Self-Actualization

Self-actualization names the organism’s tendency to actualize its essential nature and potentialities in engagement with its world. The term was coined by Kurt Goldstein in The Organism (1939) and adopted by Abraham Maslow, who gave it its most systematic development in humanistic psychology. For Goldstein, self-actualization was a biological concept: the one underlying drive of every living organism, whose apparent multiplicity of drives resolves under scrutiny into expressions of this single tendency. Maslow transformed it into a psychological and clinical concept, placing it at the apex of a hierarchy of needs and identifying specific characteristics of persons who had achieved, at least intermittently, this fullest form of development.

Goldstein’s Original Concept

Kurt Goldstein coined the term “self-actualization” in The Organism (1939), a work of phenomenological biology that drew its evidence from extensive clinical work with brain-injured patients.(Goldstein, Kurt, 1939) The concept emerged from his rejection of the standard drive-theory framework, which postulated a plurality of discrete drives (hunger, sex, self-preservation) competing within the organism for expression. Goldstein argued that this picture is an artifact of studying organisms under abnormal conditions: the isolated, experimental, or diseased organism does display what look like autonomous drives, but these appearances arise precisely because the organism’s normal integration has been disrupted.

His alternative was unitary: there is only one drive, and it is the drive of self-actualization.(Goldstein, Kurt, 1939) All the apparent separate drives are expressions of this single tendency under particular conditions. What determines which action comes to the foreground at any moment is not competition among drives but the organism’s current situation and the capacities relevant to it. When a human being is forced into prolonged hunger, or into emergency conditions, the organism appears to be governed by a hunger drive. Under normal conditions, however, the same organism is able to defer the hunger feeling when something of greater organismic importance requires attention.(Goldstein, Kurt, 1939) The drive framework mistakes a figure-ground phenomenon for an inventory of independent forces.

Goldstein preferred the word “needs” to “drives” for this reason.(Goldstein, Kurt, 1939) “Drives” implies the organism is passively impelled by forces alien to its personality. “Needs” positions the organism as active: it has definite potentialities, and because it has them, it has the need to actualize or realize them. The fulfillment of these needs is self-actualization. Experienced from within, this is not compulsion but agency; the person is an active personality, not a passive vehicle for drives that conflict with the self.

The goal of the drive is not discharge of tension. This point is Goldstein’s most direct disagreement with Freud.(Goldstein, Kurt, 1939) The tension-reduction model, on which gratification means return to a resting state, describes neither normal behavior nor normal motivation. Normal behavior involves a continual change of tension, one that again and again reaches a state enabling and impelling the organism toward further activities. The organism is not aiming at rest but at the kind of tension that sustains its engagement with the world. Tension-discharge as the goal appears in isolated, immature, or disordered organisms; it is a pathological phenomenon read backward into a general theory of motivation.

This critique extends directly to self-preservation. The drive for self-preservation has traditionally been regarded as the most basic motivational law of living things. Goldstein reversed this judgment.(Goldstein, Kurt, 1939) The tendency to maintain the existing state is characteristic of sick people and is a sign of anomalous life, of decay of life. The tendency of normal life is toward activity and progress. For the sick, maintaining the existing state may be the only form of self-actualization that remains available to them. That is not the tendency of the normal. The self-preservation drive achieved its scientific prestige, Goldstein argued, because researchers relied on observations from abnormal or experimental situations and then generalized the findings upward.(Goldstein, Kurt, 1939)

A particular form of self-actualization is the tendency to complete incomplete actions.(Goldstein, Kurt, 1939) Children’s repetitive activities are not the expression of a senseless repetition compulsion: they are driven by the experience of imperfection and by the pull toward completion. The nearer the organism approaches perfection in a task, the stronger the need to perform becomes. Self-actualization, in this light, has a specific developmental shape; it is not satisfied by random activity but by activity that moves toward the actualization of what remains unrealized.

