Motivation And Personality

By Abraham Maslow

SELF ACTUALIZING PEOPLE: A STUDY 0F PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH (Their traits) 

MORE EFFICIENT PERCEPTION OF REALITY AND MORE COMFORTABLE RELATIONS WITH IT 

• The first form in which this capacity was noticed was as an unusual ability to detect the spurious, the fake, and the dishonest in personality, and in general to judge people correctly and efficiently.
• As the study progressed, it slowly became apparent that this efficiency extended to many other areas of life-indeed all areas that were observed. In art and music, in things of the intellect, in scientific matters, in politics and public affairs, they seemed as a group to be able to see concealed or confused realities more swiftly and more correctly than others. Thus an informal survey indicated that their predictions of the future from whatever facts were in hand at the time seemed to be more often correct, because they were based upon wish, desire, anxiety, fear, or upon generalized, character-determined optimism or pessimism.
• It has become progressively more clear that this had better be called perception (not taste) of something that was absolutely there (reality, not a set of opinions).
• They live more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs, and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world, They are therefore far more apt to perceive what is there rather than their own wishes, hopes, fears, anxieties, their own theories and beliefs, or those of their cultural group.
• The relationship with the unknown seems to be of exceptional promise as another bridge between academic and clinical psychology. Our healthy subjects are generally unthreatened and unfrightened by the unknown, being there in quite different from average men. They accept it, are comfortable with it, and often are even more attracted by the unknown. They not only tolerate the ambiguous and unstructured; they like it.
• Since for healthy people, the unknown is not frightening, they do not have to spend any time laying the ghost, whistling past the cemetery, or otherwise protecting themselves against imagined dangers.
• They can be, when the total objective situation calls for it, comfortably disorderly, sloppy, anarchic, chaotic, vague, doubtful, uncertain, indefinite, approximate, inexact, or inaccurate (al, at certain moments in science, art, or life in general, quite desirable). 
• Thus it comes about that doubt, tentativeness, uncertainty, with the consequent necessity for abeyance of decision, which is for most a torture, can be for some a pleasantly stimulating challenge, a high spot in life rather than a low.

ACCEPTANCE (SELF, OTHERS, NATURE)

• Our healthy individuals find it possible to accept themselves and their own nature without chagrin or complaint or, for that matter, even without thinking about the matter very much.
• They can accept their own human nature in the stoic style, with all its shortcomings, with all its discrepancies from the ideal image without feeling real concern. 
• It would convey the wrong impression to say that they are self-satisfied. What we must say rather is that they can take the frailties and sins, weaknesses, and evils of human nature in the same unquestioning spirit with which one accepts the characteristics of nature.
• A self-actualized person sees reality more clearly: our subjects see human nature as it is and not as they would prefer it to be. Their eyes see what is before them without being strained through spectacles of various sorts to distort or shape or color the reality.
• Closely related to self-acceptance and to acceptance of others is (1) their lack of defensiveness, protective coloration, or pose, and (2) their distaste for such artificiality in others. Cant, guile, hypocrisy, front, face, playing a game, trying to impress in conventional ways: these are all absent in themselves to an unusual degree. Since they can live comfortably even with their own shortcomings, these finally come to be perceived, especially in later life, as not shortcomings at all, but simply as neutral Personal characteristics.
• What healthy people do feel guilty about (or ashamed, anxious, sad, or regretful) are 
  • (1) improvable shortcomings, e.g., laziness, thoughtlessness, loss of temper, hurting others; 
  • (2) stubborn remnants of psychological ill health, e.g., prejudice, jealousy, envy;
  • (3) habits, which, though relatively independent of character structure, may yet be very strong, or 
  • (4) shortcomings of the species or of the culture or of the group with which they have identified. The general formula seems to be that healthy people will feel bad about discrepancies between what is and what might very well be or ought to be

SPONTANEiTY; SIMPLICITY; NATURALNESS 

• Self-actualizing people can all be described as relatively spontaneous in behavior and far more spontaneous than that in their inner life, thoughts, impulses, etc. Their behavior is marked by simplicity and naturalness, and by lack of artificiality or straining for effect. 
  • This does not necessarily mean consistently unconventional behavior. If we were to take an actual count of the number of times that the self-actualizing person behaved in an unconventional manner the tally would not be high. His unconventionality is not superficial but essential or internal. It is his impulses, thoughts, and consciousness that are so unusual, unconventional, spontaneous, and natural.

