Today's soundtrack is LSD and the Search for God's self-titled album.
This morning, I’m reading the first half of chapter 2 of Abraham Maslow’s The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, “Neurosis as a Failure of Personal Growth.”
Maslow begins the chapter by saying that the aspects of this topic that he will address are those that are often overlooked by others. Maslow says that neurosis is not merely a mental disease: it is a fear-based method of attempted human growth. From birth, everyone possesses an innate drive toward health, growth, and actualization of our potential - though sadly, so few people reach actualization, even in one of the most prosperous societies in history! So why, asks Maslow, if we all have the drive for actualization, do so many never attain it? Is something preventing it?
There are two ways of looking at humanity and society. One is to look around us and accept what we see, then label that as the norm. The other is to find the examples of people who reach actualization of their potential and try to find ways to help more people to reach their potential abilities. Instead of accepting that as we get older, we’ll get more jaded and unhappy, we should ask why we aren’t as happy as adults as we are as children.
Facts are like “signposts which tell you what to do” (p. 26). The more we learn, the more we know what actions to take automatically. There are some words which are combined fact and value together; Maslow calls these “fusion-words” (p. 26). These words, coupled with the facts we know, to help us differentiate between that which is and that which ought to be. People who are healthier feel more confident in making objective statements, with the only evidence being that they feel it so or know it to be true. An example given is a person who categorizes paintings as good or bad based solely on personal preference. These people don’t need to second-guess themselves when it comes to their personal taste. They realize that they can make objective statements about their subjective tastes. They can trust their intuition to lead them in the right direction, because they have filled themselves with facts which serve as signposts, pointing them in the right direction.
One of the fusion-words is “fully human” (p. 27), which Maslow says is “more descriptive and objective [...] than the concept ‘self-actualization’” (p. 27). Maslow believes that using fusion words will help us to better understand concepts, which, following Robert Hartman’s definition of “‘good’ as the degree to which an object fulfills its definition or concept” (p. 27), makes this a good way for us to present ideas to listeners and readers. We want to be understood, not to talk over the heads of the public that we are trying to reach in an attempt at impressing each other. So can we quantify the concept of full humanness? We might include such categories as “the ability to abstract, to have a grammatical language, to be able to love, to have values of a particular kind, to transcend the self, etc.” (p. 28). By using such a checklist, we could determine how close a person is to being fully human - how close they are to reaching actualization of potential! Then we could see what areas they are lacking in, and help them progress in those areas. Other fusion-words that Maslow identifies are “mature, evolved, developed, stunted, crippled, fully functioning, graceful, awkward, clumsy, and the like “ (p. 28).
While we are exchanging fusion-words for scientific ones, we could say “‘human diminution’ instead of ‘neurosis’” (p. 29). (A quick Google search tells me that “diminution” means a reduction of size or importance, and that “neurosis” is a non-psychotic mental illness, often related to stress: depression, anxiety, and the like, while Maslow says that it is from the old concept of nerve illness). So we can say that people with human diminution are not yet fully human, because they are not operating at full capacity - their capacity for full humanness has been reduced. If we use our “fully human checklist” as mentioned earlier, it will also be easier to identify people as suffering from human diminution than it would be to diagnose depression, or the emotional stuntings associated with poverty, or addictions, or other personality disorders - all things that are invisible to the naked eye, unlike a broken leg or a severed thumb.
