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

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (6) ◽  
pp. 908-933 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Hoffman
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social World ◽  
Humanistic Psychology ◽  
Intellectual Style ◽  
Counseling Education ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
Love Marriage ◽  
Future Theory

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 By pulling together Maslow’s comments primarily in his published works, and secondarily in his unpublished works-in-progress, it is possible to explicate his tacit viewpoint.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.

scholarly journals Teaching Economic Reasoning to Children

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark C. Schug
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social World ◽  
Economic Perspective ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Classroom Activities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Reasoning ◽  
Future Consequences ◽  
Economic Thinking

The author discusses the differing perspectives which the social sciences offer to young people to analyse problems. Perspectives from history, political science and geography are briefly discussed. The author stresses that the child's perspective of the social world differs from the ones offered by social scientists. Following a summary of the economic thinking of children and adolescents, the author stresses that economics also presents students with an important perspective through the application of economic principles involving choice, costs, incentives, rules, trade, and future consequences. These economic principles are explained by reference to an example of why the buffalo population in the United States nearly became extinct and why it is now recovering. The author concludes with suggestions for how teachers can bring an economic perspective into the classroom. Readers are provided with three ‘economic mysteries' as examples of classroom activities.

Populism and the yearning for closure: From economic to cultural fragility

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-492
Author(s):  
Sibylle van der Walt
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social World ◽  
Western World ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Transformations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Western Democracies

Since the Brexit-vote and the election of a far-right businessman as President of the United States, the social sciences have been struggling to explain the societal conditions that nourish the increasing appeal of far-right parties and leaders in the Western world. The article’s main thesis is that the currently leading sociological paradigm, the theory of globalization losers, is not sufficient to understand the social dynamics in question. Starting from a discussion of the recent work of German sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer, it is argued that the best insight in far-right voter’s motivations and emotions can be found in the work of Margaret Canovan. The article shows further that a sociological investigation into the socio-psychological dynamics of the rise of the far-right should take into account broader cultural transformations that have been weakening the social world of Western democracies in the past 30 years, namely individualization, acceleration and demographic decline. In times of crisis (the ‘modernization’ of Eastern Europe and the financial crisis of 2007), these transformations become manifest as a general crisis of advanced capitalism.

scholarly journals Law as a Language, Law as an Art: Reflections on James Boyd White's Keep Law Alive

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Jefferson Powell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social World ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Language Law ◽  
Traditional Understanding

Abstract Keep Law Alive, the latest book by law and literature scholar James Boyd White, is an important apologia for the traditional understanding and practice of law in the United States. Law, White argues, has served as a language in a sense closely parallel to what we mean by referring to English or Spanish as a language: law provides those fluent in it with the tools to describe the social world and to imagine its transformation, but without scripting what the speaker must say. White also envisions law as an art that evokes imagination, emotion and personal judgment, as well as the mind, and that is fundamentally oriented toward the realization of justice. Intellectual, social and political changes, however, threaten to displace law as a language and art with a view of law as an essentially empty rhetoric that cloaks the use of abstract and impersonal reasoning often borrowed from other disciplines. The survival of law depends on the willingness of those who speak it to continue its practice as an art that serves a humane vision of political life.

Adult attachment styles and negativistic beliefs about the social world: The role of self-image and other-image

2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-520
Author(s):  
Krystyna Skarżyńska ◽  
Piotr Radkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Adult Attachment ◽  
Attachment Styles ◽  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Social World ◽  
Negative Image ◽  
Social Beliefs ◽  
Negative Beliefs ◽  
The Social ◽  
Adult Attachment Styles ◽  
High Level

Abstract This article is concerned with the relationship between adult attachment styles and generalized negativistic social beliefs (i.e. pessimistic expectations concerning human nature and interpersonal relations). Two general dimensions of attachment styles, avoidance and anxiety, are considered to be manifestations of an individual’s image of other people and of the self, respectively. We suggest that both dimensions may be a substantial basis for formulating negative beliefs about the social world. Firstly, we believe that a high level of negativistic social beliefs can be positively predicted by the growth of avoidance (negative image of others) and anxiety (negative image of self). Secondly, we formulate an expected interaction effect. Although the nature of such an interaction is ambiguous, it may be argued as having a synergistic as well as antagonistic pattern. These hypotheses were tested and supported (in favor of an antagonistic pattern of interaction in the case of the second hypothesis) on a representative sample of adult Poles (N = 853).