The concept of preferred behavior connects this to the individual organism’s concrete character.(Goldstein, Kurt, 1939) Goldstein observed that organisms exhibit definite modes of functioning that are relatively stable across environmental variations. These preferred behaviors are experienced as more comfortable, more natural, and more accurate than alternatives. They are determined by the total attitude of the performing person, not by the demands of any single stimulus. Preferred behavior is the organism’s self-actualization showing up as consistency: the individual’s nature expresses itself in characteristic ways of engaging with the world, and these ways cannot be reduced to external conditioning.

Habits and mechanisms acquire what Gordon Allport called “functional autonomy”: they tend to perpetuate themselves regardless of the original need they served.(Goldstein, Kurt, 1939) Goldstein accepted this observation but gave it a holistic qualification. Genuine functional autonomy, in health, means that habits are integrated with the whole personality and do not conflict with its needs. When mechanisms achieve actual autonomy from the personality, running independently of and in opposition to organismic needs, this signals pathological isolation, a defective centering of the organism.

Disease enters this account as a disruption of self-actualization.(Goldstein, Kurt, 1939) Disease is defined not by deviation from a statistical average but by disordered functioning of the individual organism as compared to that individual’s own norm. This disorder qualifies as disease insofar as it endangers self-actualization: the organism can no longer engage with its proper milieu without catastrophic reaction. The individual, not the species average, is the norm against which health and disease are measured.

Maslow’s Conceptualization

Maslow’s starting premise was that human inner nature is not intrinsically destructive. “Man’s inner nature is not intrinsically or primarily or necessarily evil. The base and the evil do not flow from man’s animal nature… but rather from the thwarting or twisting of this inner nature.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) This claim does direct work in the theory: if inner nature is generally good or neutral, then the goal of psychology is to remove what interferes with its expression rather than to contain what it produces.

Self-actualization names the outcome of that unobstructed expression. Maslow used the term to mean becoming fully human — realizing the capacities that distinguish persons from less developed organisms and that distinguish each person from others through their particular constitution. He connected this to a naturalistic ethics: psychology, by studying what healthy people are like and what they choose, can generate a science of values that does not depend on religious or cultural authority. “It is possible now to have a science of values. Humanistic psychology can discover and teach the values that emerge when man is most fully human… resting on the knowledge of man’s nature rather than on authority outside himself.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

His relationship to Freud shaped how he positioned the concept. Maslow accepted that Freud had mapped psychological sickness with considerable accuracy. What psychoanalysis could not do was map health. “Freudian psychology supplies us with the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Self-actualization was the organizing concept of the missing half.

Method: Studying the Ceiling, Not the Floor

Maslow’s methodological argument is that psychology had been sampling the wrong population. Standard research averages across all available subjects, which means that findings describe typical persons — not optimally developed ones. Maslow argued this produced a systematically incomplete and distorted picture of what human beings can be. “To discover full humanness, start with the best human beings you can find, and define their characteristics… This is the only way to find out what human beings can be, i.e., the ceiling rather than the floor of human nature.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

This logic applied to choosing as well as to persons. Drawing on experimental evidence from animal diet studies — in which animals given free choice among adequate alternatives reliably select diets that benefit their health — Maslow proposed that organisms have an internal capacity to recognize what is good for them when environmental interference is removed.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) For human value theory, the implication follows: the choices of psychologically healthy people are better guides to what is good for the species than averages across a population that includes many individuals whose choices are distorted by fear, deprivation, or cultural conditioning. “No theory will be adequate that rests simply on the statistical description of the choices of unselected human beings. Only the choices of healthy human beings will tell us what is good for the human species.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

This methodological move is essential for understanding what self-actualization means. It is not a statistical average outcome; it is an asymptote — what development tends toward when conditions are favorable. Maslow was explicit that he was defining the ceiling of human possibility, not the norm.

