Maslow's Hierarcy of Human Needs, Explained

The revolutionary concept made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

In his now famous 1943 paper, A Theory of Human Motivation, Abraham Maslow organized the most fundamental human motivations into five sets of “instinct-like” needs or drives, which he also arranged in a five-level hierarchy ranging from the most basic, most powerful, lower needs, to the least basic, least powerful, higher needs.

In ascending order from lowest to highest, the five levels of needs in the hierarchy were: (1) the “physiological needs” (for food, water, warmth, sex, maintaining homeostasis, and everything else required for basic biological survival), (2) the “safety needs” (for stability, security, freedom from danger, and predictable access to all things that satisfy the physiological needs), (3) the “love needs” (for friendship, community, social acceptance, basic affection, group belongingness, and love), (4) the “esteem needs” (for high social status, prestige, and the respect of one’s peers, as well as for competence, confidence, and self-esteem), and (5) the “need for self-actualization” (to use and develop one’s unique set of abilities and capacities, and thereby “become everything that one is capable of becoming”).^[i]

Any one of these needs, if left severely unsatisfied for a long time, can completely take over a person’s whole psychology. For the person severely deprived of food, for example, nearly all of his mental capacities, Maslow wrote, “may now be defined simply as hunger-gratifying tools.” His values change (he values food much more highly), his “perceptions change” (he perceives food, or the opportunity to get it, much more easily), his “memories change” (he remembers meals much more keenly), and even his interests and entire worldview “tends to [become] defined in terms of eating”—“freedom, love, community feeling, respect, philosophy, may all be waved aside as fripperies,” Maslow explained, “which are useless since they fail to fill the stomach.”^[ii]

In a very real sense, then, the person acutely and chronically lacking in food, or safety, or love, as Maslow wrote, can be said to be living for food alone, or safety alone, or love alone, and so on. And when more than one need is left unsatisfied to an extreme degree, it will be the need lowest down in the hierarchy that most likely seizes the person’s mind—and to the exclusion of all of his other, higher needs. “In the human being who is missing everything in life in an extreme fashion, it is most likely that the major motivation would be the physiological needs rather than any others,” to quote Abraham Maslow. “The organism is then dominated by the physiological needs, [and] all other needs may become simply non-existent or be pushed into the background.”^[iii]

Different people, therefore, essentially live at different levels of human motivation. Their primary aims in life are profoundly different in quality from one another’s. And a major part of their personalities are unconsciously structured around their lowest (acutely and chronically) unsatisfied need. Once that frustrated need is sufficiently gratified, however, the person will stay content only briefly. “At once other (and higher) needs emerge [to] dominate the organism,” Maslow wrote. “And when these in turn are satisfied, again new (and still higher) needs emerge, and so on.”^[iv]

In this way, over the course of his life, an individual comes to climb Maslow’s hierarchy. His lowest severely frustrated need becomes the main focus of his life. He then grows a personality structure (of skills, behaviors, values, and beliefs) designed to fulfill that need. And when that need is sufficiently gratified, his next-lowest need-deficit will emerge into consciousness, become the new primary focus of his life, and generate a new personality structure that replaces the old one.

Maslow’s theory, therefore, can effectively predict a person’s unsatisfied needs based on his personality. It can predict much of his personality, given his unsatisfied needs. And it can predict how his personality will transform, in response to the need frustrations and gratifications he comes to encounter throughout life. The more specific nature of these need-levels, and the different ways they affect personality, are described below:

Physiological Needs: “For the man who is extremely and dangerously hungry,” wrote Abraham Maslow, “no other interests exist but food. He dreams food, he remembers food, he thinks about food, he emotes only about food, he perceives only food, and he wants only food.”

Even “Utopia,” for him, “can be defined very simply as a place where there is plenty of food. He tends to think that, if only he is guaranteed food for the rest of his life, he will be perfectly happy and will never want anything more.” But this is an illusion.

“It is quite true,” wrote Abraham Maslow, “that humans live by bread alone—when there is no bread.” But when there finally “is plenty of bread” and “their bellies are chronically filled,” they move up instead to their next level of needs:^[v]

Safety Needs: Under conditions of dire emergency, “such as war, disease, natural catastrophes, crime waves, societal disorganization, neurosis, brain injury, breakdown of authority, or chronically bad situations” involving constant danger from “wild animals, extremes of temperature, criminal assault, murder, chaos, tyranny, and so on,” people are very strongly motivated by their safety needs.

