We Need Transcendence and Service to Others to Be Fully Human

“A person can be fully human only if they are fulfilling their deepest inner nature.” —Abraham Maslow

“The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free. What I mean is to set people free from the bonds of their past, free from their own unconscious automatic reactions…so that they can be themselves.” —Rollo May

A friend told me: “The problem is human beings. We think we are special. The earth was here before us, and will be here after us. Human beings are a disease on the earth.”

The evil and destruction we humans are capable of is legendary and deeply disturbing. However, human beings are indeed special. Like all beings on earth, we have a special role. What is the meaningful role humans play on earth? There is a branch of psychology grappling with this question.

What does it really mean that we humans have the power to destroy all life on earth, and yet could choose not to use this power and instead use the power of serving, protecting, and nurturing life on earth with empathy, creativity, intelligence?

A Fictional Case of Unmet Needs Blocking Service to Others

We Often Find Ourselves with Unfulfilled Needs

Source: Vika Glitter/ Pixabay

The fifty-two year-old nursing manager works at a busy for-profit hospital serving patients living below the poverty line. She is over-worked, underpaid, and frequently condescended to by “higher-ups” at the corporation that owns the hospital. They don’t appreciate the art and science of nursing. A “leader” once said to her about her nurses, “Why do they whine so much? Aren’t they just plugging in equipment and checking vitals all day?”

In the past, she loved working with patients and with her nurses. She was impressed by their dedication, intelligence, and resourcefulness. Now she sees patients as manipulative and lazy, and nurses as entitled. She only connects with the most pleasant patients and nurses, who smile and defer to her authority.

She has become harsh and impatient. She’s lost the sense that she can be of meaningful and joyful service. She’s obsessed with doing a perfect job with the company’s unreasonable administrative task requirements, and works late most nights. The corporation is paranoid about liabilities and running afoul of insurance companies, and yet must keep profits high. They not only make nurses “care” for too many patients in a shift, but double and triple as administrative support and case managers. Her personal life is non-existent.

More perniciously, the “leaders” are unconsciously narcissistic and jealous of the medical staff. They know in their hearts that medical care is a psychologically rich and fascinating profession having to do with arguably the most important art of all: being in healing relationships with others. They sense that often much platonic love is generated between nurses and patients, when nursing is allowed the space and time to be done correctly. They want the glory, power, love, and creativity for themselves.

And so, unconsciously, they enact policies and procedures that crush the spirits of nurses. Then, they scratch their heads when half the nurses leave the company after a few years. Instead of introspecting on this, they use our main character as an example of a “good fit,” and try to find “more like her.”

This is an example of a human being whose needs are not being met by the system she is a part of, nor by herself. She has ceased to be of moral service to herself and others and is cut-off from reaching her full potential as a human being.

Let’s add in another factor: she was raised by a harsh father, a passive and depressed mother, and was taught that her feelings did not matter and that hard-work was the only respectable activity for human beings. She only received positive attention for doing things correctly, like producing good grades. The emphasis was on being a “Good girl,” not on being an “authentic and creative girl with needs.”

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The company gives her excellent performance reviews: the hospital would not survive without her, they say. They smile, while she looks down at the floor and feels confused—this is what she works hard for, and yet it does not fulfill her. Every year they give her a $100 Gift Card to a local restaurant known for carbs, fried food, and cheese. Disapproving of her own body, she mails the gift card to her petite niece in college. She says to her manager colleagues that the year she uses that gift card is the year she gives up all hope.

What Does it Mean to be Fully Human?

Integrated System of Human Needs

Source: Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, PhD

Humanistic psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, PhD, deeply explores this question in his book Transcend: the New Science of Self-Actualization. I assert that this book is a much more accurate representation than we typically see of the ideas of the father of humanistic psychology: Abraham Maslow.

Maslow, sometimes called "the pyramid guy," never drew a pyramid and actively disliked that representation of his ideas. Kaufman expands out from Maslow’s actual ideas, and offers new empirical support for many of the fundamental claims of HP.

Human beings have security needs for: safety, connection, self-esteem. Our lives are deficient and dangerous when too many security needs are ignored or blocked: the hull of the boat is gashed open, we take on water, we may even sink.

And yet, as every sailor knows, all boats take on some water in the hull. This does not necessarily mean the boat is sinking.

Whose self-esteem is “perfect” (or even “good”) for very long, really? Most of us experience self-confidence and self-doubt within each three-minute span. In my opinion, a major source of the disempowering narratives we tell ourselves about our perceived “low self-esteem” is our culture fetishizing a surface-level “confidence.”

Humans also have growth needs for: exploration, love, purpose, and transcendence. We need to hoist and open the sail, to move and explore. Maslow referred to these as “Being” needs. We are human beings and human becomings. Each moment is an opportunity to choose growth.

“Transcendence” refers to states of flow, peak experiences, paradoxical-yet-meaningful states of effortless effort, being in the zone, and the state of awe. Schneider (2019) refers to “awe” as: humility and wonder for the adventure of living.

Transcendence also has a moral component: we are most open to transcendent states when we do things that are meaningfully good for humanity and the earth while being good for ourselves at the same time.

In the example of the nurse manager, she does things that are good for the company’s financial and compliance goals and she fulfills her fate programmed by her childhood. And yet, she is painfully unmet in her needs for meaningful exploration, love, purpose, connection, and “the more of life.” She is cut off from transcendent growth states. Rollo May might say she is fulfilling her fate but not her destiny. She is achieving culturally sanctioned goals, but not her deepest wish. A wish sinks deep down into the feelings, the sensations, the spirit.

This is the first of a two-part series.