Maslow’s 16 Aspects of Peak Experience

Abraham H. Maslow, in his paper A Theory of Human Motivation ¹, said that man [the human being] is a perpetually wanting animal. There seems to be no denying this, and, in fact, it seems to be a fundamental basis for the growth of the species. In this mode of wanting, in our desire for more, in our need to fill the psychological void, there is the prospect of success or failure. In success, there is Peak Experience, the seemingly seldom-reached place where we may say that we have made it, if even for only a short period. Short-lived because although we may believe we know what we want, the fulfilled need is transient and never truly satisfied.

As Maslow further states, “The average member of our society is most often partially satisfied and partially unsatisfied in all of their wants”. What is difficult for many of us, perhaps, is that we possess a certain degree of unawareness of our desirous state – we know we want something, but we don't know what it is. In this, we seem fundamentally disturbed by our dissatisfaction, only partially relieved by moments of release through idle indulgence or, indeed, a chance peak experience. The latter being a godlike state of consciousness rarely encountered. In today's article, I'm exploring the phenomenon of Peak Experience and the aspects that comprise it according to psychotherapist and psychologist Abraham H. Maslow, so that maybe we may recognise and nurture it in our daily work.

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It seems that we humans are constantly searching for ourselves in every walk of life, in every engagement, and in every relationship. That in itself is not necessarily remarkable, but what is remarkable is that most of us don't realise it. For example, most of us work because we have to and not because we want to or because we love the work. We have become conditioned and socialised towards work that has little value to us other than the means to maintain appearances. If the truth is known, it will show that we'd rather be doing something else. Unfortunately, that something else is usually frivolous and leans us not towards growth, but decline. We follow the rules of society to our personal disadvantage. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, for whom Maslow was a significant influence, states in his book Flow ²;

…civilisation is built on the repression of individual desires. It would be impossible to maintain any kind of social order unless society's members were forced to take on the habits and skills that the culture required whether the individuals liked it or not.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi | Psychologist

And so, a somewhat tragic although broadly apparent set of global circumstances seem to prevail. We seem to live in perpetual pursuit of something we just can't quite put our finger on, all the while engaged in activities of someone else's design. We go down the well-worn path chasing after something that we just don't seem to know what it is. We get the job, the house, the husband or wife, the business, the bank account, but the gratification doesn't seem to last. Why? What motivates us? What is the drive or otherwise, that brings us to behave the way we do, to set and pursue particular goals that perhaps fail to satisfy? Is our behaviour bringing us to the growth of self or to decline? Abraham H. Maslow had some ideas around these questions.

Who Was Abraham Maslow?

Abraham Maslow was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1908 to Jewish parents who fled Kyiv due to increasing antisemitic activity. Growing up in a multicultural city, he graduated from City College and subsequently studied psychology at the University of Wisconsin. Not surprisingly, given the dominant mode of thought in psychology at the time, Maslow's training at UW was decidedly experimental-behaviourist. His early work was focused on the social behaviour of primates under the supervision of Harry F. Harlow, who later became one of the most eminent behaviourist psychologists of his time.

Following the horrors of World War II, Maslow began to develop his ideas on human motivation, which ran contrary to the Freudian movement, which focused on the dysfunction of the human mind. Maslow decided to leave animal research behind and focus on human beings. He coined the term ” humanistic psychology.” However, rather than encouraging further opposition between pro-Freudian and anti-Freudian thinking, he emphasised the importance of integrating opposite philosophies into a single, unified approach.

So many people insist on being either pro-Freudian or anti-Freudian, pro-scientific-psychology or anti-scientific-psychology, etc. In my opinion any such loyalty positions are silly. Our job is to integrate these various truths into the whole truth, which should be our only loyalty

Abraham H. Maslow | Humanist Psychologist

A Theory of Human Motivation

Abraham Maslow offered a theory of human motivation that emerged from a movement toward a positive-growth view of humanity. Prior to this, a popular and dominant view was that all human motivation was driven by dark and unseen unconscious forces that lurked within the subconscious mind. Maslow didn't deny negative motivation, or “deficiency needs”, as he termed them, but rather asked that we consider “growth needs” as just as valid a motivator of human behaviour. He envisaged the growth of the individual and of the species, towards a full humanness through ultimate self-realisation, or “self-actualisation” as he termed it.

