only an end state but also the process of actualizing one’s potentialities at any time, in any amount. It is, for example, a matter of becoming smarter by studying if one is an intelligent person. Self-actualization means using one’s intelligence. It does not mean doing some far-out thing necessarily, but it may mean going through an arduous and demanding period of preparation in order to realize one’s possibilities. Self-actualization can consist of finger exercises at a piano keyboard. Self-actualization means working to do well the thing that one wants to do. To become a second-rate physician is not a good path to self-actualization. One wants to be first-rate or as good as he can be.”

7. “Peak experiences are transient moments of self-actualization. They are moments of ecstasy which cannot be bought, cannot be guaranteed, cannot even be sought. One must be, as C. S. Lewis wrote, ‘surprised by joy.’ But one can set up the conditions so that peak experiences are more likely, or one can perversely set up the conditions so that they are less likely. Breaking up an illusion, getting rid of a false notion, learning what one is not good at, learning what one’s potentialities are not—these are also part of discovering what one is in fact.”

  1. “Finding out who one is, what he is, what he likes, what he doesn’t like, what is good for him and what bad, where he is going and what his mission is—opening oneself up to himself—means the exposure of psychopathology. It means identifying defenses, and after defenses have been identified, it means finding the courage to give them up. This is painful because defenses are erected against something which is unpleasant. But giving up the defenses is worthwhile. If the psychoanalytic literature has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that repression is not a good way of solving problems.”

NOTES

Self-Actualizers on Identity & Work

On identity:

“This kind of **self-forgetfulness is one of the paths to finding one’s true identity, one’s real self, one’s authentic nature, one’s deepest nature**. It is almost always felt as pleasant and desirable. We needn’t go so far as the Buddhists and Eastern thinkers do in talking about the ‘accursed ego’; and yet there is something in what they say.”

A feeling of destiny or fate “outside themselves”:

*“*All such people are devoted to some task, call, vocation, beloved work (‘outside themselves’). In examining self-actualizing people directly, I find that in all cases, at least in our culture, they are dedicated people, devoted to some task ‘outside themselves,’ some vocation, or duty, or beloved job. Generally the devotion and dedication is so marked that one can fairly use the old words vocation, calling, or mission to describe their passionate, selfless, and profound feeling for their ‘work.’ We could even use the words destiny or fate. I have sometimes gone so far as to speak of oblation in the religious sense, in the sense of offering oneself or dedicating oneself upon some altar for some particular task, some cause outside oneself and bigger than oneself, something not merely selfish, something impersonal.”

Their cause/call/mission is one with their identity:

“Such vocation-loving individuals tend to identify (introject, incorporate) with their ‘work’ and to make it into a defining-characteristic of the self. It becomes part of the self.”

They transcend the dichotomy of inner requiredness and outer requiredness:

“In the ideal instance, which fortunately also happens in fact in many of my instances, ‘l want to’ coincides with ‘l must.’ There is a good matching of inner with outer requiredness. And the observer is then overawed by the degree of compellingness, of inexorability, of preordained destiny, necessity, and harmony that he perceives. Furthermore, the observer (as well as the person involved) feels not only that ‘it has to be’ but also that ‘it ought to be, it is right, it is suitable, appropriate, fitting, and proper.’ I have often felt a Gestaltlike quality about this kind of belonging together, the formation of a ‘one’ out of ‘two.'”