Category Archives: psychosophy

Pokémon and humanistic psychology

What do these two phenomena have in common?

Both inspire people to become their best selves!

What is a psychological person?

Maybe more aptly: who are they?

The psychological person is so necessarily by their being embedded in society among other, conscious agents.

As both conscious and societal, the psychological person has the following attributes:

  • They have a mind.
  • They engage in behaviors.
  • They have a distinct personality.
  • They respond to situations.
  • They experience.
  • They sense and perceive.
  • They think, feel, and motivate.
  • They pay attention.
  • They recall and foresee.
  • They learn.

What might this mean for the person who may not have a personality or general life situation? What if they don’t think, feel, or motivate? Surely, they must experience as a conscious being. Further, personhood has been granted according to societal status over the centuries. Societal, conscious personage is a keenly biosocial label. (If someone ceases to be alive medically, they are no longer technically a “person”.)

The psychological person is biosocial! Another way to say this is that people are biopsychosocial. Some may be more or less psychological than others in certain respects…

Subjectifying the other

How do we do it? By taming the following:

  • Male gaze
  • Outgroup demonization
  • Fundamental attribution error (FAE) – reactively judging oneself–including one’s efforts–as superior, and others’ as inferior

Outgroup demonization is turned inside-out into (“outto”?) ingroup angelification.

The ideal opposite of FAE is FAC, i.e. fundamental attribution correction. Through FAC, we fundamentally attribute correctly, viewing oneself and others as innately, humanly equal and democratic!

From Frankl, to Maslow, to Heidegger…

Frankl’s “paradoxical intention” can be paraphrased as follows: let the fulfillment of second-order desires (e.g., accruing wealth) follow only from meaningful living.

This is consistent with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which places self-actualization atop a pyramid of lower-level “deficiency needs” (D-needs). It also follows from his Theory Z–once people achieve a sufficient level of economic security, this theory goes, humans will search for more in life.

What will human persons seek? Specifically, what do human persons aim for (paradoxically or not) once they self-actualize?

Human persons will self-transcend.

Maslow viewed self-actualization and peak experiencing as overlapping more often than not. “B-values”–i.e., Being-values–partially comprise the peak experience.

Environment-transcendence is one out of 14 total B-values. Self-actualization partially involves resistance to enculturation, as well as independence from one’s environment.

While typing and reading about Being and the environment, we could propose the following construct: “being-with-nature”. Being-with-nature follows linguistically from Heidegger’s “being-with-others”, or mitsein in German.

Do we save the natural environment by transcending it or being with it? Is such transcendence not also a being-with? A hierarchical relation is still a relation. Once we add the horizontal, egalitarian level to this, we need to either separate environment-transcendence from being-with-nature or fuse them in some novel way.

Accommodating hierarchy and “heterarchy” as proposed above leads us to a holarchic approach. The holarchic approach fuses these perspectives or approaches.

Thus–holarchically-speaking–we may speak of being-with-natural environment-transcendence!

Of course, before transcending the environment, one should transcend oneself. Maslow wrote that the acceptance of self, of others and nature is a self-actualizing characteristic. Perhaps his order here was deliberate?