Motivation and Personality

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. He must be true to his own nature. This need we may call self-actllalization. NEED FOR SELF-ACTUALIZATION, it refers to man's desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one idiosyncratically is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.

The resistance of the person to enculturation in the interests of his own integrity and of his own intrinsic nature is then, or should be, a respectable area of study in the psychological and social sciences. A person who gives in eagerly to the distorting forces in his culture, i.e, a welladjusted man, may occasionally be less healthy than a delinquent, a criminal, a neurotic who may be demonstrating by his reactions that he has spunk enough left to resist the breaking of his psychological bones.

The most stable and therefore most healthy self-esteem is based on deserved respect from others rather than on external fame or celebrity and unwarranted adulation.

From this same consideration, furthermore, arises what seems at first to be a topsy-turvy, hind-end-to paradox. Education, civilization, rationality, religion, law, government, have all been interpreted by most as being primarily instinct-restraining and suppressing forces. But if our contention is correct that instincts have more to fear from civilization than civilization from instincts, perhaps it ought to be the other way about (if we still wish to produce better men and better societies): perhaps it should be at least one function of education, law, religion, etc, to safeguard, foster, and encourage the expression and gratification of the instinctoid needs for safety, for love, for self-esteem, for self-actualization.