Colin Wilson on Abraham Maslow and Peak Experience

Abraham Maslow

Abraham Maslow was a psychologist who created the “hierarchy of needs.”  Maslow took a different tack than most psychologists, and instead of studying mentally sick people, he decided to spend his life studying very successful people. 

 What is interesting about Maslow is that he wrote that someone has to meet the lower needs on the hierarchy before the needs higher up on the pyramid will be meaningful to them.  So people need to have met their basic physiological and survival needs like breathing, food, and shelter before the esteem of their friends will mean anything to them.  Maslow did make the caveat that someone who has established the lower needs as being met will not necessarily regress.  For instance, someone who had a home and a loving family that was all swept away in a flood will not necessarily lose their current needs of esteem and love – they will maintain their current needs for some time even though they have lost their home and family.

1. Biological and Physiological needs – air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep, etc.

2. Safety needs – protection from elements, security, order, law, limits, stability, etc.

3. Belongingness and Love needs – work group, family, affection, relationships, etc.

4. Esteem needs – self-esteem, achievement, mastery, independence, status, dominance, prestige, managerial responsibility, etc.

5. Self-Actualization needs – realising personal potential, self-fulfillment, seeking personal growth and peak experiences.

Something that I found very interesting is Maslow’s theory regarding self-actualizing people and trascendence.  You can read Maslow’s text regarding his theory, entitled “Theory Z” here.  The opening paragraph of the paper is:

I have recently found it more and more useful to differentiate between two kinds (or better, degrees) of self-actualizing (SA) people, those who were clearly healthy, but with little or no experiences of transcendence, and those in whom transcendent experiencing was important and even central. As examples of the former kind of health, I may cite Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, and probably Truman and Eisenhower.[Gates? --Ed.] As examples of the latter, I can use Aldous Huxley, and probably Schweitzer, Buber and Einstein. [Jobs? --Ed.]

A point that Maslow stresses in this paper is that the transcendent people are often “Yea-sayers rather than Nay-sayers,” they are also conscious of the current moment and not lost in thinking.  These themes also find purchase in both the Gestalt psychology of Fritz Perls and the spiritualism of Eckhart Tolle.   What does it mean to be a Yea-sayer and be in the Here and Now?  Well, it is really simple, you learn to be positive and not live in your head, by training yourself to be positive and be aware you are alive right here and right now.  Easier said than done – you might be thinking, especially after a life-time of focusing on thinking, believe me that in some parts of your life thinking is an enemy.  Most of your thoughts are probably repetitive and pointless, and focus on things you don’t have or things that should or shouldn’t happen.  The two most awful, negative words in english are “want” and “should.”  Because they both express a disharmony with the moment.

One thing that is great about Maslow is that the heirarchy makes sense within your own life, so if you are confused about what your current psychological needs are you could try and use his chart.  That way you can be objective about where you are.  The way I look at the chart I figure out what needs I have that are definately met, and then look and see if I am meeting the next set of needs.  The only problem is that it is a little weird to have a small chart explain your life!

Carl Jung

Carl Jung newly released secret diary starts off with this quote:

The years of which I have spoken to you, when I was pursued by inner images, were the most important time of my life.  Everything else is to be derived from this.  It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore.  My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me.  That was the stuff and material for more than only one life.  Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life.  But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.

Carl Jung was a deeply flawed man in many regards, he professed racist views in public lectures, and he carried on extra-marital affairs most of his adult life.  Carl Jung was also a genius who revolutionized psychology, and created a form of therapy called Analytical Psychology.  He was a profoundly sensitive man who used that sensitivity to explore his own inner world, but he was also a doctor, and as the above quote implies – he at least partially explained his own mysterious experience by writing.

As a young man Jung had several mystical experiences – by mystical I mean first-hand inexplicable experiences of something out of the ordinary that defies rational explanation.  Including a cousin who could act as a medium at seances and apparently channel spirits.  Jung started his career with a disposition to believe in the super-natural world, and used his ideas in treatment of schizophrenics.  However, he didn’t publicly reveal this side of himself till he was more established later in life.