• Apparently recognizing that the world of people in which he lives could not understand or accept this, and since he has no wish to fight with them over every triviality, he will go through the ceremonies and rituals of convention with a good-humored shrug and with the best possible grace. Thus I have seen a man accept an honor he laughed at and even despised in private, rather than make an issue of it and hurt the people who thought they were pleasing him.
• A self actualizing person infrequently allows convention to hamper him or inhibit him from doing anything that he considers very important or basic.
• This same inner attitude can also be seen in those moments when the person becomes keenly absorbed in something that is close to one of his main interests. He can then be seen quite casually to drop off all sorts of rules of behavior to which at other times he conforms; it is as if he has to make a conscious effort to be conventional; as if he were conventional voluntarily and by design.
• Finally, this external habit of behavior can be voluntarily dropped when in the company of people who do not demand or expect routine behavior. That this relative control of behavior is felt as something of a burden is seen by our subjects’ preference for such company as allows them to be more free, natural, and spontaneous, and that relieves them of’ what they find sometimes to be effortful conduct.
• One consequence or correlation of this characteristic is that these people have codes of ethics that are relatively autonomous and individual rather than conventional. 
  • The unthinking observer might sometimes believe them to be unethical, since they can break down not only conventions but laws when the situation seems to demand it. But the very opposite is the case. They are the most ethical of people even though their ethics are not necessarily the same as those of the people around them. lt is this kind of observation that leads us to understand very assuredly that the ordinary ethical behavior of the average person is largely conventional behavior rather than truly ethical behavior, e.g., behavior based on fundamental accepted principles (which are perceived to be true).

• Because of this alienation from ordinary conventions and from the ordinarily accepted hypocrisies, lies, and inconsistencies of socialife, they sometimes feel like spies or aliens in a foreign land and sometimes behave so.
• It was such findings as these that led ultimately to the discovery of a most profound difference between self-actualizing people and others; namely, that the motivational life of self-actualizing people is not only quantitatively different but also qualitatively different from that of ordinary people. lt seems probable that we must construct a profoundly different psychology of motivation for self-actualizing people, e.g., metamotivation or growth motivation, rather than deficiency motivation. Perhaps it will be useful to make a distinction between living and preparing to live. Perhaps the ordinary concept of motivation should apply only to non self-actualizers. Our subjects no longer strive in the ordinary sense, but rather develop. They attempt to grow to perfection and to develop more and more fully in their own style. The motivation of ordinary men is a striving for the basic needs and gratifications that they lack. But self actualizing people in fact lack none of these gratifications; and yet they have impulses. They work, they try, and they are ambitious, even though in an unusual sense. For them motivation is just character growth, character expression, maturation, and development; in a word self-actualization. Could these self-actualizing people be more human, more revealing of the original nature of the species, closer to the species type in the taxonomical sense? Ought a biological species be judged by its crippled, warped, only partially developed specimens, or by examples that have been over domesticated, caged, and trained?

PROBLEM CENTERING 

• Our subjects are in general strongly focused on problems outside themselves. In current terminology they are problem centered rather than ego centered.
• They generally are not problems for themselves and are not generally much concerned about themselves; e.g., as contrasted with the ordinary introspectiveness that one finds in insecure people. 
• These individuals customarily have some mission in life, some task to fulfill, some problem outside themselves which enlist much of their energies. 
• This is not necessarily a task that they would prefer or choose for themselves; it may be a task that they feel is their responsibility, duty, or obligation. This is why we use the phrase “a task that they must do” rather than the phrase “a task that they want to do.” In general these tasks are non personal or unselfish, concerned rather with the good of mankind in general, or of a nation in general, or of a few individuals in the subject’s family.
• This impression of being above small things, of having a larger horizon, a wider breadth of vision, of living in the widest frame of reference, sub specie aeternitatis (universally & eternally true), is of the utmost social and interpersonal importance; it seems to impart a certain serenity and lack of worry over immediate concerns that make life easier not only for themselves but for all who are associated with them.