It is, fundamentally, a state of intense and chronic anxiety, worry, and fear. “A man in this state, if it is extreme enough and chronic enough, may be characterized as living almost for safety alone.” To this person, “practically everything looks less important than safety and protection.” And he will be quite willing to give up his dignity, and even his freedom, by accepting a “dictatorship,” or “military rule,” or “perhaps a Fuehrer,” for the sake of security, stability, and order.^[vi]

Love Needs: Maslow divided the love needs into two distinct types of needs: (1) the “belongingness needs” for friendship, community, and social acceptance; and (2) the “love and affection needs” for affection, intimacy, and familial and romantic love.

“If both the physiological and the safety needs are fairly well gratified,” Maslow wrote, “there will emerge the love and affection and belongingness needs, and the whole cycle already described will repeat itself with this new center.” Frustration at this level of needs is characterized by intense “pangs of loneliness, of ostracism, of rejection, of friendlessness, of rootlessness.”

The person will powerfully yearn “for a place in his group [,] or family,” or clan, or gang, or tribe—“he will want to attain such a place more than anything else in the world.” And he’ll also “feel keenly, as never before, the absence of friends, or a sweetheart, or a wife, or children,” and “may even forget that once, when he was hungry, he sneered at love as unreal or unnecessary or unimportant.”

The need for love, however, must not be confused with the need for sex. “Sex may be studied as a purely physiological need,” although most “human sexual behavior” is motivated by both the “sexual” and the “love and affection needs”—and many other needs too. “Also not to be overlooked,” added Maslow, “is the fact that the love needs involve both giving and receiving love.”^[vii]

Esteem Needs: Maslow divided the esteem needs, too, into two separate types of needs: (1) the need for “respect or esteem from other people,” and (2) the need “for self-respect, or self-esteem.”

The first is characterized by desires for “reputation,” for “status, fame and glory, dominance, recognition, attention, importance, dignity, or appreciation.” The second is characterize by desires “for strength, for achievement, for adequacy, for mastery and competence, for confidence in the face of the world, and for independence and freedom.”

Both may contribute to an overarching need for a positive, “usually high evaluation of [oneself]”—whether based on “the opinions of others” or “on real capacity, competence, and adequacy to the task.” The “thwarting of these needs,” however, “produces feelings of inferiority, of weakness, and of helplessness.”^[viii]

Self-Actualization Need: “Even if all [the lower] needs are satisfied,” Maslow wrote, “we may . . . expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he or she, individually, is fitted for. Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. . . . This need we may call self-actualization.”

This need is characterized by a “desire for self-fulfillment,” a pull “to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”^[ix] The person who lives at this level of motivation is driven, most fundamentally, by a pursuit of what Maslow called the B-values (or values of being). Some of these were, according to Maslow: Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Wholeness, Aliveness, Uniqueness, Perfection, Completion, Justice, Order, Simplicity, Self-Sufficiency, Comprehensiveness, Playfulness, Effortlessness, and Meaningfulness. These were, he wrote, “the characteristics of ideal art,” of ideal “science and knowledge,” of “the ideally good environment” and “the ideally good society.”^[x] They were, furthermore, not like “separate piles of sticks,” but “the different facets of one jewel.”^[xi]

“Both the [self-actualized] scientist who is devoted to truth and the [self-actualized] lawyer who is devoted to justice,” Maslow explained, “are [really] devoted to the same thing.” Each one is simply using, “in his life’s work,” that “aspect of the general value [of being] which suits him best,” and by which he pursues (and sometimes achieves) his self-actualization.^[xii]

(This need for self-actualization, however, should not be confused with the personality type of the self-actualized individual. We may consider the latter the personality structure that emerges, at least in some people, as a result of successfully fulfilling that former need.)

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The above article is an exerpt from my book, On Rotting Prison Staw: The Self-Actualization of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It is the best explanation and summary I have seen anywhere of Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. I wrote it in full accordance with Einstein’s dictum: to “make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

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[i] Maslow, Abraham, Motivation and Personality, Second Edition, p 46

[ii] Maslow, Abraham, Motivation and Personality, Second Edition, pp 20, 37

[iii] Maslow, Abraham, Motivation and Personality, Second Edition, pp 36-37

[iv] Maslow, Abraham, Motivation and Personality, Second Edition, p 38

[v] Maslow, Abraham, Motivation and Personality, Second Edition, pp 37-38

[vi] Maslow, Abraham, Motivation and Personality, Second Edition, pp 39, 41-42

[vii] Maslow, Abraham, Motivation and Personality, Second Edition, pp 43-45

[viii] Maslow, Abraham, Motivation and Personality, Second Edition, pp 45-46

[ix] Maslow, Abraham, Motivation and Personality, Second Edition, p 46

[x] Maslow, Abraham, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, Appendix G

[xi] Maslow, Abraham, Farther Reaches of Human Nature, p 186

[xii] Maslow, Abraham, Farther Reaches of Human Nature, pp 186-187