Finds thinking cap, puts it on

Having had a friend cite Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs while analysing her situation, I took a quick gander at the fellow's (summarised) thoughts, and had the following response (which really needs to be fleshed out when I find 2 spare seconds and the will to rub them together):

The greatest problem I have with Maslow's theory, as it's outlined in your linked text, is that it provides no access to the higher levels of need while a lower need remains unsatisfied. This creates glaring dissimilarities between the tenets of the theory and real life.

For example, if a young child is being raised in a 'normal', loving environment, it could be said to have all conceivable physiological, safety, love and esteem needs met, but it seems unlikely that a toddler would be capable of self-realisation. I can see how removing access to some lower needs could topple the higher levels; it seems self-evident that a child denied food would feel unsafe. But would a child denied a fixed place of abode (like some military kids), since safety is a lower need than love, feel unloved as a consequence? Not necessarily, in my opinion. Children are at a pretty fluid place in their views on the world.

So what if we regard Maslow's Hierarchy to apply to adults only? Well, even that raises some immediate questions. I have seen instances (in my experience and the media) of groups of people living together and deriving esteem satisfaction from their peer group while they go short on food and live in a condemned building. Is their sense of esteem an illusion because their lower needs aren't being met? Does a parent stop loving their child when they get evicted? These are scenarios which, albeit contrived, seem to fly directly in the face of Maslow's theory.

Moreover, all of this presupposes that self-actualization is the highest need that must be fulfilled in a human's life. So what of the person who, having met all other needs, achieves complete self-realisation, only to have one of the lower needs re-appear? Do they lose all sense of self as a consequence? Does a hungry Amnesty worker stop caring about the situation in Palestine every time her stomach rumbles? I'm guessing not. Sure, when you feel unwell, that feeling takes precedence in your general conscious awareness, but do you stop caring about Amnesty when that happens? To reign the scenario in a little, when your esteem needs are being met by a group of friends, but your physiological needs are going unfulfilled, do you feel less accepted by your group? See what I'm saying? It just doesn't hold together very well.
So I'm not immensely keen on this theory in the first place. I think it provides too little scope for the parallelism of human life. It's certainly a start, in that it treats people like thinking beings rather than flesh machines, but it's still way too simple. It reminds me of an old aphorism; "If you hear a simple explanation for a complex situation, it's probably wrong."

Although I intensely distrust the stupid pyramid arrangement of the Hierarchy (who ever heard of a pyramid scheme you can trust?), I like Maslow's categorisation of needs, although I would be disinclined to distinguish between love and esteem. What I'd like to see is these needs arranged as a web, with self-realisation in the middle and the physiological, social (which would incorporate love and esteem as Maslow ranks them) and environmental (or safety) types arranged around it and linked to it and each other, a little like this, maybe:
A deficiency in fulfilment of one of these needs would put stress on the web in the direction of the need, pulling resources away from the other categories and placing stress and doubt on self-realisation. In a web, each of these categories can be sub-divided into its essential components, each with its own junction on the web, exerting greater or lesser influence on your central sense of identity (which is what, in essence, self-realisation is; a stable sense of exactly who you are).

What you'd get is a theory that predicts that, for example, an increase in the level of litter in your neighbourhood would place stress on your safety needs ("Ugh. How can I live in a place like this") and result in a diminished interest in other needs until the problem has been fixed, and a corresponding re-evaluation of self-realisation ("How can I care about the environment when my own district is such a mess?") rather than a complete personality meltdown ("My district is a mess. No time to worry about global warming").

With this arrangement, some of your questions suddenly became easier to consider. When your health is poor (physiological stress), you have less energy to deal with your immediate environment and your social group, and the lack of feedback makes you question an element of your identity (Am I loved? Do I really love x?). If a close relationship fulfils your social, physiological and environmental social needs, it can still put stress on your other physiological and environmental needs, but because your self-realisation grows to incorporate this relationship (2 people living as 1 and all that), the stresses eventually damp out and your centre-point becomes stronger.

If you weight each of the needs, the revised theory becomes even more useful. As greater needs put stress on the centre (the self), it would 'stretch out' to encompass needs or powerful need-satisfiers and provide an increasingly more stable centre to the web. Children, whose centre's begin very small, and whose needs are large and varied, experience large swings in personality as their self is largely undefined. People who suffer from aberrant brain chemistry or abusive upbringing would have similar difficulty in establishing an equilibrium, at least until the stress from the unusual need is incorporated in their self, which could explain some forms of sociopathy.

And so on. I'd love to know what people think about all that.