THE QUALITY OF DETACHMENT; THE NEED FOR PRIVACY 

• For any subjects it is true that they can be solitary without harm to themselves and without discomfort. Furthermore, it is true for almost all that they positively like solitude and privacy to a definitely greater degree than the average person.
• They find it easy to be aloof, reserved, and also calm and serene; thus it becomes possible for them to take personal misfortunes without reacting violently as the ordinary person does. They seem to be able to retain their dignity even in undignified surroundings and situations.
• They have the ability to concentrate to a degree not usual for ordinary men. Intense concentration produces as a by-product such phenomena as absent-mindedness, the ability to forget and to be oblivious of outer surroundings. Examples are the ability to sleep soundly. to have undisturbed to be able to smile and laugh through a period of problems, worry, and responsibility.
• Another meaning of autonomy is self-decision, self government, being an active, responsible, self-disciplined, deciding agent rather than a pawn, or helplessly “determined” by others, being strong rather than weak. My subjects make up their own minds, come to their own decisions, are self starters, are responsible for themselves and their own destinies. It is a subtle quality, difficult to describe in words, and yet profoundly important.
• They taught me to se as profoundly sick, abnormal, or weak what I had always taken for granted as humanly normal; namely that too many people do not make up their own minds, but have their minds made up for them by salesmen, advertisers, parents, propagandist, TV, newspapers and so on. They are pawns to be moved by others rather than self-moving, self-determining individuals. Therefore they are apt to feel helpless, weak, and totally determined; they are prey for predators, flabby whiners rather than self-determining, responsible persons.
• Of all self-actualizing subjects, 100 percent are self-movers.

AUTONOMY; INDEPENDENCE OF CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT; WIL; ACTIVE AGENTS

• Self actualizing people are not dependent for their main satisfactions on the real world, or other people or culture or means to ends or, in general, on extrinsic satisfactions. Rather they are dependent for their own development and continued growth on their own potentialities and latent resources. Just as the tree needs sunshine and water and food, so do most people need love, safety, and the other basic and gratifications that can come only from without. But once these external satisfiers are obtained, once these inner deficiencies are satiated by outside satisfiers, the true problem of individual human development begins, e.g., self-actualization.
• This independence of environment means a relative stability in the face of hard knocks, blows, deprivations, frustrations, and the like. These people can maintain a relative serenity in the midst of circumstances that would drive other people to suicide; they have also been described as “self-contained.”
• Deficiency-motivated people in the US have other people available, since most of their main needs gratifications (love, safety, respect, prestige, belongingness) can come only from other human beings. But growth-motivated people may actually be hampered by others. The determinants of satisfaction and of the good life are for them now inter-individual and float social. They have become strong enough to be independent of the good opinion of other people, or even of their affection.

CONTINUED FRESHNESS OF APPRECIATION 

• Self-actualizing people have the wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naïvely, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, awe or even ecstasy, however stale these experiences may have become to others-what C. Wilson has called “newness”
• Thus for such a person, any sunset may be as beautiful as the first one, any flower may be of breath-taking loveliness, even after he has seen a million flowers.
  • He remains as convinced of his luck in marriage thirty years after his marriage and is as surprised by his wife’s beauty when she is sixty as he was forty years before. For such people, even the casual workday, moment-to-moment business of living can be thrilling, exciting, and ecstatic. These intense feelings do not come all the time; they come occasionally rather than usually, but at the most unexpected moments. The person may cross the river on the ferry ten times and at the eleventh crossing have a strong recurrence of the same feelings, recurrence of beauty, and excitement as when he rode the ferry for the first time.

• There are some differences in the choice of beautiful objects. Some subjects go primarily to nature. For others it is primarily children, and for a few subjects it has been primarily great music; but it may certainly be said that they derive ecstasy, inspiration, and strength from the basic experiences of life. Not one of them, for instance, will get this same sort of reaction from going to a nightclub or getting a lot of money or having a good time at a party.
• Life could be vastly improved if we could count our blessings as self-actualizing people can and do, and if we could retain their constant sense of good fortune and gratitude for it.

THE MYSTIC EXPERIENCE; THE PEAK EXPERIENCE 

• Those subjective expressions that have been called the mystic experience and described so well by William James (212) are a fairly common experience for our subjects though not for all. The strong emotions described in the previous section sometimes get strong enough, chaotic, and widespread enough to be called mystic experiences.
• My interest and attention in this subject was first enlisted by several of my subjects who described their sexual orgasms in vaguely familiar terms which later I remembered had been used by various writers to describe what they called the mystic experience. There were the same feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one ever was before, the feeling of great ecstasy and wonder and awe, the loss of placing in time and space with, finally, the conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened, so that the subject is to some extent transformed and strengthened even in his daily life by such experiences.
• It is quite important to dissociate this experience from any theological or supernatural reference, even though for thousands of years they have been linked. Because this experience is a natural experience, well within the jurisdiction of science, I call it the peak experience.

