Book discussion: Transcend - The New Science of Self-Actualization

[OutOfTheBlue]

I haven't yet completed my readings of Abraham Maslow, but since Jacob has read the book (which was briefly mentioned in Axel Heyst's journal), and to get the discussion and interest rolling, I am creating a thread about Scott Barry Kaufman's "Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization", published in 2020.

To boot, here's an excerpt from the book presentation:

When psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman first discovered Maslow’s unfinished theory of transcendence, sprinkled throughout a cache of unpublished journals, lectures, and essays, he felt a deep resonance with his own work and life. In this groundbreaking book, Kaufman picks up where Maslow left off, unraveling the mysteries of his unfinished theory, and integrating these ideas with the latest research on attachment, connection, creativity, love, purpose and other building blocks of a life well lived.

Kaufman’s new hierarchy of needs provides a roadmap for finding purpose and fulfillment–not by striving for money, success, or “happiness,” but by becoming the best version of ourselves, or what Maslow called self-actualization. While self-actualization is often thought of as a purely individual pursuit, Maslow believed that the full realization of potential requires a merging between self and the world. We don’t have to choose either self-development or self-sacrifice, but at the highest level of human potential we show a deep integration of both. Transcend reveals this level of human potential that connects us not only to our highest creative potential, but also to one another.

---

The book is a curious mix: part biography and homage (with many quotes taken directly from Maslow's books, lectures and journals, and various insights into his life, theory and own development), part scientific treatise (updating Maslow’s theory and humanistic psychology with modern psychology research, including the author's) and part how-to guide, it presents and follows an updated hierarchy of needs. The book is further expanded by two self-help appendices: a. Seven Principles for Becoming a Whole Person and b. Growth challenges.

For this new integrated hierarchy of needs, the author states we need a new metaphor. not that of a stage-like pyramid ("Maslow never actually created a pyramid to represent his hierarchy of needs"), but of a sailboat.

As he notes, "Maslow argued that all the needs can be grouped into two main classes, which must be integrated for wholeness: deficiency and growth".

In this metaphor, the boat represents the deficiency needs (or D-realm of existence) and the sails the growth aka self-actualization needs (Being or B-realm).

At the top of the new hierarchy of needs, Kaufman adds the need for transcendence (a topic Maslow has explored in his later years), "which goes beyond individual growth and allows for the highest levels of unity and harmony within oneself and with the world. Transcendence, which rests on a secure foundation of both security and growth, is a perspective in which we can view our whole being from a higher vantage point with acceptance, wisdom, and a sense of connectedness with the rest of humanity".

Here, you can see a more complete overview of the sailboat metaphor for the hierarchy of needs: https://scottbarrykaufman.com/sailboat-metaphor/


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Initial comment:

I have enjoyed the author's account of Maslow's life and theory and the updated hierarchy of needs, especially the expansion of self-actualization (into exploration, love, purpose), the promise of transcendence (including peak/transcendent experiences and plateau experiences), and how self-actualizers tend to transcend the dichotomy between self and world. What may start as an individual pursuit grows to something bigger.

This fits nicely with the shift/bridge from ERE1 to ERE2 and ecological thinking.

Given its hybrid approach, as a self-help book, I have found it a worthwhile read, although a little wantiing in that department. It is inspiring and provides a good overview, with various insights, self-evaluation scales and interesting suggestions, but it is maybe a little short on details, and the framework/roadmap feels less convincing than Bill Plotkin's, which provides a rich set of practices for wholing, Self-healing, individuation and nature-based/soul-centric human development.

If I have a beef with humanistic psychology/philosophy is its tendency to human-centeredness (specist worldview), but I was surprised to see Abraham Maslow's own view expand beyond the human community, to encompass the transhuman.

[jacob]

The book is an in-depth description of Maslow and his humanistic psychology. Humanistic psychology is the perspective that humans are innately good and that there are no bad (evil) people, just bad behavior resulting from bad environments or culture. Furthermore that humanity has more room to evolve [by changing our interobjective and intersubjective systems going forward] from the D(effiency)-realm to the B(eing)-realm. This is basically saying that a lot of humanity misbehaves because it is stuck meeting needs [in the D-realm] in a win-lose fashion, which makes humans act mean towards each other, rather than pursuing innate wants [in the B-realm].