Maslow suggested that in peak experience, human beings are closest to their real selves and most idiosyncratic. He further stated that this is “the most important source of clean and uncontaminated data; i.e. invention is reduced to a minimum, and discovery increased to a maximum“. It seems here he was referring to the almost organic nature of the activity, which was engaged for its inherent value rather than out of an ulterior motive to gain something from it. Perhaps this can be likened to the term in Chinese Buddhist philosophy known as Ziran; that which comes of itself.

I cannot help, when I read these lines almost 80 years after they were first written, but to draw comparisons to the philosophy of Purposeful Accident and the ideas about work that have been parading through my mind for the last few years. The ideas are obviously not new; they are not uniquely mine, but it is remarkable to find that eminent others have already been speaking of the things that became apparent to me, alone in my insignificant corner of the world, and it is what draws me further into Maslow's work.

The emotional reaction in the peak experience has a special flavour of wonder, of awe, of reverence, of humility and surrender before the experience as before something great.

Abraham Maslow | Psychologist

Self-Discovery in Peak Experience

Maslow says that self-discovery, the realisation of the highest level of personal identity is part discovery and part creativity. Identity is whatever we say it is. He claims that identity, although it may have slightly different meanings depending on how the term is used and by whom, in this case, refers to that aspect of the self where individuals are most their true selves. The aspects of the self in peak experience of which he speaks, are not truly separate. They are rather, overlapping characteristics, intertwined and ultimately inseparable.

And so, as Maslow breaks down these aspects of the peak-experiencing self, he insists on taking a holistic view. In other words, we should not think of these aspects as existing independently in the realm of the psyche or physical world, but rather ultimately inseparable from the experience of the self at the highest known level.

1. Sense of Unity of The Self

Maslow suggests that when we reach a peak experience, a sense of unity within the self emerges, characterised by wholeness and unification. To the observer, we seem to be of a single mind, less split and dissociated from the activity. The surface-level personality seems to take a back seat.

It seems this aspect, as with all others mentioned below, is a constituent of all other aspects as well as something we can speak of separately. Reading Maslow's work and other material on the subject, coupled with my personal experience, it appears that the self is fractal with all aspects containing and contained in all others.

2. One With The Environment

As a person in peak experience becomes more singly themselves, they also blend with the environment, Maslow says. The I-Thou monism becomes possible, the mother becomes one with her child, the musician becomes the music, the artist becomes the drawing.

He says that this is the greatest attainment of identity and autonomy. I can relate to this, as I recently wrote about it in The Reflectionist. When I draw, when I become immersed in the work, the surface-level personality of me disappears. There seems only to be the activity and I come back “into the room” so to speak, only when I step back from the work.

Maslow suggests that this is the greatest attainment of identity and autonomy. However, it seems temporary.

3. Experience of Peak Power

When we find ourselves in peak experience, Maslow writes, we feel at the peak of our power, using all capacities to the best and fullest. We feel a greater level of perception, stronger and more intelligent than we otherwise do in ordinary everyday life. There is no fighting against the self physically or psychologically, every aspect of the organic entity is free to act in the task at hand.

4. Non-Forcing

I run a couple of times per week. Anyone who runs can relate to this; There are days when I run and I'm in full flight, I feel like I have an engine on my back. I feel light as a feather and that I could run all day. Then there are other times when I feel like I'm dragging two lead blocks around on my feet. This is despite preparing in the same way prior to both runs. It happens in the gym, too, if I'm going for a big lift. Sometimes, I'm in the zone, and sometimes, I'm not.

Maslow recognises this phenomenon as effortlessness and ease of functioning. He says what takes effort, striving and struggle at other times becomes easy and effortless. It comes of itself, as he puts it. Artists, writers, business people, scientists, all people in all domains of work have the opportunity to display this characteristic of identity when operating at their peak.

The only question being; how do we hit that spot more often?

5. Self Determination

When we find ourselves in peak experience, we feel greater responsibility for outcomes. Rather than a subject at the mercy of external influences, caused, determined and helpless, we feel to be the “prime mover” as Maslow puts it. We feel in charge of our destiny, captain of our own ship, fully volitional.