Gemeinschaftsgefühl: 

• This word, invented by Alfred Adler, is the only one available that describes well the flavor of the feelings for mankind expressed by self actualizing subjects. They have for human beings in general a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection in spite of the occasional anger, impatience, or disgust described below. 
• In a nutshell, Gemeinschaftsgefühl describes the capacity of the self-actualized human to develop a vision bigger than himself.
• Because of this they have a genuine desire to help the human race. It is as if they were all members of a single family. One’s feelings toward his brothers would he on the whole be affectionate, even if these brothers were foolish, weak, or even if they were sometimes nasty. They would still be more easily forgiven than strangers.
• When it comes down to it, in certain basic ways he is like an alien in a strange land. Very few really understand him, however much they may like him. He is often saddened, exasperated, and even enraged by the shortcomings of the average person, and while they arc to him ordinarily no more than a nuisance, they sometimes become bitter tragedies. However far apart he is from them at times, he nevertheless feels a basic underlying kinship with these creatures whom he must regard with, if not condescension, at least the knowledge that he can do many things better than they can, that he can see things that they cannot see, that the truth that is so clear to him is for most people veiled and hidden. This is what Adler called the older brotherly attitude.

INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS 

• Self-actualizing people have deeper and more profound interpersonal relations than any other adults (although not necessarily deeper than those of children). They are capable of more fusion, greater love, more perfect identification, more obliteration of the ego boundaries than other people would consider possible.
• One consequence of this phenomenon and of certain others as well is that self.actualizing people have these especially deep ties with rather few individuals. Their circle of friends is rather small. The ones that they love profoundly are few in number. Partly this is for the reason that being very close to someone in this self-actualizing style seems to require a good deal of time. Devotion is not a matter of a moment. One subject expressed it like this: “I haven’t got time for many friends. Nobody has, that is, if they are to be real friends.”
• This love does not imply lack of discrimination. The fact is that they can and do speak realistically and harshly of those who deserve it, and especially of the hypocritical, the pretentious, the pompous, or the self-inflated.
• Perhaps the briefest possible description is to say that their hostile reactions to others are (1) deserved, (2) for the good of the person attacked or for someone else’s good. This is to say, with Fromm, that their hostility is not character based, but is reactive or situational.
• All the subjects for whom I have data show in common another characteristic that is appropriate to mention here, namely, that they attract at least some admirers, friends or even disciples or worshipers. The relation between the individual and his train of admirers is apt to be rather one-sided. The admirers are apt to demand more than our individual is willing to give. 
  • And furthermore, these devotions can be rather embarrassing, distressing, and even distasteful to the self-actualizing person, since they often go beyond ordinary bounds. The usual picture is of our subject being kind and pleasant when forced into these relationships, but ordinarily trying to avoid them as gracefully as possible.

THE DEMOCRATIC CHARACTER STRUCTURE

• They can be and are friendly with anyone of suitable character regardless of class, education, political belief, race, or color. As a matter of fact it often seems as if they are not even aware of these differences, which are for the average person so obvious and so important.
• For instance they find it possible to learn from anybody who has something to teach them-no matter what other characteristics he may have. 
  • In such a learning relationship they do not try to maintain any outward dignity or to maintain status or age prestige or the like. It should even be said that my subjects share a quality that could be called humility of a certain type. They are all quite well aware of how little they know in comparison with what could be known and what is known by others. Because of this it is possible for them to be honestly respectful and even humble before people who can teach them something that they do not know or who have a skill they do not possess.

• These individuals, themselves elite, select for their friends elite, but this is an elite of character, capacity, and talent, rather than of birth, race, blood, name, family, age, youth, fame, or power.

DISCRiMINATION BETWEN MEANS AND ENDS, BETWEN GOOD AND EVIL 

• I have found none of my subjects to be chronically unsure about the difference between right and wrong in his actual living. Whether or not they could verbalize the matter, they rarely showed in their day-to-day living the chaos, the confusion, the inconsistency, or the conflict that are so common in the average person’s ethical dealings. This may be phrased also in the following terms: these individuals are strongly ethical, they have definite moral standards, they do right and do not do wrong. Needless to say, their notions of right and wrong and of good and evil are often not the conventional ones.
• A few say that they do believe in a God, but describe this God more as a metaphysical concept than as a personal figure. If religion is defined only in social-behavioral terms, then these are all religious people, the atheist included. But if more conservatively we use the term religion to stress the supernatural element and institutional orthodoxy (certainly the more common usage) then our answer must be quite different, for then very few of them are religious.
• Our subjects make the situation more complex by often regarding as ends in themselves many experiences and activities that are, for other people, only means. Our subjects are somewhat more likely to appreciate for its own sake, and in an absolute way, the doing itself; they can often enjoy for its own sake the getting to some place as well as the arriving. It is occasionally possible for them to make out of the most trivial and routine activity an intrinsically enjoyable game or dance or play.