My issues with the book follow my standard complaint about "academic psychology". It once again describes the "average human" where individuals have been statistically reduced to variations around a mean(*). The "transcended human" is discussed in rather normative ways as in "everybody should be more ... [in some direction]".

In this book, this direction is clearly towards Green and Turquoise and it's basically just presumed that "everybody should want a closer and more loving connection to other people". I don't think the author is aware that he's talking his book.

(*) As an outlier, I don't feel very "seen" by this perspective.

Maslow (and the author) describes transcended people as having a lot of depth (wide range of emotional stages) which includes some high states (flow and unity). Also see this thread: viewtopic.php?t=12305
Examples also mostly include transitions from very low states... basically going from dark rock bottom to a sudden light that changed everything going forward.

(As someone with low depth [my emotional state is nearly constant] most of these descriptions of people's inner turmoil and conflicting subpersonalities sound like an absolute monkey farm to me. I can not relate at all. I actually feel somewhat gaslighted by books that take such turmoil for granted in everybody.)

On the other hand, nowhere is the need or pursuit for higher complexity of mind discussed. The high state unitive mind as described, wherein everything is simply "amazing" and "wonderful", comes across as rather simplistic-minded. Transcendence happened only along the subjective emotional axis and the orientation/perspective reflects that. I think I finally understand why "blissheads" rub me the wrong way. On the one hand their experience of feelings and emotions is extremely well developed. On the other hand the capacity for logical abstraction, recursion, classification, and arrangement is very often ... average, so relatively simplistic. Having transcended emotionally might even guarantee that it stays that way---categorization is often rejected. Why try to understand and make changes in the real world, D-ficient as it is, when it's perceived as wonderful the way it is? Why bother to understand people when we can simply love them as the unique and beautiful people we deeply feel they are?

One kind of development does not follow from the other. However, since one doesn't know what one doesn't know, the unitive experience can come across as having found the one true answer ("all is one") which is expressed in heartfelt tones ... even if one doesn't understand much about the world per se. Also see Quantum Woo.

In particular with these kinds of books, it would be nice if the other axis (complexity of mind) was also covered or at least acknowledged. Especially for the Morlocks who are actually running the support systems that allow the Elois the time to attenuate their medial prefrontal cortex with meditation in order to feel one with all.

Insofar we look at the sail on the sailboat above, I think T is for understanding what F is for love. Personally I have no desire to be emotionally loved or love [on] people. I want to be understood and understand. Replace that word in the sail of the sailboat and the model works just as well. I think both lead to Tier2 in spiral dynamics, but F leads to Turquoise and T leads to Yellow, in general.

As such, Maslow is a bit one-dimensional due to his focus on feelings, presuming that everybody wants and should want what he wants, that is emotional contact and closeness with others. Kaufmann runs with that and rationalizes it with humans being a herd/tribal animal. This missive is to restore some balance to those ideas.

[AnalyticalEngine]

Jacob, do you have a branch of psychology you prefer? My experience with psychology is there's no unifying paradigm so a lot of theories about it can be all over the place. I'm curious your perspective on psychology.

[Qazwer]

Carl Rogers is definitely academic from his time period. The concept of the universal desire to be understood and the desire for a good life full of the complications that it entails is part of what he wrote about.
Maslow is a rather simplistic model of human beings and the pyramid is, to me, a simplistic summary of one one stage of his writings. I keep wanting simplistic models to apply to human desires and goals but then I keep returning to Rogers when I find all those models lacking.

[OutOfTheBlue]

Carl Rogers is definitely academic from his time period. The concept of the universal desire to be understood and the desire for a good life full of the complications that it entails is part of what he wrote about.
Maslow is a rather simplistic model of human beings and the pyramid is, to me, a simplistic summary of one one stage of his writings. I keep wanting simplistic models to apply to human desires and goals but then I keep returning to Rogers when I find all those models lacking.

