Humanistic Psychology: A Closer Look to Our Needs and Wants

Humanistic Psychology is about our needs and wants and our strategies to get them; basically it's about the free will and our choices as individuals in our lives, to get a desired payoff from a certain situation. Everybody have needs and wants in their lives so the basic thing we must understand is that these needs that are waiting to be fulfilled are mutual, just like every other individuals.

We have some basic needs in our lives like air, water, food, healthcare, security etc. Other than that we have other needs in the society that we are living in. We have made a list in our discussion with Giuseppe, came up with great amount of examples for our needs; we had an example to discuss; a boss and his/her assistant for example. In this example we talked about the mutual needs of these people; the boss needs and wants a certain assistance for his assistant because he or she's hired to do so to weaken the amount of work the boss can handle. On the other hand the assistant is waiting to be appreciated by his work done by his boss so that he can be motivated. There are many strategies to fulfill these kind of needs and wants but its obvious that we must be aware that everybody have needs just like we do, and act according to that. Sometimes helping an individual to get his/her need and want can be a strategy to have what you want and need. 

I have taken couple of psychology courses in Sabancı and one of them was Social Psychology. So, Maslow's triangle of needs was nothing new for me but it really gave the nuance of what we are really talking about about when we are dealing with needs and wants as individuals, the keystone of the society. 

Maslow's theory is that in order to fulfill a need, you must first fulfill the basic needs, so it goes up layer by layer. If we want safety and security, we must have our physiological needs like air, water, food and shelter. If we want self esteem, we must have love and belongingness, safety and our physiological needs. This can be shown as a good example for the needs and wants of the individuals in a society, even if its not proven. I think the bottom layer; physiological needs are true, but others can be in a matrix form.