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SITE: ‘Unmet Human Needs’

*** POST : “ACAs – Vicious Cycle re. Needs”

🔹 NEEDs  – A psychological feature that arouses any organism (humans….) to move toward a goal, giving purpose & direction to their behavior.

NEEDS are normal, made up of all the elements required for developing a safe, stable & healthy life. Having an accurate & sufficient amount of them fulfilled is imperative, since a deficiency will have severe consequences : dysfunction or premature death

Having needs can be said to be the ‘costs of being human’. People who don’t have enough of them met (a ‘needy’ person) function poorly in their personal life & in society. Feelings / emotions indicate whether or not our needs are being met & to what degree – so they’re neither good nor bad, right nor wrong – just very necessary 🙄

EXP: Sexuality is used everywhere in our culture to sell goods & services, by stirring a desire for things we may or may not need. This works because sex is one of our basic instinctual needs, so we react automatically, unconsciously.

🔹 WANTs – Desires, wishes or aspirations that are not vital – things that must be (should be) earned. This is not to say we shouldn’t have wants. The desire to have someone or something good is part instinctive & healthy, & part personal taste – something to strive for that adds pleasure to our life

🔹 DEMANDs –  People (even famous or powerful ones) can get into trouble when they demand to have their wants met – especially without contributing anything positive towards getting them. Being demanding is arrogant,  presumptuous…. but comes from neediness & an immature feeling of unfairness.

We had every right to expect that our family provide normal human needs when we were young – but had little control about getting them. For many of us this was done poorly or barely at all, which created a sense of desperation that can trigger the compulsion to demand that others make up for those early deficits.

However, it’s not legitimate for adults to assume that other adults should fill the empty hole in our emotional/ psychological gut – which is our responsibility to provide. Nor is it ‘sane’ to demand something from a person who absolutely does not have it to give – like NPDs or the disabled.

❣️ HAPPINESS – The Pyramid of needs is one of the best-known theories of motivation. Inspired by the work of Carl Jung & humanistic psychologist Erich Fromm, Brooklyn-born American psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) believed that the urge for self-actualization is deeply entrenched in the human psyche, so that the desire for happiness is equally worthy of attention, but is usually based on more basic needs being met first.
He believed that a great personal (non-spiritual) tragedy for many is dying without ever knowing who they really could have been – their True Self. (Maslow’s life & writing)

This Hierarchy points out the possibility of growing intentionally – to develop our unique identity & skills, & use them creatively to benefit ourself & the world. Maslow was dissatisfied with the 2 main theories of his time – Freud’s Psychoanalysis which dealt with mental illness, & Skinner’s Behaviorism which reduced humans to mindless machines or animals.

He wanted to identify mental health & happiness, not just focusing on misery. To that end he studied positive human characteristics, looking at the lives of outstanding people such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, & Jane Addams (the ‘mother’ of Social Work)…..

Synthesizing piles of research re. human motivation (the inner drive to get what we need), Maslow created his Needs pyramid in 1954. He concluded that when our basic physical needs are satisfied, other higher ones can be recognized & worked on, & once those are met, even higher needs can become our focus. The assumption was that people first have to be on a solid foundation – providing the Deficiencies (Level 1 -3), before they can work on Growth.

PS – as of the 2000s : This is no longer considered the best theory – being too rigid & not accounting for personal individuality.
However, it’s included here since the individual stages have validity.

NEXT: Maslow’s Pyramid #2