I think the book does a fine job at restoring/rendering the complexity and richness of Maslow's theory and thought beyond the pyramid, as not only a simplistic summary of one stage of Maslows writings, but a (gross) misrepresentation. Here is what Scott Barry Kaufman has to say:

Maslow never actually created a pyramid to represent his hierarchy of needs. […] Todd Bridgman and his colleagues examined in detail how the pyramid came to be and concluded that “Maslow’s Pyramid” was actually created by a management consultant in the sixties. From there, it quickly became popular in the emerging field of organization behavior. Bridgman and his colleagues note that the pyramid resonated with the “prevailing [post-war] ideologies of individualism, nationalism and capitalism in America and justified a growing managerialism in bureaucratic (i.e., layered triangular) formats.”
Unfortunately, the continual reproduction of the pyramid in management textbooks had the unfortunate consequence of reducing Maslow’s rich and nuanced intellectual contributions to a parody and has betrayed the actual spirit of Maslow’s notion of self-actualization as realizing one’s creative potential for humanitarian ends. As Bridgman and his colleagues noted, “Inspiring the study of management and its relationship to creativity and the pursuit of the common good would be a much more empowering legacy to Maslow than a simplistic, 5-step, one-way pyramid.

[OutOfTheBlue]

The book is an in-depth description of Maslow and his humanistic psychology. Humanistic psychology is the perspective that humans are innately good and that there are no bad (evil) people, just bad behavior resulting from bad environments or culture. Furthermore that humanity has more room to evolve [by changing our interobjective and intersubjective systems going forward] from the D(effiency)-realm to the B(eing)-realm. This is basically saying that a lot of humanity misbehaves because it is stuck meeting needs [in the D-realm] in a win-lose fashion, which makes humans act mean towards each other, rather than pursuing innate wants [in the B-realm].

My issues with the book follow my standard complaint about "academic psychology". It once again describes the "average human" where individuals have been statistically reduced to variations around a mean(*). The "transcended human" is discussed in rather normative ways as in "everybody should be more ... [in some direction]".

From the book:

Maslow’s work on self-actualization was really his search for the characteristics of the “good” human being. Maslow believed that human nature was basically good, and his work was an attempt to systematically show that this is the case by studying those who he considered most fully human. As he noted in an interview many years later, “I wanted to prove that humans are capable of something grander than war, prejudice, and hatred. I wanted to make science consider all the people: the best specimen of mankind I could find.”
Maslow continued his work on self-actualization due in part to his fervent belief that in self-actualizing people, “we find a different system of motivation, emotion, value, thinking, and perceiving.”

I agree that there are some normalizing/normative (not just descriptive) overtones. And I have the same qualms about psychology/science being used to dictate how we should live:

it is hoped that science in its onward march will eventually take over the whole problem of values for study. . . . We see no reason to believe that this process will not eventually be extended so that most of our values, perhaps even all of them, will eventually come within the jurisdiction of science but until this is true, any discussion of the ideal personality must be postponed.”

However, when much of psychology focuses on the pathologic (or the average), I think it is refreshing to see a focus on "the best specimen" aka self-actualizing people or "wholly human" as Maslow would later describe them.

Jacob, I admit I am a little surprised you feel (or rather, think yourself) misrepresented by the self-actualization/transcendence theory as one that overly focusses on feelings and emotions. I didn't get that impression, but as I said, I haven't read Maslow's writings enough thus far. They way I understand it, you could well be one of the most self-actualizing people I "know", especially someone with an expanded consciousness, no need to "feel one with all" for that. I get it to also be a more general critique (for instance, towards the subpresonalities in Bill Plotkin's Wild Mind, if I read that one correctly), but these comments on feeling/emotion and complexity of mind are quite thought-provoking.

It reminded me of Albert Camus' "The Stranger" and how revolted I felt as a reader with his treatment regarding his supposed "inhumanity" during the protagonist's trial. If "I am a human being, so nothing human is strange to me", we shouldn't hold it against others when they fail to comply with what we perceive as normal or "human".

[jennypenny]

n this book, this direction is clearly towards Green and Turquoise and it's basically just presumed that "everybody should want a closer and more loving connection to other people". I don't think the author is aware that he's talking his book.

(*) As an outlier, I don't feel very "seen" by this perspective.
...

(As someone with low depth [my emotional state is nearly constant] most of these descriptions of people's inner turmoil and conflicting subpersonalities sound like an absolute monkey farm to me. I can not relate at all. I actually feel somewhat gaslighted by books that take such turmoil for granted in everybody.)
...

Insofar we look at the sail on the sailboat above, I think T is for understanding what F is for love. Personally I have no desire to be emotionally loved or love [on] people. I want to be understood and understand. Replace that word in the sail of the sailboat and the model works just as well. I think both lead to Tier2 in spiral dynamics, but F leads to Turquoise and T leads to Yellow, in general.

