We try to discuss the fundamental needs which are considered to be the basic cause of different conflicts, and which play an effective role in the development of human behavior or character and motivation.
Dynamics of the Basic Needs
People exhibit a wide variety of needs, drives, or motives, ranging from very basic physical needs, through ego and security needs, to social and achievement needs. within the limits, people mostly focus their energies on only a few of their needs at a time. The others are put aside either because they are too far off to be immediately operational importance. But people seldom seek complete satisfaction of their needs. Feelings of conflict result either when goals are set higher than one’s achievement potentials or when a person perceives his several needs to be inconsistent.
These feelings of conflict, in turn, tend to cause unconventional (offbeat) behavior, like withdrawal from a situation or “irrational” hostility.
A shifting of emphasis from lower to higher needs caries with it important implications for problems of failure and frustration. The situation is further complicated in organizations in which a man’s aspirations are fed not only by his own success but by social pressures. Frustration is not the only problem in the satisfaction of higher needs, they tend often to be incompatible with one another. Conflicts between competing needs might be especially severed.
a- Basic Needs
Basically five sets of goals, which we may call them basic needs. These are briefly called physiological, safety, love, esteem and self-actualization. These needs are usually taken as the starting point for motivation. These lines of research make it necessary for us to revise our customary notions about the needs. First the development of the concept of homeostasis which refers to the body’s automatic Or involuntary efforts to maintain a constant, normal state Oof the bloodstream. Cannon in “wisdom of the body” has described this process for.
1. Water contents 2. Salt contents 3. Sugar content 4. Protein, fat, calcium, oxygen, vitamins and hydrogen contents. If the body lacks some chemicals.
A specific appetite or partial hunger for that food element an individual will tend to develop. Undoubtedly these physiological needs are the most prepotent (having priority over others) of all needs and the major motivating factor in the individual.
b- Safety Needs
If all physiological needs are relatively well gratified, there then safety needs emerge. The organism (man) is equally dominated by this need.
This is a common need for adults and infants and children. In the light of daily observation and experience, we may generalize and say that the average child in our society usually prefers a safe, ordinary predictable, organized world which he can rely on and in which surprising, unmanageable or different risky things don’t occur and in which, regardless, he has every single amazing guardian to shield and shield him from hurt.
The healthy, normal, fortunate adult in our society and culture is largely satisfied in his safety needs. The propensity to have some religion or world way of thinking that composed the universe and the man in it, into a sufficiently sound, important who is added to a limited extent roused by wellbeing chasing.
Science and philosophy in general as partially motivated by safety needs.
c- Love Needs
There will emerge affection, love, and belongingness related needs If the physiological and safety needs fulfilled, then, and with this new center the whole cycle will revise itself. The person feels keen as never before, the absence of friends, wife, and children. He will hunger for affectionate relations with people.
Practically all theories of psychology have stressed thwarting of love needs, as basic in the picture of maladjustment.
d- Steem Needs
All people in our societies have a need or desire for self-respect or self-esteem, stable, firmly based, high evaluation of themselves, and for the esteem of others. By firmly based self-esteem we mean that which is soundly based upon respect from others in real capacity and achievement.
It can be classified into two subsidiary sets. First, in the face of the world for independence and freedom desire for achievement, for adequacy, for strength, for confidence… Second, people have a desire for prestige and reputation, attention, recognition, appreciation and importance. These needs have been relatively stressed by Alfred Adler and his followers, and relatively neglected by Freud and other psychologists.
The satisfaction of self-esteem needs leads to feelings of capability, self-confidence, adequacy and worth the strength of being useful and necessary in the world.
e- The Need for Self-Actualization
Even if some satisfied with all these needs but It is human nature, we expect that a few discontents and restlessness will soon develop unless the individual is doing what he is suitable for. an artist must paint, A Musician must make music and a poet must write if he is to be ultimately happy.
This need may be called self-actualization. Kurt Goldstein first coined this term. It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely to the tendency for one to become actualized in what one is potential. It differs from person to person. In one individual it may be expressed maternally, in another athletically, in still another aesthetically, in the painting of pictures and in another inventively in the creation of new contrivances. This need emerges upon prior satisfaction of the physiological, safety, love and esteem needs.
- What role do psychological needs play in achieving a fulfilling and balanced life?
- How can understanding and addressing psychological needs contribute to overall well-being?
- What are the key psychological needs that individuals must prioritize for a more fulfilling life?