p.5 Usually when a conscious desire is analyzed we find that we can go behind it, so to speak, to other,
more fundamental aims of the individual... the study of motivation must be in part the study of the ultimate human
goals or desires or needs.
p.5 sound motivation theory cannot possibly afford to neglect the unconscious life.
p.6-7 In a certain sense any organismic state of affairs whatsoever is in itself also a motivating
state. Current conceptions of motivation seem to proceed on the assumption that a motivational state is a special,
peculiar state, sharply marked off from the other happenings in the organism. Sound motivational theory should,
on the contrary, assume that motivation is constant, never ending, fluctuating, and complex, and that it is an almost
universal characteristic of practically every organismic state of affairs.
p.7 The human being is a wanting animal and rarely reaches a state of complete satisfaction
except for a short time. As one desire is satiated, another pops up to take its place... It is a characteristic of
human beings throughout their whole lives that they are practically always desiring something.
p.7 the human being is never satisfied except in a relative or one-step-along-the-path fashion, and second,
that wants seem to arrange themselves in some sort of hierarchy of prepotency.
p.8-9 the only sound and fundamental basis on which any classification of motivational life may be constructed
is that of the fundamental goals or needs, rather than any listing of drives... It is only the fundamental goals that remain
constant
p.10 a child who is trying to attain a certain object of value to him or her, but who is restrained by a
barrier of some sort, determines not only that the object is of value, but also that the barrier is a barrier. Psychologically
there is no such thing as a barrier; there is only a barrier for a particular person who is trying to get something that he
or she wants.
p.11 Behavior is determined by several classes of determinants, of which motivation is one and environmental
forces are another.
p.12 Dewey (1939) and Thorndike (1940) have stressed one important aspect of motivation that has been completely
neglected for most psychologists, namely, possibility. On the whole we yearn consciously for that which might conceivably
be actually attained.
p.13 Is it, however, John Dewey's contention that all impulses in the adult - or at least the characteristic
impulse - are integrated with and affected by reality.
p.18 The physiological needs, along with their partial goals, when chronically gratified cease to
exist as active determinants or organizers of behavior. They now exist only in a potential fashion in the sense that
they may emerge again to dominate the organism if they are thwarted. But a want that is satisfied is no longer a want.
The organism is dominated and its behavior organized only by unsatisfied needs.
p.27-28 most members of our society who are normal are partially satisfied in all their basic needs
and partially unsatisfied in all their basic needs at the same time. A more realistic description of the hierarchy
would be in terms of decreasing percentages of satisfaction as we go up the hierarchy of prepotency.
p.28 What we have called the basic needs are often largely unconscious although they may, with suitable
techniques and with sophisticated people, become conscious.
p.30 Everyday conscious desires are to be regarded as symptoms, as surface indicators of more basic
needs... It has been pointed out above several times that our needs usually emerge only when more prepotent needs
have been gratified. Thus gratification has an important role in motivation theory... needs cease to play an active
determining or organizing role as soon as they are gratified.
p.31 healthy people are primarily motivated by their needs to develop and actualize their fullest potentialities
and capacities... When we ask what humans want of life, we deal with their very essence.
p.32-33 the chief principle of organization in human motivational life is the arrangement of basic needs
in a hierarchy of less or greater priority or potency. The chief dynamic principle animating this organization is
the emergence in the healthy person of less potent needs upon gratification of the more potent ones... The
most basic consequence of satiation of any need is that this need is submerged and a new and higher need emerges.
p.78-79 General dynamic theory... indicates the necessity for individual definition of threat... How shall
we know when any particular situation is perceived by the organism as a threat? ...Such techniques allow us to know what the
person needs... No picture of threat is complete in any organism unless we know also what this threat feeling leads to, what
it makes the individual do, and how the organism reacts to the threat... it is absolutely necessary to understand both the
nature of the feeling of threat and also the reaction of the organism to this feeling.
p.160-161 Very frequently, it appeared that an essential aspect of self-actualizing creativeness was a special
kind of perceptiveness that is exemplified by the child in the fable who saw that the king had no clothes on... These people
can see the fresh, the raw, the concrete, the ideographic, as well as the generic, the abstract, the rubricized, the categorized
and classified... creativeness in self-actualized people was in many respects like the creativeness of all happy
and secure children. It was spontaneous, effortless, innocent, easy... it seemed to be made up largely of "innocent" freedom
of perception and "innocent," uninhibited spontaneity and expressiveness... it was in this childlike sense that my subjects
were creative.
p.185 Science is only one means of access to knowledge of natural, social, and psychological
reality. The creative artist, the philosopher, the literary humanist, or, for that matter,
the ditch digger can also be the discoverer of truth, and should be encouraged as much as the scientist.
p.188-189 More and more attention has been given to the shortcomings and sins of "official" science... Inevitable
stress on elegance, polish, technique, and apparatus has as a frequent consequence a playing down of meaningfulness, vitality,
and significance of the problem and of creativeness in general... The tendency is growing therefore to say that
the dissertation problem itself does not matter - only so it be well done. In a word, it need no longer be a contribution
to knowledge.
p.189-190 Means centering [JLJ, from p.188, the tendency to consider that the
essence of science lies in its instruments, techniques, procedures, apparatus, and its methods rather than in its problems,
questions, functions, or goals] tends to push into a commanding position in science the technicians and the "apparatus
men," rather than the "question askers" and the problem solvers... Means-centered scientists tend, in spite
of themselves, to fit their problems to their techniques rather than the contrary. Their beginning question tends
to be Which problems can I attack with the techniques and equipment I now possess? rather than what it should more often be,
Which are the most pressing, the most crucial problems I could spend my time on?
p.190 If scientists looked on themselves as question askers and problem solvers rather than specialized
technicians, there would now be something of a rush to the newest scientific frontier, to the psychological and social problems
about which we know least and should know most. Why is it that there is so little traffic across these departmental borders?
p.191 One main danger of scientific orthodoxy is that it tends to block the development of new
techniques.
p.192-193 Means-centered orthodoxy encourages scientists to be "safe and sound" rather than
bold and daring... The proper place for scientists - once in a while at least - is
in the midst of the unknown, the chaotic, the dimly seen, the unmanageable, the mysterious, the not-yet-well-phrased.
This is where a problem-oriented science would have them be as often as necessary.
p.193 Sir Richard Livingstone, of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, has defined a technician as "a man who
understands everything about his job except its ultimate purpose and place in the order of the universe." Someone else, in
similar vein, has defined an expert as a person who avoids all the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy. [JLJ
- attributed to Steven Weinberg, who also said: The effort to understand the universe is one
of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
]
p.194-195 The writer especially hopes to communicate some of his conviction that much of what passes
for cognition is actually a substitute for it, a second-hand trick made necessary by the exigencies of living in a flux-and-process
reality without being willing to acknowledge this fact. Because reality is dynamic, and because
the average Western mind can cognize well only what is static, much of our attending, perceiving, learning, remembering,
and thinking actually deals with staticized abstractions from reality or with theoretical constructions rather than with reality
itself.
p.196 it is simultaneously true that (1) we tend not to notice that which does not fit into the already
constructed set of rubrics (i.e., the strange) and (2) it is the unusual, the unfamiliar, the dangerous, or threatening
that are most attention compelling... Fullest attention is given to the unfamiliar-dangerous; least attention
is given to the familiar-safe; an intermediate amount is given to the unfamiliar-safe or else it is transformed into
the familiar-safe, that is, categorized.
p.196 For relatively anxious people, attending is more exclusively an emergency mechanism, and the
world tends somewhat to be divided simply into the dangerous and the safe.