PHILOSOPHICAL, UNHOSTILE SENSE OF HUMOR 

• One very early finding that was quite easy to make, because it was common to all my subjects, was that their sense of humor is not of the ordinary type. They do not consider funny what the average man considers to be funny. Thus they do not laugh at hostile humor (making people laugh by hurting someone) or superiority humor (laughing at someone else’s inferiority) or authority-rebelion humor (the unfunny, Oedipal, or smutty joke). 
• Characteristically what they consider humor is more closely allied to philosophy than to anything else. It may also be called the humor of the real because it consists in a large part in poking at human beings in general when they are foolish, or forget their place in the universe, or try to be big when they are actually small. This can take the form of poking fun at themselves,
• Our subjects are rather on the sober and serious side. This attitude also rubs off on professional work itself, which in a certain sense is also play, and which, though taken seriously, is somehow also taken lightly.

CREATIVENESS 

• This is a universal characteristic of all the people studied or observed. There is no exception. Each one shows in one way or another a special kind of creativeness or originality or inventiveness that has certain peculiar characteristics.
• The creativeness of the self-actualized man seems rather to be kin to the naive and universal creativeness of unspoiled children. It seems to be more a fundamental characteristic of common human nature, a potentiality given to all human beings at birth.
• This creativeness appears in some of our subjects not in the usual forms of writing books, composing music, or producing artistic objects, but rather may be much more humble. It is as if this special type of creativeness, being an expression of healthy personality, is projected out upon the world or touches whatever activity the person is engaged in. In this sense there can be creative shoemakers or carpenters or clerks. Whatever one does can be done with a certain attitude, a certain spirit that arises out of the nature of the character of the person performing the act. One can even see creatively as the child does.
• Furthermore, as we have seen, these individuals are less inhibited, less constricted, less bound, in a word, less enculturated. In more positive terms, they are more spontaneous, more natural, more human. This too would have as one of its consequences what would seem to other people to be creativeness.

RESISTANCE TO ENCULTURATION; THE TRANSCENDENCE OF ANY PARTICULAR CULTURE 

• Self actualizing people are not well adjusted (in the naive sense of approval of and identification with the culture). They get along with the culture in various ways, but of all of them it may be said that in a certain profound and meaningful sense they resist enculturation and maintain a certain inner detachment from the culture in which they are immersed.
• On the whole the relationship of these healthy people with their much less healthy culture is a complex one; from it can be teased out at least the following components. 
  • 1. All these people fall well within the limits of apparent conventionality in choice of clothes, of language, ofod, of ways of doing things in our culture. And yet they are not really conventional, certainly not fashionable or smart or chic. Since choice of shoes, or style of haircut or politeness, or manner of behaving at a party are not of primary concern to any of the individuals studied, they are apt to elicit as a reaction only a shrug of the shoulders. These are not moral issues.
  • Another point that came up very commonly in discussion was the desirability of enjoying life and having a good time. This seems to all but one to be incompatible with hot and full-time rebelliousness.

• The mixture of varying proportions of affection or approval and hostility or criticism indicated that they select from American culture what is good in it by their lights and reject what they think is bad in it. In a word they weigh it, say it, taste it, and then make their own decisions. This is certainly very different from others. 
• For these and other reasons they may be called autonomous, i.e, ruled by the laws of their own character rather than by the rules of society. It is in this sense that they are not only or merely Americans, but also to a greater degree than others, members at large of the human species.

THE IMPERFECTIONS OF SELF-ACTUALIZING PEOPLE

• Our subjects show many of the lesser human failings. They too are equipped with sily, wasteful, or thoughtless habits. They can be boring, stubborn, irritating. They are by no means free from a rather superficial vanity, pride, partiality to their own productions, family, friends, and children. Temper outbursts are not rare.
• Our subjects are occasionally capable of an extraordinary and unexpected ruthlessness. It must be remembered that they are very strong people. This makes it possible for them to display a surgical coldness when this is called for, beyond the power of the average man. The man who found that a long-trusted acquaintance was dishonest cut himself off from this friendship sharply and abruptly and without any observable pangs whatsoever.
• Not only are these people strong but also they are independent of the opinions of other people.
• In their concentration, in their fascinated interest, in their intense concentration on some phenomenon or question, they may become absent-minded or humorless and forget their ordinary social politeness. In such circumstances, they are apt to show themselves more clearly as essentially not interested in chatting, gay conversation, party-going, or the like, they may use language or behavior that may be very distressing, shocking, insulting, or hurtful too. 
• What this has taught me I think all of us had better learn. There are no perfect human beings! Persons can be found who are good, very good indeed, in fact, great. There do in fact exist creators, sages, saints, shakers, and movers.