As such, Maslow is a bit one-dimensional due to his focus on feelings, presuming that everybody wants and should want what he wants, that is emotional contact and closeness with others. Kaufmann runs with that and rationalizes it with humans being a herd/tribal animal. This missive is to restore some balance to those ideas.

I haven't finished this book but I've read a lot on Maslow. I think Maslow's original hierarchy works, but as you say he focuses too much on feelings. For me, I think the hierarchy works, but the terms on which people fulfill each level of the hierarchy are different. Maslow assumes only one way to achieve fulfillment at each level.

For example, the lower levels focus on safety and basic physiological needs. Some people feel most fulfilled when society provides those needs for them. They feel that's the 'right' way for that to happen. Others feel that only self-sufficiency in those areas is true fulfillment. Both paths are truth to those individuals.*

As you pointed out, there are also several ways to fulfill the 'love and belonging' level. For some, it's as Maslow described. For others like you, it's based on understanding and intellectual belonging. For others, it's based on tribal belonging. Belonging is still a necessary level, but each finds their own terms on which they feel most fulfilled.

I'm sure there are 'colors' you could assign to these, but I'm not familiar enough with SD to use the terms here. I only wanted to point out that yes, this book and others speak to a certain segment and unfortunately seem blind to other methods of working one's way up Maslow's Hierarchy. OTOH, I don't think that negates the legitimacy of the hierarchy. I'd love to see that SD color chart and an MBTI chart inserted into a hierarchy chart to show how each type might define and pursue self-actualization.

I'm curious to see where the book leads wrt self-esteem and self-actualization. I've always wondered if my aversion/lecturing on finding meaning in life is tied to a difference in interpreting those terms.


* One of the more interesting aspects to me recently is how/where people try to fulfill the love/belonging stage. Some feel that relying on each other for basic needs forces a kind of societal belonging. Others feel that each individual should fend for themselves and come together at the belonging stage as individuals. Some here sometimes state that they'll get around to the belonging part after they've achieved self-actualization. I'm not sure how important the order is of the stages but I suspect Maslow has it right yet most people tend to jump around, fulfilling stages in their preferred order instead of the order that makes the later stages easier/more enjoyable.

[jacob]

Jacob, do you have a branch of psychology you prefer? My experience with psychology is there's no unifying paradigm so a lot of theories about it can be all over the place. I'm curious your perspective on psychology.

I agree with that. The field psychology does resemble diet, exercise, and investment advice in that it's often someone's autobiography, alternatively generic one-size-fits-all food pyramid advice. Since psychology is essentially about the "theory of mind", an "autobiographical approach" essentially implies that the author projects their own mind onto everybody else.

Although it's changing a lot of the field also focus on the pathological---for lack of a better word---aspects. This creates the same bias as one might find in cops in which people are divided into "fellow cops", "crooks", and "civilians" leading to the heuristic that if insofar the person the cop is dealing with is not a fellow cop, then [by the law of the excluded middle] it's a crook because it's not one's job to deal with civilians---at least not in most law enforcement philosophies. To certain psychologists, everything is a potentially traumatic experience.

Thus, I think psychology could benefit from more mapping of the territory rather than just declaring what [the territory] should be; or presuming that all the territory is similar to the mental valley one personally lives in; or simply working off an average.

Ideally, I'd like to see a map that describes the different temperaments (e.g. MBTI or enneagram); a map that describes different levels or stages of psychological development (e.g. Cook-Greuter, Piaget, Kegan, MHC); and a map that describes functioning (from sickness to health).

Unfortunately, these descriptions tend to focus on one "axis" (dimension) while just rolling all the other axes up. Thus MBTI describes personality but rolls all stages of development and functioning into an average. Kegan describes social development but rolls all personalities into an average. And so on.

As such I find myself needing multiple theories to make sense of an instance. It's not really different than investing ... but it would be nice if it existed. The reason it doesn't is likely that it's very complex ... and as such too complicated to write down.

[J_]

I agree with that. The field psychology does resemble diet, exercise, and investment advice in that it's often someone's autobiography, alternatively generic one-size-fits-all food pyramid advice....