B-Values and Peak Experience

Maslow’s most precise account of self-actualization connects it to B-cognition, the perceptual mode in which the object of experience is perceived whole and on its own terms rather than filtered through the observer’s needs. “In B-cognition the percept is seen whole and completely, as if it were all by itself… Normally, attention is selective and for-use; in B-cognition attention is total and non-selective. The perceiver is relatively de-fused with the percept, ego-transcendent.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Peak experiences are moments of fully active B-cognition. During them, persons perceive what Maslow called Being-values — B-values — as qualities genuinely present in reality rather than as projections: “wholeness, perfection, completion, justice, aliveness, richness, simplicity, beauty, goodness, uniqueness, effortlessness, playfulness, truth, honesty, reality, self-sufficiency.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) These are later developed as metaneeds — needs whose frustration produces metapathology (meaninglessness, anomie, cynicism) rather than the ordinary suffering produced by ungratified basic needs.

Peak experiences are self-validating. They do not require justification from outside themselves; they are perceived as ends rather than means.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) They also have lasting effects. After a peak experience, “people feel luckier, more grateful, more appreciative of life. There can be removal of symptoms, freeing of inhibitions, increased spontaneity.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) This gives peak experiences clinical significance beyond their immediate quality.

Maslow’s most consequential redefinition ties self-actualization directly to peak experience and shifts the concept from a stable trait of rare persons to an episode available, in principle, to anyone. Operationally, Maslow defined self-actualization as fully experiencing a moment — wholly, selflessly, with complete absorption (Maslow, Abraham H., 1962). In his own formulation:

In other words, any person in any of the peak experiences takes on temporarily many of the characteristics which I found in self-actualizing individuals. That is, for the time they become self-actualizers… We may define it as an episode, or a spurt in which the powers of the person come together in a particularly efficient and intensely enjoyable way, and in which he is more integrated and less split, more open for experience, more idiosyncratic, more perfectly expressive or spontaneous, or fully functioning, more creative, more humorous, more ego-transcending, more independent of his lower needs.

This formulation also makes self-actualization observable: rather than requiring long-term assessment of a person’s life trajectory, it can be identified in specific episodes.

The identity consequences of peak experiences deepen the picture. During peak states, persons feel more integrated, more self-accepting, more spontaneous, and more genuinely themselves.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) The apparent paradox — that ego-transcendence strengthens rather than dissolves identity — Maslow explained by distinguishing the ordinary, constricted ego from the fuller identity that emerges when self-consciousness is suspended. “Paradoxically, the transcendence of ego can sharpen and strengthen identity. Letting go of self-consciousness, the person feels more himself than at other times… The loss of ego boundaries is experienced not as dissolution but as expansion.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Peak experiences also leave a residue: after them, a person tends to feel more certain about who they are and what they are pursuing, functioning as self-defining moments.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Because they condense the essential features of psychological health into a recoverable episode, peak experiences are, in Maslow’s view, functionally equivalent to good health itself — making any person, during such a spurt, available as a subject for studying self-actualization.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) The sense of completion that characterizes peak states connects to D-motivation. In peak experience, the universe is perceived as complete and finished, and ordinary wanting temporarily ceases.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) This means the person is temporarily freed from deficiency motivation — they are not computing what is missing but experiencing what is present. The philosophical antinomy between Being (static, complete) and Becoming (striving, incomplete) is not resolved theoretically but dissolved experientially: “We are again and again rewarded for good Becoming by transient states of absolute Being, by peak-experiences… Heaven, so to speak, lies waiting for us through life, ready to step into for a time.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

At the higher levels of human maturation, classical Western dichotomies are not balanced or compromised but fused, transcended, or resolved. Self-actualizing people are simultaneously selfish and unselfish, Dionysian and Apollonian, individual and social, rational and irrational, fused with others and detached from them. Polar opposites that look like straight-line continua turn out to behave more like circles or spirals in which the extremes meet.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Limits of B-Cognition: The Integration with Daily Life

