Concept
Self-actualization
Overview
Self-actualization, in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, is the highest personal aspirational human need in the hierarchy. It represents where one's potential is fully realized after more basic needs, such as for the body and the ego, have been fulfilled, and is recognised in psychological teaching as the peak of human needs. Maslow later added the category self-transcendence (which, strictly speaking, extends beyond one's own "needs").
Self-actualization was coined by the organismic theorist Kurt Goldstein for the motive to realize one's full potential: "the tendency to actualize itself as fully as [...] the drive of self-actualization." Carl Rogers similarly wrote of "the curative force in psychotherapy – man's tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities [...] to express and activate all the capacities of the organism."
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
To demand in advance of voluntary desire and deliberate choice that it be demonstrated that an individual shall get happiness in the measure of the rightness of his act, is to demand the obliteration of the essential factor in morality: the constant discovery, formation, and reformation of the self in the ends which an individual is called upon to sustain and develop in virtue of his membership in a social whole…
John Dewey, Ethics
States what Self-actualization is.
The first set of facts to be adduced against the common sense view of desire are those studied by psycho-analysis. In all human beings, but most markedly in those suffering from hysteria and certain forms of insanity, we find what are called "unconscious" desires, which are commonly regarded as showing self-deception. Most psycho-analysts pay little attention to the analysis of desire, being interested in…
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
States what Self-actualization is.
The sensitivity is thus a soul in which the whole mental life is condensed. The total individual under this concentrated aspect is distinct from the existing and actual play of his consciousness, his secular ideas, developed interests, inclinations, &c. As contrasted with this looser aggregate of means and methods the more intensive form of individuality is termed the genius, whose decision is ultimate whatever may…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
States what Self-actualization is.
Related ideas
- Albert Schweitzer
- Family
- Creativity
- Love
- Personality
- Autonomy
- Desire
- Motivation
- Sigmund Freud
- Abraham Maslow
- Humanistic psychology
- Henry David Thoreau
- Human nature
- Self
- Independence
- Albert Einstein
- Carl Rogers
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Humanism.