VALUES AND SELF-ACTUALIZATION

• A firm foundation for a value system is automatically furnished to the self-actualizer by his philosophic acceptance of the nature of himself, of human nature, of much of social life, and of nature and physical reality. These acceptance values account for a high percentage of the total of his individual value judgments from day to day. What he approves of, disapproves of, is loyal to, opposed or proposes, what pleases him or displeases him can often be understood as surface derivations of this source trait of acceptance.
• The topmost portion of the value system of the self-actualized person is entirely unique and idiosyncratic-character-structure-expressive. This must be true by definition, for self-actualization is actualization of a self, and no two selves are altogether alike. There is only one Renoir, one Brahms, one Spinoza. Our subjects had very much in common, as we have seen, and yet at the same time were more completely individualized, more unmistakably themselves, less easily confounded with others than any average control group could possibly be. That is to say, they are simultaneously very much alike and very much unlike each other. They are more completely individual than any group that has ever been described, and yet are also more completely socialized, more identified with humanity than any other group yet described. They are closer to both their species hood and to their unique individuality.

THE RESOLUTION OF DICHOTOMIES IN SELF-ACTUALIZATION

• For example the age-old opposition between heart and head, reason and instinct, or cognition and conation was seen to disappear in healthy people where they become synergic rather than antagonist, and where conflict between them disappears because they say the same thing and point to the same conclusion. In a word, in these people, desires are in excellent accord with reason. St. Augustine’s “Love God and do as you will” can easily be translated, “Be healthy and then you may trust your impulses.“
• The dichotomy between selfishness and unselfishness disappears altogether in healthy people because in principle every act is both selfish and unselfish (312). Our subjects are simultaneously very spiritual and very pagan and sensual even to the point where sexuality becomes a path to the spiritual and “religious.” Duty cannot be contrasted with pleasure nor work with play when duty is pleasure, when work is play, and the person doing his duty and being virtuous is simultaneously seeking his pleasure and being happy. If the most socially identified people are themselves also the most individualistic people, of what use is it to retain the polarity? If the most mature are also childlike? And if the most ethical and moral people are also the lustiest and most animal?
• In these people, the id, the ego, and the superego are collaborative and synergic; they do not war with each other nor are they interested in basic disagreement as they are in neurotic people.

A PRELIMINARY DESCRIPTION OF SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF LOVE BETWEEN THE SEXES

• This feeling of pleasure in contact and in being with, shows itself also in the desire to be together with the loved one as much as possible in as many situations as possible; in work, in play, during aesthetic and intellectual pursuits. There is often expressed a desire to share pleasant experiences with the loved person so that it is often reported that the pleasant experience is more pleasant because of the presence of the sweetheart.
• Finally, of course, there is a special sexual arousal in the lover. This, in the typical instance, shows itself directly in genital changes. The beloved person seems to have a special power that nobody else in the world has to the same degree of producing erection and secretion in the partner, of arousing specific conscious sexual desire, and of producing the usual prickling and tingling that go with sexual arousal. And yet this is not essential, since love can be observed in people who are to old for sexual intercourse.
• The desire for intimacy is not only physical but also psychological. It expresses itself frequently as a special taste for privacy for the pair. in addition to this, I have observed often the growth in a pair who love each other of a secret language, secret sexual words that other people cannot understand, and of special tricks and gestures that only the lovers understand.
• Quite characteristic is the feeling of generosity, of wanting to give and to please. The lover gets special pleasure from doing things for and making gifts to the loved one.1 Very common is the desire for a fuller knowledge of one another, a yearning for a kind of psychological intimacy and psychological proximity and of being fully known to each other.