Self-actualization, in Maslow’s mature account, is not exclusive B-cognition or sustained peak-state. The chief danger of B-cognition is that it makes action impossible or at least indecisive: contemplation is without judgment, comparison, or condemnation, and decision requires precisely the readiness to act that B-cognition suspends.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Self-actualization therefore demands both B-cognition and D-cognition; conflict, practical decisiveness, struggle, regret, and even guilt are necessary epiphenomena of self-actualization, not failures of it.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Health is not a problem-free state. Self-actualization moves the person from the deficiency problems of youth and the neurotic, infantile, fantasy, or “unreal” problems of life to the real, intrinsically human, existential problems for which there is no perfect solution.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) B-cognition can also blur values and produce too great a tolerance, since each person seen exclusively from the viewpoint of his own Being looks perfect in his own kind. Unconditional acceptance is appropriate for the therapist or lover but not for the judge or administrator.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Maslow’s retrospective impression of his subjects, accordingly, is that the most fully-human people live ordinary lives most of the time: shopping, eating, going to the dentist, getting annoyed at bores. Peak experiences and pure contemplation remain exceptional in absolute frequency even for self-actualizers; integration with everyday life is the hallmark of mature health.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Creativity as Epiphenomenon

Self-actualizing creativity is one of the more reliable correlates of the broader concept. Maslow distinguished it from specialized artistic talent: creativity in this sense is a fundamental human characteristic, given to most people at birth and most often lost through enculturation. A first-rate soup can be more creative than a second-rate painting, and parenthood or homemaking can be creative while poetry need not be.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) What unites creative acts is a special perceptiveness, Carl Rogers’s “openness to experience,” that sees the fresh, the raw, and the concrete rather than processing reality through inherited categories.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

This connects creativity tightly to B-cognition. Both involve encountering reality without the filter of category and preconception, and both require accessible depths. Primary creativeness flows easily from the integrated person; integrated creativeness fuses primary spontaneity with secondary discipline to produce the great work of art, philosophy, or science.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Creativity is therefore an epiphenomenon of psychological wholeness rather than a separable capacity. The civil war between depths and defenses, characteristic of the average person, has been resolved in self-actualizers; more of themselves is available for use rather than spent on protection.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) What blocks creativity is fear: fear of one’s own thoughts, impulses, and depths. The route to creativity passes through self-acceptance and reduced fear, not through training technique.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Autonomy and Health as Transcendence of Environment

Maslow was sharply critical of definitions that reduce psychological health to adjustment, environmental competence, or social fit. The danger he saw was a sophisticated resurgence of older conformist ideals: defining the healthy person by job-analysis or social adaptation, treating the person as an instrument shaped by external demands rather than as something in their own right.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) His healthy subjects were superficially accepting of conventions but privately casual and detached, with a calm rejection of cultural stupidities and a willingness to fight when fighting was warranted. Maslow called this autonomy: rule by the laws of one’s own character rather than by the rules of society.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Autonomy did not equal perpetual mastery. The more eager the helper is to make a diagnosis or cure, the less helpful they become; B-cognition’s receptive, letting-be stance is part of health, and in some situations to give in is to overcome.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Maslow also reversed the standard valuation of the unconscious. Where Freud had treated the depths as id-driven and dangerous, Maslow’s healthy subjects drew on the unconscious as a resource: source of creativity, art, love, humor, play, and certain kinds of truth. Primary-process cognition can be valued rather than pathologized.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) The disciplinary implication followed: psychology has its own jurisdiction, distinct from biology and sociology, in that portion of the psyche which is not a reflection of the outer world.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

The unique person, encountered on their own terms, is the appropriate unit of analysis. Healthy patients react against being classified, and Maslow read this reaction as evidence of health rather than pathology: a defense of personal identity against being reduced to a category.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) The patient must be approached as a single, unique person rather than as a member of a class; understanding (not classifying) is the prerequisite of therapy.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Self-actualization is therefore plural in its manifestations: each person’s full humanness has its own profile, since their constitutions and capacities differ.