Ideally, I'd like to see a map that describes the different temperaments (e.g. MBTI or enneagram); a map that describes different levels or stages of psychological development (e.g. Cook-Greuter, Piaget, Kegan, MHC); and a map that describes functioning (from sickness to health).

Unfortunately, these descriptions tend to focus on one "axis" (dimension) while just rolling all the other axes up. Thus MBTI describes personality but rolls all stages of development and functioning into an average. Kegan describes social development but rolls all personalities into an average. And so on.

As such I find myself needing multiple theories to make sense of an instance. It's not really different than investing ... but it would be nice if it existed. The reason it doesn't is likely that it's very complex ... and as such too complicated to write down.

(bolds done by me)

Jacob your description to use together those three "maps", which are all deep and separated discussed and enlightened in this forum, is very helpful to me. It is already a lot to think through before I can assess a how a meeting was going, how to discuss/argue with a group with a completely different opinion. Etcetera
But you idea gives structure to my thinking process. I hope I have enough thinking power..
Thanks.

[OutOfTheBlue]

I too have found the quote with bold particularly striking.

The closest holistic model/framework I have found of so far is Bill Plotkin's mappings: Nature and The Human Soul for the stages of psychological development, his yet unpublished model of nature-based model of personality (I would very much like to get my hands on that one) and Wild Mind for a nature-based map of the human psyche, which can also be used for (self-)assessment and Wholing/Self-healing purposes, with the caveat that his approach consciously does not focus on pathology.

More extended post found here (to avoid double-posting): viewtopic.php?p=260832#p260832

[Campitor]

I think the problem with psychological paradigms is the manner they are considered and expressed. In the picture above you see each level is delineated which implies separations between all the levels in that teardrop shaped pyramid; how the psychological framework is pictured will subconsciously influence how you perceive human psychology.

Human psychology is more like a web interconnected at all levels influencing how we think and behave at all levels. People exhibit thinking and behavior that's clearly connected to another segment (i.e., it bubbled up from "self-esteem" into the "purpose" segment and visa-versa). Any diagram with delineations between states of being is inherently flawed.

Please note I'm not saying that residing in a particular state of being, as pictured in any psychological diagram, isn't the largest factor influencing behavior or thinking. What I'm saying is that other segments are still apply force to your thoughts and actions regardless of the segment you reside in.

[jacob]

Enneagrams typically describe temperament or personality if you will. The framework is open to subpersonalities, although you can't come up with your own. However, the idea of being e.g. a 9 with 1, 2, and 6 subpersonalities seems more descriptive to me than the idea of wings. It's workable. In particular, tests will tell you how much you align with each type and so you can rank how much each subpersonality rules your mindset.

The Enneagram Institute has descriptions for each of the 9 temperaments that includes a description of development+functioning as one additional dimension. It is, however, assumed that high development (MHC) = high stage (psychological functioning). E.g. https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-1 (scroll to bottom).

Some MBTI sites consider a maturity dimension. Maturing according to MBTI almost always involve developing and switching one's focus to the weaker functions (the backseat in the car model) as one "grows up".

[guitarplayer]

If you look at the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders which is the main US-developed disease-model classification tool for psychologists and psychiatrists (the European equivalent being ICD), they do try to come up with a paradigm-agnostic map of the territory with specified axes, e.g. here

The axes could be seen as roughly corresponding to personality/temperament (ICD Axis 1), psychological development (ICD Axis 2) and functioning (ICD Axis 3). The manuals are heavy reads.

IIRC, Martin Seligman did some work on trying to flip the disease model into a positive model along the axes when launching his positive psychology project.

I took a class in both psychopathology and positive psychology when at uni. Psychopathology is of course backed up with much more data. Wrt positive psychology, a lot of it seemed to me to be just riding the wave of positivity associated with the subject. Seligman's work seems solid; he came with lots of experience of doing research in the psychopathology department (his perhaps most known research being that of describing learned helplessness as a model for depression).

ETA: As to normality, just to spell it out (I cannot find a source now), (ab)normal can be:
- what the theory says (normative, paternalistic, talking one's book, green),
- what the status quo is, what has always been the case (cultural, blue),
- what the mean or median is (statistical, orange),

with the interplay between these aspects, e.g.
- theory shaping cultural change,
- local culture being an outlier,
- algorithms nudging people to a new status quo
- etc.