We appear this way to others also, Maslow says. We seem strong and single-minded, assured and certain of the way ahead. This characteristic of identity would seem to be a requirement for leadership, in the captain of a team, in the manager or the chief executive of a corporation. Maslow says that it is often possible for the therapist to see this moment of self-realisation arise in a client in therapy.

6. Free of Inhibition

There is no presence of inhibition, fear, doubt, or worry in those experiencing peak states. There are no psychological breaks to performance, such as those caused by self-consciousness or performance anxiety. Maslow suggests that this is both a subjective and objective phenomenon, and we can describe it further in both ways. Csikszentmihalyi's work in this regard provides a deeper exploration of how this is both a subjective and objective phenomenon, and this idea. ³

7. Spontaneity

As a consequence of the absence of self-consciousness, there is the opportunity for spontaneity. There is an innocence, a naivety and an unguardedness. We have no experience of threat to the self, so we have the opportunity to enter flow. It's difficult for me to separate these two aspects of identity in peak performance. For me, they seem to arise mutually. Maslow separates them but only discusses them. These individual aspects of identity in peak experiences are, as he says, all interconnected.

8. Purposeless Creativity

Here, Maslow says we can express creativity without premeditation. As a result of lack of self-consciousness, of ego-led sense of self there can be greater improvisation and self-expression in its purest form. The self creates the behaviour from nothing, no planning or activity along rehearsed preconceived lines. There is no preparation, design or rehearsal required. There is no need or purpose yet there is purposefulness in the act. It is timeless in so far as the creative behaviour comes out of now, all past and future merge into the moment of the act without premeditation.

Peaks are not planned or brought about by design; they happen.

Abraham Maslow | Psychologist

9. Timelessness

And so we bring ourselves to the timeless quality of peak experience. In peak experience, the individual is free of the past and future. There are no demands or expectations, and the fullness of the self is available in the experience. There is no evaluation of their performance, no expectation in the timeless moment of now. The memory of previous performances or expectation of future performances falls away as the central, more integrated self takes command. Deliberate Practice ⁴, of course, plays a role but only as the practised behaviours are drawn into the performance automatically. There is no need for the individual to make things happen. It all happens by itself, now.

10. Pinnacle of Individuality

We can put all of this, as Maslow suggests, in terms of the acme of uniqueness, of individuality or idiosyncrasy. He says in peak experience, the roles we play, the surface-level identity of the ego drops away, and we are more wholely individual than before. Whatever our identity is in normal, everyday life, we are more than that in peak experience.

I struggled with this aspect of Maslow's list of qualities. All I can do is consider it from my personal experience and try to relate and understand what he means. For me, it seems that my personality, my self, disappears altogether in peak experience. Everyone else disappears too. In art or writing or sport it seems the same. Sometimes there's a mild awareness that others are there but for the most part, I'm on my own. In fact, as I said above, often there is not me to speak of.

The jury is out on this one.

11. Merging of I and Other

It may seem as we make our way through these aspects of identity in peak experience that we are saying the same thing in a different way.

Maslow suggests here that the person becomes pure psyche and less an object in the world. As the ego-led self interacts in the world, it perceives others are often times its enemy, or perhaps adversary or competitor. There is I and Other. The psychoanalyst, Lacan, in his concept of The Mirror Stage ⁵ referred to a “big Other” (society and its rules) and a “small Other” (other people or egos) and parallels can be drawn here. By letting go of the need to control the other and allow it to exist under its own rules, Maslow says, I can emancipate myself from the not-me and live by my own intrinsic laws. He says that in peak experience, both intra-psychic laws and the extra-psychic laws of the other are not so different and we can integrate them.

12. Unmotivated by Needs

Maslow says that for the individual in peak experience, there is the phenomenon of feeling unmotivated or undriven by needs, especially lower-level deficiency needs. He says that in the highest level of experience of the most authentic self, there is non-striving, non-needing, and non-wishing. The individual simply is. Everything, he says, comes as we need it and of its own accord without effort and execution of the will. It seems we reach a point of equilibrium in peak experience, albeit temporarily.