Real Hallucinations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Ratcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Social World ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Philosophical Study ◽  
Intentional State ◽  
Thought Insertion ◽  
Auditory Verbal Hallucinations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
Do So

Real Hallucinations is a philosophical study of the structure of human experience, its vulnerability to disruption, and how its integrity depends on interpersonal relations. It focuses on the beguilingly simple question of how we manage to routinely distinguish between our experiences of perceiving, remembering, imagining, and thinking. This question is addressed via a detailed philosophical study of auditory verbal hallucinations (usually defined as hearing a voice in the absence of a speaker) and thought insertion (somehow experiencing one’s own thoughts as someone else’s). The book shows how thought insertion, and also a substantial proportion of auditory verbal hallucinations, consist of disturbances in the structure of experience and –more specifically - in our sense of the various types of intentional state, such as believing, perceiving, remembering, and imagining, as distinct from one another. It is further argued that episodic and seemingly localized experiential disturbances such as these usually occur against a backdrop of less pronounced but much wider-ranging alterations in the structure of intentionality. To do so, the book addresses types of experience associated with trauma, schizophrenia, and profound grief. The outcome of this is a more generally applicable account of how the integrity of human experience, including the most basic sense of self, is inseparable from how we relate to other people and to the social world as a whole.

The Interview as a Technology for Understanding the Social World: The Case of Interviews About Race

2021 ◽  
pp. 153270862110540
Author(s):  
Brigette A. Herron ◽  
Kathryn Roulston
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Social World ◽  
Design Studies ◽  
Sensitive Topics ◽  
Public Media ◽  
The Social ◽  
Research Interviews ◽  
Forsyth County ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Support Research

The interview is a technology used all over the world to learn about others’ lives, disseminate opinions, and construct narratives concerning the social world. While formerly a province of elite members of society prior to the 19th century, the interview became accessible to ordinary people everywhere over the past 150 years. In this article, we explore how the interview as a technology, although promising in its democratic possibilities, can marginalize, exclude, and misrepresent people. We examine interviews conducted in relation to one particular context in the United States: Forsyth County, Georgia. Through our examination of interviews conducted about race in public media over the last 50 years, we found that sometimes the ways interviewees were selected, interviewed, and represented reproduced and reified existing stereotypes and discourses surrounding the question of “why Forsyth County continued to be an all-White county” for much of the 20th century. Furthermore, when information sought focused solely on interviewees’ opinions and perspectives, critical dialogue did not occur. We argue that for research interviews on sensitive topics such as “race” to fulfill their democratic promise, researchers must intentionally design studies in ways that support research for social justice.

The Complexity of Health Disparities: More Than Just Black–White Differences

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Charles Ellis ◽  
Molly Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Health Disparities ◽  
Clinical Outcomes ◽  
The United States ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Speech Language Pathology ◽  
Death Rates ◽  
The Social ◽  
Health Related ◽  
Language Pathology

Health disparities have once again moved to the forefront of America's consciousness with the recent significant observation of dramatically higher death rates among African Americans with COVID-19 when compared to White Americans. Health disparities have a long history in the United States, yet little consideration has been given to their impact on the clinical outcomes in the rehabilitative health professions such as speech-language pathology/audiology (SLP/A). Consequently, it is unclear how the absence of a careful examination of health disparities in fields like SLP/A impacts the clinical outcomes desired or achieved. The purpose of this tutorial is to examine the issue of health disparities in relationship to SLP/A. This tutorial includes operational definitions related to health disparities and a review of the social determinants of health that are the underlying cause of such disparities. The tutorial concludes with a discussion of potential directions for the study of health disparities in SLP/A to identify strategies to close the disparity gap in health-related outcomes that currently exists.

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