Growth Through Free Choice

Maslow’s developmental model adds a structural picture to the trait description. Every person has both safety and growth tendencies inside them, and healthy growth proceeds as a never-ending series of free-choice situations: between safety and growth, dependence and independence, regression and progression. Each of these forks carries both delights and anxieties. Growth is chosen when the delights of growth and the anxieties of safety together outweigh the anxieties of growth and the delights of safety.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Growth itself occurs through delight rather than through pain: the next step forward is subjectively more rewarding than the last, and the experience self-validates rather than relying on external criteria.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) This frames self-actualization as cumulative outcome of countless small choices rather than a sudden achievement.

It also marks Maslow’s distance from both pure Freudian pathologizing and pure growth-school optimism. The mature framework holds defense and growth together: classical Freudians saw only sickness, growth-schoolers slid past genuine pathology, and a complete psychology of self-actualization required both lenses.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Values and the Free Choices of Healthy People

Maslow’s value theory rests on what healthy people are observed to choose. The “higher values, the eternal virtues” turn out, on this approach, to be roughly what relatively healthy persons spontaneously prefer when they feel strong and have real choice: truth over falsehood, good over evil, beauty over ugliness, integration over dissociation, joy over sorrow, aliveness over deadness, uniqueness over stereotype.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Healthy people also value, alongside these growth choices, what Maslow called coasting values: peace and quiet, sleep, surrender, dependency, protection, retreat. The two coexist in dialectical relation rather than as opposed alternatives, and the more mature the person, the more growth values dominate, but coasting values remain necessary.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

The hierarchical principle restated in value terms is that man’s higher nature rests on a satisfied lower nature rather than on its renunciation. The best way to develop higher capacities is to gratify lower needs first, and a tolerable environment is part of that base.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) On this footing Maslow proposed a descriptive, naturalistic science of human values: in principle possible because what healthy organisms tend toward is what is good for them, dissolving the strict opposition between is and ought.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Past and present ethical theories have been weakened, in his reading, by inadequate knowledge of psychopathology and psychotherapy, since the dynamic-psychology literature supplies the missing mechanism by which humans fail to meet their own ideals.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Therapy, accordingly, can be reframed as a search for intrinsic values; the search for identity is, in essence, the search for one’s own authentic values.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Instinctoid Nature

The biological grounding of self-actualization is Maslow’s instinctoid thesis. Human inner nature is biologically based, directionful, and inherently toward health — but it is weak rather than compulsive. “Man has an essential, biologically based inner nature which is intrinsically good or neutral rather than evil… This inner nature is instinctoid — having a hereditary determinant though weak and easily overcome by habit, culture, training, and learning.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) This position distinguishes Maslow both from strong instinct theorists, for whom human nature is a powerful deterministic force, and from blank-slate environmentalists, for whom human nature has no directional content.

The weakness of instinctoid drives matters because it explains why self-actualization requires favorable conditions rather than simply unfolding inevitably. Human nature can be thwarted. When it is, the result is not neutral — it is pathological. Neurosis, on Maslow’s account, is the evasion of growth — specifically, the failure to actualize distinctly human potentialities, not a breakthrough of animal drives (Maslow, Abraham H., 1962). Maslow’s own formulation is precise:

A neurosis is not part of the inner core but rather a defense against or an evasion of it, as well as a distorted expression of it (under the aegis of fear). It is ordinarily a compromise between the effort to seek basic need gratifications in a covert or disguised or self-defeating way, and the fear of these needs, gratifications and motivated behaviors.

The clinical task is not primarily removing repression but supporting growth and reducing the fear that drives evasion.

