Self-actualization

Self-actualization, in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, is the highest personal aspirational human need in the hierarchy. It represents where one's potential is fully realized after more basic needs, such as for the body and the ego, have been fulfilled. Long received in psychological teaching as the peak of human needs, Maslow later added the category self-transcendence (which, strictly speaking, extends beyond one's own "needs").

Self-actualization was coined by the organismic theorist Kurt Goldstein for the motive to realize one's full potential: "the tendency to actualize itself as fully as possible is the basic drive ... the drive of self-actualization."[1] Carl Rogers similarly wrote of "the curative force in psychotherapy – man's tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities ... to express and activate all the capacities of the organism."[2]

  1. ^ Goldstein, quoted in Arnold H. Modell, The Private Self (Harvard 1993) p. 44
  2. ^ Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person (1961) p. 350-1