Then, in 1959, I got the shock of my life – when this express
self but not at the expense
of others began to change. This express self but not at the expense of
others is very much like Maslow’s self-actualizing man and
Rogers
’ fully functioning person
and those descriptions. Well . . . low and behold this ”express
self” person began to deny that this
conception was a healthy human being.
I had people show up who said that they used-to believe that
this (express self but
with concern for others/not at the expense of others) was a healthy
human being . . . but now they did not believe this to be so. In other
words, I had a new conception, a new description of healthy human
behavior, a new conception appeared right in the middle of my
research.
And if you think ahead a little bit, this really created a
tremendous problem because -
the fully functioning person as
Rogers
’ states it – this is
the healthy person – and as Maslow describes the
self-actualizing person – this is the healthy person. In
other words – Rogers and Maslow, in essence, along that line,
conceived of this healthy human being, as healthy human behavior, as
the end, an ultimately achievable state.
{Dr.
Graves, following Maslow’s lead of studying healthy human beings,
had assumed
that Maslow was correct when he developed the hierarchy of needs
(in a closed pyramid form) with a final end state being the
self-actualized human being.
Now, Maslow’s conception of the self-actualized human being and
even
Rogers
’ conception of the fully
functioning human being as the final end state, the
“healthiest of human beings”, were called into question.}
So what are you going to do when your data says that this state
which is the healthiest
human being is not an end state (an ultimately achievable end state)
but is a state that some people begin to cast aside as the healthy
human being? This opened up the idea that psychological health
is a process and not a state of behavior and that there isn’t
any such thing as psychological health.
This appears to be an illusion and we have to begin to think along
that line if we are going to understand human behavior.
Now, at this time (early 1960’s), as things changed in the
colleges and human beings who were previously deprived of the
opportunity to enter into college began to appear
in my classes, I started to get a new conception, another one, one
that I have not previously gotten. That conception was: Express
self impulsively at any cost. One of my students who held this
conception started off with; “Doc, the world is a Goddamned jungle
and any healthy man knows it. It’s survival of the fittest and
he’s a damned fool if he doesn’t know it.” This is the way this
conception started out.
This conception started to appear enough for it to be sorted
out by my later judges as a category. We check through the previous
years (remember: only 60% of the original conceptions
fell into two sub-categories in the beginning) and in the remaining
40% of the conceptions that were originally unclassified – we found
scattered examples of this express
self impulsively at any cost
conception . . . so this became a new category in the classification
and I went on to study this new conception.
When this conception changed . . . low and behold . . . it was
the category that changed into
the deny self for reward later.
- - - the express self impulsively at any cost
–
when it changed centrally became - - -
- - - the deny/sacrifice self now for reward later.