The higher capacities and needs — those most distinctively human — are more fragile than the lower ones. “The higher needs are more distinctively human than the lower needs, which are shared with other animals… To be fully human means to be moved by truth, beauty, goodness — not only by hunger and safety.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) This means that deprivation of B-values — the metaneeds — produces a specifically human form of suffering that cannot be addressed by meeting safety and belonging needs alone. Valuelessness is not merely an absence of purpose; it is its own kind of illness. “Absence of values, the state of anomie or valuelessness, is itself pathogenic… People need a philosophy of life, a set of values that they can live by and commit to. Without this, they experience emptiness, purposelessness, and metapathology.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Maslow also argued that individual capacities generate their own needs. A person with well-developed capacities — physical, intellectual, relational — will feel the pull to exercise them. “Capacities are needs, and therefore are intrinsic values as well… The muscular person likes to use his muscles, indeed has to use them in order to self-actualize.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) This grounds a pluralistic account of self-actualization: the content of full humanness differs for each person because their constitutions differ. There is no uniform profile of the self-actualized person, only a structural description of what it means for any person to be fully developed.

Deficiency motivation and growth motivation operate through different relationships with the environment. Deficiency-motivated persons are highly dependent on what the environment supplies, and their perception of the world is shaped by what they need from it.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Growth-motivated persons are more independent of environmental supply; their attention is freed for the world as it is rather than as a resource to be extracted from.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Neurosis, restated in this framework, is a deficiency disease: it is the product of specific things the person is missing, not of drives that require suppression. “We can speak of neurosis as a deficiency disease — just as we can speak of pellagra or scurvy as deficiency diseases… Neurosis is the end product of ungratified basic needs.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Gratification of those needs does not produce passivity but releases the person for higher-order engagement: “Gratification releases the person for higher needs and for self-actualization.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Self-actualization also changes the structure of relationships. The shift from deficiency motivation to growth motivation corresponds to a shift from D-love to B-love — from needing another person to appreciating them. “B-love (love for the Being of another person, unneeding love, unselfish love) is different from D-love (deficiency-love, love that is selfish, love that is a hunger). They are qualitatively different and can be clearly differentiated.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Criticism and Reception

Maslow presented his framework as a research program rather than established findings. The forty-three propositions in Toward a Psychology of Being were “offered not as established facts but as a program of research and theory for a third force in psychology — one that goes beyond the psychoanalytic and the behaviorist traditions to build a comprehensive science of the full human being.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Third Force psychology as Maslow understood it in the early 1960s was a coalition of intellectual traditions — Adlerians, Jungians, neo-Freudians, Gestalt therapists, and existential psychologists — converging on the position that neither behaviorism nor classical psychoanalysis could account for the full range of human development.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) This openness to revision has not always been observed in popular reception.

Several lines of criticism recur in the literature. First, the hierarchy of needs — the claim that higher needs become active only after lower ones are substantially met — is difficult to test empirically and has not been consistently supported by cross-cultural research. Second, the selection of self-actualized exemplars (historical figures Maslow admired, including Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein) is not a controlled sample and reflects the investigator’s values. Third, the concept of instinctoid inner nature remains vague in its biological specification: Maslow acknowledged that the evidence on human aggression and destructiveness was insufficient to resolve whether Freud’s death-drive hypothesis was wrong.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Fourth, the hierarchy’s cultural specificity — the assumption that safety and belonging are universally prerequisite to the higher needs — has been questioned by research in collectivist societies.

The concept has nonetheless been influential in clinical psychology, counseling, education, and organizational behavior. Maslow’s contribution was less the specific hierarchy — which he never regarded as more than a rough approximation — and more the insistence that psychology must have a theory of health as well as a theory of sickness, and that the study of psychological health required its own methods, its own population of exemplars, and its own standard of what counts as a successful outcome. “Psychologically healthy people do not experience the classical dichotomies of Western thought as genuine dilemmas.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) That reframing of what psychology is for remains the durable core of his legacy.

See Also

• Abraham Maslow
• Humanistic Psychology
• Peak Experience
• B-Cognition
• Hierarchy of Needs
• Third Force Psychology
• Carl Rogers
• Kurt Goldstein

Sources

All claims cite evidence cards from:

• Goldstein, K. (1939). The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man. New York: American Book Company. [Source ID: goldstein-organism-1939]
• Maslow, A. H. (1962). Toward a Psychology of Being. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand. [Source ID: maslow-towardpsychologyofbeing-1962]