The Social World of Self-Actualizing People: Reflections by Maslow’s Biographer

Abstract

Maslow’s concept of self-actualization has been a bulwark of humanistic psychology for more than 50 years, and has increasingly gained international appeal beyond its original nexus within the United States. His description of the high achieving characteristics of self-actualizing men and women has influenced theorists and practitioners in such fields as counseling, education, health care, management, and organizational psychology. Through these same decades, Maslow’s formulation has also been criticized as promoting a hyperindividualistic, even narcissistic, orientation to personality growth. Because Maslow by temperament and intellectual style expressed himself in an ever-evolving set of speeches and writings that were seldom explicit about interpersonal relations, his actual outlook on the social world of self-actualizers has remained elusive. The focus of this article, therefore, is how Maslow depicted self-actualizing people with regard to five major interpersonal dimensions of life: friendship, romantic love, marriage and lasting intimacy, parenthood, and communal service. By pulling together Maslow’s comments primarily in his published works, and secondarily in his unpublished works-in-progress, it is possible to explicate his tacit viewpoint. Doing so will not only help dispel the misconception that Maslow depicted self-actualizers as loners or even hermits but also guide future theory and research on personality growth.