Healthy Personality

1
The Healthy Personality
2

• Maslow set out to discover the nature of the
  healthy personality.
• He tried to identify people with exceptional
  mental health so that he could investigate their
  characteristics.

3

• He used psychological tests and interviews to
  sort out the healthiest 1 of a sizable
  population of college students.
• Over a period of years, he accumulated his case
  histories and sketched, in broad strokes, a
  picture of ideal psychological health.

4

• Maslow called people with exceptional mental
  healthy personalities self-actualizing persons
  because of their commitment to continued personal
  growth.

5
Characteristics of Self-Actualizing People

1. Clear, efficient perception of reality and
   comfortable relations with it
2. Spontaneity, simplicity, and naturalness
3. Problem centering
4. Detachment and need for privacy
5. Autonomy, independence of culture and environment
6. Continued freshness of appreciation
7. Mystical and peak experience

6

• 7. Feelings of kinship and identification with
  the human race
• 8. Strong friendships, but limited In number
• 9. Democratic character structure
• 10. Ethical discrimination between means and ends
  between good and evil
• 11.Philosophical, unhostile sense of humor
• 12. Balance between polarities in personality.

7
Evaluating Humanistic Perspectives

• Poor testability
• Like psychoacademic theorists, the humanist have
  been criticized for proposing hyphotheses that
  are difficult to put to a scientific test.
  Humanistic concepts like personal growth and self
  actualization are difficult to define and
  measure.

8

• 2. Unrealistic view of human nature
• Critics charge that humanists have been overly
  optimistic in their assumptions about human
  nature and unrealistic in their descriptions of
  the healthy personality.Maslows had a hard time
  finding self-actualizing persons. Thus,
  humanistic portraits of psychological health are
  perhaps a bit unrealistic.

9

• 3. Inadequate evidence
• Humanistic theories are based primarily on
  discerning but uncontrolled observations in
  clinical settings. More experimental research is
  needed to catch up with the theorizing in the
  humanistic camp.