Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: The Peak
This is the final week of reflecting on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. As I mentioned last week, Maslow expanded his original final category of Self-Fulfillment Needs into four sub-categories: Cognitive, Aesthetic, Self-Actualization, and Transcendence. Last week, I focused exclusively on Self-Actualization and becoming all that God created you to be. However, Maslow believed that self-actualization is brought about by intellectual and creative behavior.
Cognitive, or intellectual, needs are straight-forward: it’s our need to continue to learn and explore. Those of us who call ourselves lifelong learners are not only aware of this need, but actively meeting it. This need comes out when we learn a new fact, or a new word, and we go down an internet search rabbit hole to learn more because we are curious and want to know more. You’re also meeting your cognitive needs any time you do brainstorming or problem-solving. It’s a need to make meaning and a search for knowledge as part of your personal growth.
Aesthetic, or creative, needs are why although we may cut funding for the arts, we will never completely eliminate them. We need beauty in our lives, to experience and to create, whether visual or auditory or pleasant to one of the other senses. Even when we devalue creativity and don’t want to pay artists for their work, the arts remain important and an important part of every culture. We have a need for creativity, to experience it and to express it, whether you think of yourself as an artist or not. In fact, you generally have to think creatively and outside the box to achieve self-actualization because to reach your potential you have to do things that you’d never imagined yourself doing before.
Finally, transcendent needs are the needs to transcend yourself, to feel part of something larger than yourself, to realize values that go beyond just yourself. Maslow described these needs as mystical experiences that may occur as part of your faith, out in nature, or in service to others. As a chaplain, I hear transcendent needs as spiritual needs. In the hospital, meeting spiritual needs may be providing religious literature or prayer. Other times, it’s listening to confession or facilitating forgiveness or reconciliation. Sometimes it’s the spiritual need is to yell at God, or question God, or lament with God. It may involve grief or shame or feeling disconnected. It may be trying to make meaning of the reason why you’re in the hospital. Chaplains, and clergy in general, are trained at helping meet spiritual needs. We can listen, pray, help identify feelings and coping strategies, and reflect back what we hear so that you can better hear what you’re saying.
Spiritual needs are at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy. Self-fulfillment isn’t just reaching for your potential but reaching beyond yourself. Experts say volunteering is often one of the best activities you can engage in to facilitate emotional healing – to become involved in something bigger than yourself, to practice altruism, to help simply for the sake of helping, to give back to your community. Reaching outward, whether horizontally to your fellow person or upward to God makes a difference in your life. After all, step two of AA’s Twelves Steps is the acknowledgement of a higher power. Looking inward is good for reflection, then you move outward.