Tag Archives: psychology

Self-actualizing survey

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Abraham Maslow listed the following characteristics of self-actualizing individuals:

  1. Superior perception of reality
  2. Increased acceptance of self, of others and of nature
  3. Increased spontaneity
  4. Increase in problem-centering
  5. Increased detachment and desire for privacy
  6. Increased autonomy, and resistance to enculturation
  7. Greater freshness of appreciation, and richness of emotional reaction
  8. Higher frequency of peak experiences
  9. Increased identification with the human species
  10. Changed (improved) interpersonal relations
  11. More democratic character structure
  12. Greatly increased creativeness
  13. Certain changes in the value system

Based on his impressions of famous figures, Maslow arrived at characteristics of self-actualizers including the following:

  1. More efficient perception of reality and more comfortable relations with it
  2. Acceptance of self, others, and nature
  3. Spontaneity; simplicity; naturalness
  4. Problem-centeredness
  5. The quality of detachment; the need for privacy
  6. Autonomy; independence of culture and environment; will; active agents
  7. Continued freshness of appreciation
  8. The democratic character structure, including discrimination between means and ends, good and evil
  9. Philosophical, unhostile sense of humor
  10. Creativeness
  11. Resistance to enculturation: The transcendence of any culture
  12. The resolution of certain dichotomies[1]

These lists can be consolidated like so:

  1. superior/more efficient perception of reality and more comfortable relations with it
  2. increased acceptance of self, of others and of nature
  3. increased spontaneity; simplicity; naturalness
  4. increase in problem-centering (objective problem-solving trumps self-consciousness)
  5. increased detachment, privacy
  6. autonomy: cultural transcendence, independence of environment
  7. greater/continued freshness of appreciation, emotional richness
  8. a more democratic character structure, including discrimination between means and ends, good and evil
  9. increased identification with humanity (gemeinschaftsgefühl)
  10. improved interpersonal relations
  11. philosophical, unhostile sense of humor
  12. greatly-increased creativeness
  13. certain changes in one’s values
  14. resolution of certain dichotomies

One can thus be self-actualizing in fourteen different ways. How self-actualizing are you?

[1] Maslow also noted that “the mystic [peak] experience…[was] a fairly common experience” for his study’s subjects, though not for all (1954, p. 164).

References:

Maslow, A. H. (1954). Motivation and personality. Retrieved from http://s-f-walker.org.uk/pubsebooks/pdfs/Motivation_and_Personality-Maslow.pdf

Maslow, A. H. (2011). Toward a psychology of being. Blacksburg, VA: Wilder Publications. (Original work published 1962)

How well do you know your mind?

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Want to know your mind? How about a scientific way? Your mind is unconscious and conscious, thinking and feeling—and more…

affective state: feelings in-the-momentmotivational state: reaching a goal, overcoming a situationcognitive state: thoughtfulness, lost-in-thought, daydream, conscious thinking
affective trait: Neuroticism, upbeat personalitymotivational trait: Conscientiousnesscognitive trait: introspective, intellectual, imaginative (Openness)
affective process: emotional processing in therapymotivational process: setting your mind to a goalcognitive process
consciousness

affective state: moodsmotivational statecognitive state: dreaming
affective trait: half-awareness of Neuroticism or Enthusiasmmotivational trait: habitual actioncognitive trait: half-known preference for Thinking (over Feeling)
affective processmotivational processcognitive process
subconscious

affective state: intuitionmotivational state: doing things without thinkingcognitive state: intuition
affective trait: undiscovered Neuroticism/Enthusiasmmotivational trait: doing something without knowing whycognitive trait: undiscovered Intellect or Imagination trait
affective process: System 1 intuition (fast, unconscious inference)motivational processcognitive process: System 1 intuition
unconscious

You get it? Your mind is complex!

Take the mind survey here. (Bonus at the end —click “sure!” when asked if you’re interested in superconsciousness to find out if you’re self-actualizing!)

12/17-12/27/2021

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The Universe moves through you. Don’t take it out on your career…. Armed with western psychology, you might cease to live in an interesting way!

There’s nothing exciting about “neutral”. Be a gummy lord, but ask: Where was the ground beneath us? Try love in a liberal democracy: date a 25-year-old delight 😯 Be a calm taco–forge a good relation with woman.

Feel the winter chill on your bones? That’s the result of my past, hedonistic ways! At least, I don’t take my own madness seriously…

No one wants to be overrun by other religions. Latent willpower can save you; I took the story into my own hands. No emo-ness to report, there!

What if you conform to her judgments of the situation of us? God–I really sucked from the tit of existentialism: huh? Not to prove I’m not a pig, or anything…

While purely at ease, you won’t be too sensitive from the breakup. You might become a meme-y guy, in which case you could join a party with Christians. I should have stayed a nerd! He is entitled to feel emo (as we all might be).

A Ph.D. in Chanda Studies may well exist by the time I’m through. No playing the suppression game: any Freudian one is a testy concept. Through my innovative powers, I now discard that cognition! “Bonding over individualism” might seem possible to someone who is thrown off by fiction…I won’t be an Orichalcos daddy.

I would never try to criticize her darkness. Am I obsessed with being active? Why: activity is integral to my being!

I awakened her vulnerability. “Freaking simps of culture!” She yelled. I control the flow of my cognition…yet, I passed them the sex bug.

Can you see me having fun with the oppressor’s language? Leave your grieving heart behind! Shoot over statistics while others are going blind, psychologically. Let them be riddled with subjectivity; be careful not to disappear into your grief.

What is a psychological person?

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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

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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!

Existential-humanistic psychology

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Existential-humanistic (E-H) psychology is the study of human existence.

Psychology in general is the science of mental processes (mind) and behavior.

Thus, E-H psychology enlarged is the science of mind and behavior within human existence.

But what is human existence with no mind? Mind is a necessary feature; for without it, we’d have no room to consider human existence to begin with.

Behavior may be said to pervade all levels of reality. In physics, we speak of the behavior of particles. Social science considers the situational behavior of persons as human beings.

Mind and behavior are thus part-and-parcel of human existence. Our science of the former two topics must serve to bolster our understanding–and, ultimately, experience–of the latter.

As minded human persons who behave situationally, how do we experience our existence?

Are psychological diagnoses meaningless?

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Part of the issue is the power psychiatry wields as a profession, relative to psychology.

“Evidence-based” usually translates to privileging biochemistry over psychology (the latter of which is “soft”, and therefore “less empirical”).

People have equated the brain with mind more and more, over time. Pushing that further, if neural dynamics determine psychological states (such as moods) outright–but, not vice versa–it becomes logical to target biological factors to uproot behavioral problems.

It is telling that psychological diagnoses are outlined in a manual published by the American Psychiatric (not Psychological) Association. Much of modern psychology grew out of psychiatry–see Freud and Jung, but also other theorists around their time like Karen Horney, who was an M.D.–so part of this is attributable to psychology’s heritage.

As the field develops its identity more, perhaps we’ll see psychologists push for greater control over the field’s diagnosis-establishing processes.