DROPPING OF DEFENSES IN SELF-ACTUALIZiNG LOVE RELATIONSHIPS 

• Theodor Reik (393, p. 171) has defined one characteristic of love as the absence of anxiety. This is seen with exceptional clearance in healthy individuals.
• As the relationship continues, there is a growing intimacy and honesty and self-expression, which at its height is a rare phenomenon. The report from these people is that with a beloved person it is possible to be oneself, to feel natural; “I can be myself.” 
• Self-actualizing love. or R-love, tends to be a free giving of oneself, wholly and with abandon, without reserve, withholding, or calculation of the kind exemplified in the following statements collected from college women: “Don’t give up too easily.” “Make it hard to get.” “Make him uncertain.” “He shouldn’t be too sure of me.”I keep him guessing.“”l don’t give yourself too fast or too completely.” “If I love him too much he’s the boss.” “lis love one must love more than the other; whoever does is the weaker,” “Let my hair down.’ This honesty also includes allowing one’s faults, weaknesses, arid physical and psychological shortcomings to be freely seen by the partner.
• There is much less tendency to put the best foot forward in a healthy love relationship. This goes so far as to make less likely the hiding even of physical defects of middle and old age, of false teeth, braces, girdles, and the like. There is much less maintenance of distance, mystery. and glamor, much less reserve and concealment and secrecy. This complete dropping of the guard definitely contradicts folk wisdom on the subject, not to mention some of the psychoanalytic theorists. For instance, Reik believes that being a god pal and being a god sweetheart are mutually exclusive and contradictory. My data, or rather my impressions seem to indicate the contrary.
• We may sum up this characteristic of self-actualizing love in the generalization that healthy love is in part an absence of defenses, that is to say, an increase in spontaneity and in honesty. The healthy love relationship tends to make it possible for two people to be spontaneous, to know each other, and still to love each other. Of course, this implies that as one gets to know another person more and more intimately and profoundly, one will like what one sees. If the partner is profoundly bad rather than god, increasing familiarity will produce not increasing preference but increasing antagonism and revulsion.
• One of the deepest satisfactions coming from the healthy love relationship reported by my subjects is that such a relationship permits the greatest spontaneity, the greatest naturalness, the greatest dropping of defenses and protection against threat. In such a relationship it is not necessary to be guarded, to conceal, to try to impress, to feel tense, to watch one’s words or actions, to suppress or repress. My people report that they can be themselves without feeling that there are demands or expectations upon them; they can feel psychologically (as well as physically) naked and still feel loved and wanted and secure.
• “‘Loved’ has here perhaps its deepest and most general meaning-that of being deeply understood and deeply accepted…. We can love a person only to the extent that we are not threatened by him; we can love only if his reactions to us, or to those things which affect us, are understandable to us….

THE ABILITY TO LOVE AND TO BE LOVED

• Meninger (35a) makes the very acute statement that human beings really do want to love each other but just do not know how to go about it. This is much less true for healthy people. They at least know how to love, and can do so freely and easily and naturally and without getting wound up in conflicts or threats or inhibitions. However, my subjects used the word love warily and with circumspection. They applied it only to a few rather than to many, tending to distinguish sharply between loving someone and liking him or being friendly or benevolent or brotherly. It described for them an intense feeling, not a mild or disinterested one.

SEXUALITY IN SELF-ACTUALIZING LOVE

• For one thing it can be reported that sex and love can be and most often are more perfectly fused with each other in healthy people. Although it is perfectly true that these are separable concepts, and although no purpose would be served in confusing them with each other unnecessarily (393, 42), still it must be reported that in the life of healthy people, they tend to become joined and merged with each other. As a matter of fact we may also say that they become less separable and less separate from each other in the lives of the people we have studied.
• less important than average people. It is often a profound and almost mystical experience. and yet the absence of sexuality is more easily tolerated by these people. This is not a paradox or a contradiction. It follows from dynamic motivation theory. Loving at a higher need level makes the lower needs and their frustrations and satisfactions less important. Less central. More easily neglected. But it also makes them more wholeheartedly enjoyed when gratified.
• Possibility of the average person, even at the same time that it does not play any central role in the philosophy of life. It is something to be enjoyed, something to be taken for granted, something to build upon, something that is very basically important like water or food, and that can be enjoyed as much.
• Self-actualizing love shows many of the characteristics of self-actualization in general. For instance, one characteristic is that it is based on a healthy acceptance of the self and of others. So much can be accepted by these people that others would not accept. For example, in spite of the fact that these people are relatively less driven to love affairs outside the marriage, they are much more free than the average to admit to the fact of sexual attraction to others. My impression is that there tends to be a rather easy relationship with the opposite sex, along with casual acceptance of the phenomenon of being attracted to other people, at the same time that these individuals do rather less about this attraction than other people. Also it seems to me that their talk about sex is considerably more free and casual and unconventional than the average.
• Another characteristic I found of love in healthy people is that they made no really sharp differentiation between the roles and personalities of the two sexes. That is, they did not assume that the female was passive and the male active, whether in sex or love or anything else. These people were all so certain of their maleness or femaleness that they did not mind taking on some of the cultural aspects of the opposite sex role. It was especially noteworthy that they could be both active and passive lovers and this was the clearest in the sexual act and in physical love-making. Kissing and being kissed, being above or below in the sexual act, taking the initiative, being quiet and receiving love, teasing and being teased these were all found in both sexes. The reports indicated that both were enjoyed at different times. It was considered to be a shortcoming to be limited to just active love-making or passive.
• Since this is very probably related to the lack of doubt about their maleness or femaleness, their masculinity or femininity, so also is it my strong impression that healthier men are more apt to be attracted by intelligence, strength, competence, etc., in their women rather than threatened by it, as is so often the case with the uncertain male.

