On the Hierarchy of Needs

I studied Freudian psychology. Of course, Freud was a brilliant innovator and is considered the father of modern psychology, but I felt the need to create a complement to accompany Freud's theories. He treated and examined several patients during the Victorian Era. Most if not all of the patients that he studied were suffering from psychosis or neurosis or had psychological problems of some kind; why else would they seek out a doctor? The problem with that is not that Freud examined these patients, but that he used these case studies as a basis for generalizing information about the human condition and the human mind. In order to truly do that in a way that would make the information generalizable, one would have to study people with both healthy and unhealthy minds.

One cannot generalize facts about a human mind or human needs based only on unhealthy individuals. As I said in my book Motivation and Personality, "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy"; it cannot tell us about the psychology or philosophy regarding healthy individuals. Basically, “it is as if Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.”

I chose to study those healthy individuals, or in this case 100 healthy students and other exemplary human beings, and categorized their needs in terms of the most vital and important needs that human beings have. The bottom layer, the first set of needs, are the most basic needs for survival. These are all physical needs: breathing, food, water, sex, homeostasis, sleep, excretion. These needs must be met before any others can be considered. The next need is for safety, then love, then esteem, and then self-actualization. Humans must fulfill and maintain each level to be able to focus on or achieve the next level. The ultimate goal of humans is to achieve self-actualization, and Humanist Psychology encourages people to achieve the optimal healthy psychological state.

My theories have been applied in many fields beyond psychology, including education, religious studies, and business. Human curiosity and the quest for knowledge go beyond the scope of these needs. The desire to know and understand is part of what motivates people to do well in school and to seek higher education, although a need for safety may play a part in that desire, in that a better education can lead to a better career, etc. However, the implications of my hierarchy of needs in education is that the educator must consider that all of these basic needs must be fulfilled before a student can develop the desire to educate him or herself. A student who is not motivated may be lacking one of these essential needs. Other psychologists have used these basic needs as a framework and basis for their own experiments regarding education and curiosity.

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Maslow, Abraham (1954). Motivation and personality. New York: Harper. pp. 236.
Maslow, Abraham (1943). A Theory of Human Motivation Psychological Review, Vol. 50 #4, pp. 370–396.