Reading: Self-Actualizing People: A Study of Psychological Health (A. Maslow)

1. Published in 1950 but written in 1943. He delayed publishing until he had the courage to put the ideas out there.
2. Section: More efficient perception of reality and more comfortable relations with it p 203
   
   1. p 204 fascinating comments on the sick and the healthy: "if health and neurosis are, respectively, correct and incorrect perceptions of reality, propositions of fact and propositions of value merge in this area, and in principle, value propositions should then be empirically demonstrable rather than merely matters of taste or exhortation. For those who have wrestled with this problem it will be clear that we may have here a partial basis for a true science of values, and consequently of ethics social relations, politics, religion, etc.
3. Section: Acceptance (Self, Others, Nature) p 206
   1. Impression: The idea that acceptance of self and others comes from this generation of thinkers and writers. This radical acceptance of self marks a break with the religious past. To be healthy is to be freed from the condemnation of original sin. Evidence of such radical acceptance came in the form of freedom from guilt and anxiety. With radical acceptance as the goal and indication of self-actualization or more generally as self-fulliment, a whole generation turned inward and became preoccupied with the state of the existential self, concerned as they were with freedom from neurosis and the pursuit of happiness. This pursuit of happiness highlights one dimension of the americanness of this search for meaning. This search is the individualized form of american exceptionalism.
4. p 2-8 Section: Spontaneity
   1. p 210 Description of the new therapeutic subjectivity: "Their ease of penetration to reality, their close approach to an animal-like or childlike acceptance and spontaneity imply a superior awareness of their own impulses, desires, opinions, and subjective reactions in general." Feeling becomes emphasized in the act of perception of reality. Feeling is no longer considered to be irrational per se, but should be incorporated into rational thinking [quote the passions]. The dichotomy between reason and passion in the self-actualized individual finds resolution.
   2. read 211 for a good description of the new subjectivity; I will have to define the "old" subjectivity. What is my data source for this? Religious or economic man. Where can I find descriptions of these?
5. p211 Section: Problem Centering
6. p212 Section: The Quality of Detachment; the need for Privacy
7. p213 Section: Autonomy; Independence of Culture and Environment
8. p214 Section: Continued Freshness of Appreciation
9. p216 Section: The Mystic Experience (William James); the Oceanic Feeling (Freud)
   1. This section reminds me of the criticism that later commentators would make that the search for self-fulfilment was for intense personal experience.
   2. Maslow mentions here the loss of self or transcendence of it.
      1. What is interesting is he is discussing these ideas two decades before the general population begins to experiment with them. How would you measure or track the seepage of these ideas into the culture at large? Hmmm...I guess I could look at popular accounts or diaries of the 1960s to look for this evidence. Who are characters I can use to illustrate how ideas like self-actualization were absorbed into consciousness in the 1960s? Off the top of my head: Abbie Hoffman, Joyce Milton, Rossinow Subjects (should I interview them?). I could also use other psychotherapists like Rollo May, Carl Rogers, Gordon Allport or any one else who expounds on transcendence and self-actualization.
      2. I could follow Cosmos Crumbling in the Body Reformers and portray Maslow as a Lawgiver of psychological health. Methodologically following Abzug, I would need to trace the reforms promulgated by multiple reformers to suggest how society began to focus on happiness, health, healing, and self-fulfilment like never before. So the story of modern reform begins with the advent of psychotherapy. While psychotherapy espouses a secular outlook, it address the questions of life traditionally answered by religion. What was unique about Maslow in this sense? He built his theory of the hierarchy of needs off the therapeutic insights gained through traditional psychoanalytic psychotherapy, adlerian psychotherapy, and neo-freudian psychotherapy as they addressed themselves to the crisis of meaning enveloping the modern western world. In a sense the questions of suffering, transcendence and healing that these therapeutic and cultural elite pursued predated the larger cultural questioning that would consume so much energy in the 1960s. At some point in the 1960s the process of secularization reached a tipping point and many critics prophesied the end of religion. Give examples. As traditional forms of worship gave way in the 1960s, individuals like Maslow, May and Rogers searched and taught about new forms of sacred life. Give examples.