CARE, RESPONSIBILITY, THE POOLING OF NEEDS 

• One important aspect of a good love relationship is what may be called need identification, or the polling of the hierarchies of basic needs in two persons into a single hierarchy. The effect of this is that one person feels another’s needs as if they were his own and for that matter also feels his own needs to some extent as if they belonged to the other. An ego now expands to cover two people, and to some extent the two people have become for psychological purposes a single unit, a single person, a single ego.
• The ordinary way in which this need for identification shows itself to the eyes of the world is in terms of taking on responsibility, of care, of concern for another person. The loving husband can get as much pleasure from his wife’s pleasure as he can from his own. The loving mother would rather cough herself than hear her child cough, and as a matter of fact would willingly take on to her own shoulders the disease of her child, since it would be less painful for her to have it than to see and hear her child have it.
• A good example of this is seen in the differential reactions in good marriages and in bad marriages to illness and the consequently necessary nursing. An illness in the good couple is an illness of the couple rather than a misfortune of one of the pair. Equal responsibility is automatically taken, and it is as if they were both simultaneously struck. The primitive communism of the loving family shows itself in this way and not only in the sharing of food or of money. It is here that one sees at its best and purest the exemplification of the principle: from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs. The only modification that is necessary here is that the needs of the other person are the needs of the lover.
• If we remember that human beings are in the last analysis isolated from each other and encapsulated, each one in his own little shell, and if we agree that also in the last analysis people can never really know each other as they know themselves, then every intercourse between groups and individuals is like an effort of ‘two solitudes to protect, and touch and greet each other” (Rilke). Of all such efforts that we know anything about, the healthy love relationship is the most effective way of bridging the unbridgeable gap between two separate human beings.

FUN AND GAIETY IN THE HEALTHY LOVE RELATIONSHIP

ACCEPTANCE OF THE OTHER’S INDIVIDUALITY; RESPECT FOR THE OTHER 

• All serious writers on the subject of ideal or healthy love have stressed the affirmation of the other’s individuality, the eagerness for the growth of the other, the essential respect for his individuality and unique personality. This is confirmed very strongly by the observation of the self actualizing people, who have in unusual measure the rare ability to be pleased rather than threatened by the partner’s triumphs.
• St. Bernard said it very aptly: “Love seeks no cause beyond itself and no limit; it is its own fruit, its own enjoyment. I love because I love; I love in order that I may love…” (209).

DETACHMENT AND INDIVIDUALITY 

• A paradox seems to be created at first sight by the fact that self-actualizing people maintain a degree of individuality, of detachment, and autonomy that seems at first glance to be incompatible with the kind of identification and love that I have been describing above. But this is only an apparent paradox. As we have seen, the tendencies to detachment and to need identification and to profound interrelationships with another person can coexist in healthy people. The fact is that self-actualizing people are simultaneously the most individualistic and the most altruistic and social and loving of all human beings. The fact that we have, in our culture, little of these qualities at opposite ends of a single continuum is apparently a mistake that must now be corrected. These qualities go together and the dichotomy is resolved in self-actualizing people.
• We find in our subjects a healthy selfishness, a great self-respect, a disinclination to make sacrifices without good reason. What we see in the love relationship is a fusion of great ability to love and at the same time great respect for the other and great respect for oneself. 
• This shows itself in the fact that these people cannot be said in the ordinary sense of the word to need each other as do ordinary lovers. They can be extremely close together and yet go apart when necessary without collapsing. They do not cling to each other or have hooks or anchors of any kind. One has the definite feeling that they enjoy each other tremendously but would philosophically take a long separation or death, that is, would remain strong. Throughout the most intense and ecstatic love affairs, these people remain themselves and remain ultimately masters of themselves as well, living by their own standards even though enjoying each other intensely.

THE GREATER TASTE AND PERCEPTIVENESS OF HEALTHY LOVERS 

• One of the most striking superiorities reported of self-actualizing people is their exceptional perceptiveness. They can perceive truth and reality more efficiently than the average run of people, whether it is structured or unstructured, personal or non personal. This acuity manifest itself in the arc of love relations primarily in an excellent taste (or perceptiveness) in sexual and love partners. The close friends, husbands, and wives of our subjects make a far finer group of human beings than random sampling would dictate.
• As for opposites attracting, this is true for my subjects to the extent that I have seen honest admiration for skills and talents that they themselves do not possess. Such superiorities make a potential partner more rather than less attractive to my subjects, whether in man or in woman.