Maslow says the individual now acts totally, without deficiency, without need to avoid pain or hunger or displeasure. Behaviour becomes self-validating. At this level of peak experience, Maslow calls the person godlike because we consider gods to have no needs or wants, no deficiencies, and no sense of lack.

13. Artistic Expression

Expression and communication in peak experience tend often to become poetic, mythical and rhapsodic as if expressing a natural language of being, Maslow writes. He suggests that, at the time of writing, he had only recently become aware of this aspect of identity in peak experience, and so didn't say much more about it.

However, it seems like another aspect of authenticity, and it is something I have observed in artists, writers, musicians, and other naturally creative people, who, to me, appear capable of acting more authentically than most other people. Most people insist on putting on the most elaborate show in order to hide their real selves often to their own lack of awareness. It seems to me that an artist often knows their performance is, in fact, a show – a display from a deeper source.

14. Sense of Completion

Maslow says that all peak experiences are a culmination of the act, a total discharge, catharsis, or climax. Completion of the act is of vital importance, and the absence of which, in clinical respects, can reflect a psychic disturbance and a playing out of illness in the body or a behavioural abnormality. Completion, as Maslow writes, plays out in the world of people and things, is perfection, justice, and beauty.

The inner and outer worlds are isomorphic, Maslow writes, and are dialectically related, i.e. they are mutually causative. He asks how this influences identity. And suggests that only those who reach peak experience can find closure or completion, and that those who do not peak always have a deficiency.

However, I would assert that completion is temporary and that even for those of us who reach peak experience in work or play, there is the inevitable fall from grace. The peak experience/non-peak experience is an ever-moving psychic thing. It is never complete. We never get it done.

15. Playfulness

The playfulness Maslow refers to here is not a frivolous, idle, and pointless play undertaken as a means of perhaps distraction. However, it is rather a higher level of playfulness – Maslow describes it as existential, in the sense that it is an amusement or delight with both the smallness and the largeness of the human being, which transcends the dominance-subordinance polarity of ordinary, everyday existence. Hierarchical structures we see acted out in society seem not to be of concern to the individual in peak experience.

He calls it a transcendence of locality, time, and space, of history, and the ego-led, suggesting that to be amused by a particular circumstance, not in a mocking way but in an accepting and loving manner, enables us to coexist simultaneously in both the inner and outer worlds' surface personality. He calls playfulness in this sense, a resolver of dichotomies and a solution to insoluble problems. Maslow suggests that to be amused by a particular circumstance, not in a mocking way but in an accepting and loving manner, enables us to coexist simultaneously in both the inner and outer worlds without conflict.

16. Surprise Happenings

Finally, Maslow discusses the phenomenon of what I have come to know as Purposeful Accident. He says that in the culmination of peak experience, in its completion, there is the sense in the individual of surprise, of “I don't deserve this”. Peaks, he says, are not planned or brought about by design; they happen.

What would life be like if we could plan it all? How boring it would be. The fun of life is surprise and it is this element of surprise that Maslow is speaking of. The phenomenon of human existence is remarkable and ultimately unknowable. I think all great thinkers realise this. It is only the naive ego led minds that believe otherwise. the future does not exist and either does the past, all there is, is now and it is here that we have the ability to be our true and authentic selves. In that state of mind, we have the opportunity to be surprised and delighted by life.

In Conclusion

Maslow concludes this chapter of Toward A Psychology of Being, with the idea that in these 16 aspects of identity in peak-experience, we can resolve the dichotomous relationship between pride and humility by combining, fusing them into one superordinate unity. It is akin to the yan-ying principle found in the Buddhist philosophies of the far east which says that life is a dualistic yet cooperative entity where nothing can exist in isolation.

In closing Maslow suggests that the goal of identity, of self-actualisation and autonomy, seems to be simultaneously and an end-goal and a transitional goal. We seem to be both in the way of it and of transcending it. Again we see here the fractal or kaleidoscopic nature of the self in its expression. In this, there is both activity or excitement and rest and recuperation. Thus is the nature of existence.

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5. LacanOnline.com, O. (2019). What Does Lacan Say About… The Mirror Stage? – Part I. Retrieved from https://www.lacanonline.com/2010/09/what-does-lacan-say-about-the-mirror-stage-part-i/