Jung began his medical career working in a progressive mental hospital, the Burgholzi.  Sigmund Freud was becoming a major public figure, and according to Jung – not highly esteemed at first in the medical community.  However Jung saw potential in what Freud wrote about, especially about interpreting dreams.  The mistake id often made that Jung’s theories are purely an off shoot of Freud’s, this is what Jung said regarding that:

I in no way exclusively stem from Freud.  I had my scientific attitude and the theory of complexes before I met Freud.  The teachers that influenced me above all are Bleuler, Pierre Janet, and Theodore Flournoy.

Jung however clearly was influenced and was an early disciple of Sigmund Freud, and in some ways Jung theories are based on the work Freud did.  Jung differed in one major way from Freud:  Freud considered the base of mankind’s behavior to be drives, and Jung considered it to be the unconscious.  For Freud the drives could be treated scientifically, and they also explained most of Human behavior and neurosis.  Jung presents a different, more romantic view of Human nature by insisting that the base layer of human existence is unknowable – hence the unconscious.

The schism between Freud’s drives and Jung’s mysteries is what has motivated opposing schools of brilliant people throughout the 20th, and now into the 21st century.

I prefer Jung’s method, because I do better emotionally when I allow myself to believe there is some mystery to life.  That I can’t know some stuff.  Freud’s viewpoint is very close to reducing humanity to animals, and while that may technically be correct – it just doesn’t do it for me.  You should explore both, and see what makes sense for you.

Freud and Jung went back and forth over their disagreements.  In this letter Freud concedes that Jung has made some good points about the unconscious and supernatural side of experience:

Vienna IX, Bergasse 19

June 15, 1911

Dear Friend, …In matters regarding occultism I have become humble ever since the great lesson I received from Ferenczi’s experiences.  I promise to believe everything that can be made to seem the least bit reasonable.  As you know, I do not do so gladly.  But my hubris has been shattered.  I should like to have you and F. acting in consonance when one of you is ready to take the perilous step of publication, and I imagine that this would be quite compatible with complete independence during the progress of the work…

Cordial Regards to you and the beautiful house,

from Your faithful,

Freud

Jung authored a wonderful, gigantic illustrated diary called The Red Book which delves into his personal psyche.  Carl Jung also co-authored an autobiography called Memories, Dreams, Reflections that covers his entire life.  I especially recommend reading the second to last chapter of Memories, Dreams, Reflections entitled “Late Thoughts,” it comforted me quite a bit during a troubled time.  The appendices of the book also has personal letters between Jung and Freud, and between Jung and Emma Jung his wife.

Anxiety

If you are feeling anxious and don’t know what to do about it, this blog post will help.

My story:

I went to Afghanistan as a soldier and my duty involved driving on roads that were rife with road side bombs.  When I came home I couldn’t sleep for days at a time.  The effect war had on me was something called hyper-vigilance.  Basically being hyper-vigilant means you never relax.  Besides being unable to sleep, I was doing paranoid things like sitting with my back to the wall, and seeing how many exits there are in restaurants – in case I had to escape.  I didn’t eat in fast food restaurants for a couple of years, because I couldn’t stand waiting in line and having strangers behind me.

I don’t know if I will ever be completely free of the experience of combat, but what helped to get me back on an even keel wasn’t in a pill, and it wasn’t the people around me, and it wasn’t working, eating right, or exercising.

I will tell you a secret, it was spiritual growth.  I grew with information I found in reading two books.

If you are suffering right now these books have a good shot at giving you the tools to reclaim your life:

My first recommendation is Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth.”  Eckhart Tolle is a spiritual teacher, and what he offers is a way to embrace life that is totally practical.  This is the single most important book I have ever read regarding mental health and how to deal with life.
A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (Oprah’s Book Club, Selection 61)

My second recommendation is especially important if part of your problem involves forming good relationships with other people. It is The Gestalt Approach and Eye Witness to Therapy by Fritz Perls.  This book has some ideas about anxiety that I use everyday.  This book can teach you how to balance your relationships, especially with people where the balance is skewed somehow.  Perls was a German Jew who escaped from Nazi Germany to fight against the Nazis as a doctor in the South African Army.  After World War II he came to the United States and wrote several influential books.