Self-Actualization…

“The driving force of sustainable happiness”

 

Historically the field of psychology was overly concerned about resolving mental and personal ‘problems’. Problems which either stood in the way to achieve excellence or greatness or problems which simply disabled an individual to live a normal life.

 

Only in the mid-20th century a more positive approach was introduced dubbed humanistic psychology. It was seen as a response to the limitations of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism according to Benjafield (2010) in A History of Psychology.

 

The principles and ideas humanistic psychology can be traced back to Greek philosophers, Roman Humanitas and European Renaissance. Human psychologists is centered around the idea that every person has a strong desire to realize their full potential. It emphasizes the individuals’ inherent drive towards “self-actualization” – the process of realizing and expressing one’s own capabilities and creativity.

 

German neurologist and psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein was the first to introduce the concept of the organism as a whole,‘ which is built on the assumption that “every individual, every plant, every animal has only one inborn goal – to actualize itself as it is.” In his book “The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man” (1939), he explained self-actualization as “the tendency to actualize, as much as possible, [the organism’s] individual capacities” in the world.

 

Consequently, American psychologist Carl Roger described self-actualization as the ongoing process of maintaining and enhancing the individual’s self-concept through reflection, reinterpretation of experience, allowing the individual to recover, develop, change, and grow in his book Client-centered therapy: Its current practice, implications and theory (1951).

 

Eventually Abraham Maslow’s book, Motivation and Personality (1954), exponentially popularized the humanistic psychology approach. It changed the rather negative psychological view towards a more positive view in which man is motivated to realize his full potential. Or as Maslow’s  states in his book – dedicated to Kurt Goldstein – “Toward a Psychocology of Being” (1968):

It is as if Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.