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Abraham Maslow argues that, although the biological, sociological, and psychological needs must all be satisfied by the same nervous system, they are naturally in harmony. They are organized in a hierarchy [MASLOW 1968].1 Biological needs are most potent; when they are satisfied, sociological needs become most potent; and, when those are satisfied, psychological needs, in turn, become most potent. We fail to realize our full human potential because we can not shift gears up this hierarchy of needs. Most of the people on our planet spend most of their time struggling to satisfy the survival needs and thus have little spare time for the luxury of satisfying the psychological needs of knowing and understanding. Even people in an affluent society fail to realize the full human potential because the need to know is limited by the fear of knowing [MASLOW 1963]. Fear of new things makes good evolutionary sense. As long as things remain the same, there is no danger. It's new things which are threatening. However, the need for stimulation, which is satisfied by novel stimuli, drives us to explore and manipulate new things to remove the danger or threat of danger. Having explored and manipulated a novel stimulus, it is no longer novel, and we have to seek other novel stimuli to satisfy our need for stimulation. Perhaps exploration becomes functionally autonomous - initially we explore to remove danger but eventually we explore just to explore. INTERACTIONIST CONCEPT OF THE PERSON Interactionism could be viewed as a synthesis of the behavioristic thesis and the humanistic antithesis, as presented above. The behavioristic concept of the person was presented as a system of five propositions, and the humanistic concept of the person was presented as a system of five propositions, which contradicted the corresponding propositions of behaviourism. Let us look, in turn, at each pair of opposing propositions to suggest how the interactionist concept of the person resolves those dichotomies. |
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1 My hierarchy is a simplification of Maslow's hierarchy, in which needs are clumped into three broad categories - biological, sociological, and psychological. His highest need - self-actualization - is considered here as the realization of the full human potential, which involves satisfaction of all those sets of needs. |