Findings of the WHO indicate that a quarter of Europeans suffer from clinical manifestations of anxiety and fear, 400 million have mental disorders, aging is accelerating, dementia is increasing, and drug addictions and depression are growing during the pandemic. Psychological stress appears as a frequent severe cause of the increased incidence of not only psychological disorders but also psychosomatic and somatic disorders.

From the lived experience of today’s person, positive emotions are disappearing, optimism is being replaced by pessimism, and the quality and maturity of interpersonal relationships are weakening; feelings of loneliness and social isolation are increasing. The healing power of emotional support and solidarity is weakening, and emotional tension is rising. Which personality will be able to successfully face stress load while also experiencing life as fully meaningful, joyful, and happy? In general, it can be said that a healthy personality has the prerequisites for this. The concept of a healthy personality was offered by several major figures—Gordon Allport, Carl Rogers, Erich Fromm, Abraham Maslow, Carl Jung, Viktor Frankl and Fritz Perls.

A. Maslow formulated the theory of self-actualizing personalities. He was interested in how much potential we have for full human development, which he studied in exceptionally healthy individuals. He sought information about the depth of our capacities through them. He began the work by observing two people he knew personally—gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer and anthropologist Ruth Benedict. He analyzed the lives of important living and deceased personalities. For the living, he used interviews, free associations, and projective techniques; for the deceased, analysis of biographical and autobiographical material. Among historical figures: Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Baruch Spinoza, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, J. W. von Goethe, Pablo Casals, John Keats, Adlai Stevenson, Robert Browning, Martin Buber.

He concluded that people are born with universal needs that motivate us toward growth, development, and updating our potential to become what we are capable of and want to be.

The need for self-actualization is the tendency of an individual to actualize their potentials, to become increasingly what they are able to become and want to become. By satisfying this need, the individual in their personal actions does what they fully self-realize in and feels satisfied with themselves. What the individual feels they “must” do, that is what they must be—what is true and genuine, arising from their core character nature. (A musician lives in music, a painter paints, a poet writes poetry.) The need, however, cannot be fulfilled until other lower needs are satisfied.

A necessary condition for achieving self-actualization is satisfying the hierarchy of needs, universal and innate needs, which are arranged in a hierarchy from the strongest to the weakest. Needs must be at least partly satisfied in this order before the need for self-actualization appears.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – lower level – higher level (the higher level may be satisfied after the lower level is satisfied).

„Physiological needs“

(food, water, air, sleep, sex)
„Safety needs“—to gain a sense of safety, physical comfort, protection, order, freedom from fear, anxiety, and chaos. After reaching a certain level of fulfillment, we are motivated by these needs: „Need for love and belonging“—The need for love is satisfied by creating an intimate relationship with another person or with people in general, in which it is important to both give and receive love. Belonging needs are fulfilled by feeling one is in unity with groups or ideas that reflect our values and characteristics. If they are not satisfied, a person painfully feels the absence of friends, a partner, or children. They feel hunger in relationships with people, in a place in a group or family, and experience feelings of loneliness, rejection, uprootedness, exclusion from society.
„Need for respect“—there are two types: respect derived from other people in the form of recognition and self-respect (self-evaluation) gained through a sense of confidence and certainty in oneself. They are built on knowing who we are and what we are. Satisfying the need for self-respect leads to feelings of self-confidence, worth, strength, competence, and adequacy, and to feelings of being useful and needed in the world. Preventing these needs produces feelings of inferiority, weakness, and helplessness.
The most stable and healthiest self-esteem is based more on well-deserved respect gained from other people than on external reputation, fame, flattery, and fawning.

With the fulfillment of the above-mentioned needs, readiness for self-actualization has not yet been achieved. The „cognitive needs“ (knowledge and understanding of the world around oneself) and „aesthetic needs“—the need for symmetry, order, and beauty—must still be satisfied.

An individual who achieves self-actualization shows clearer and more efficient perception of reality, does not deny truth, and is able to differentiate concreteness and abstractness. They have greater openness to experience, good integration, wholeness and unity of personality, spontaneity, the ability for self-expression, and full functioning. They have a realistic ego, a solid identity, autonomy, uniqueness, objectivity, independence, and they maintain creativity. They display a democratic character structure, the ability for love, concern for problem solving, accept themselves and others, and are free of prejudice. Creativity and growth occur without extraordinary and exhausting effort. In interpersonal communication, they do not show increased vulnerability and fear of criticism, and do not fear revising or correcting their life plans and perspectives. They accept others’ evaluations and opinions appropriately and confront them with their own. They lack ambivalence in feelings toward the environment. They feel responsibility for their own life, which they consider the result of free choice.

Environment

Societies and organizations can support or hinder personality growth. An educational environment that positively affects the development of healthy personalities gives priority to these human needs and structures the programs of social and organizational institutions accordingly. In the rapidly changing world, there is always a need to modify old institutions and devise new ones that are better able to support optimal human development and be more organizationally efficient.

The emphasis is on individual freedom, which should be balanced by an awareness of our mutual dependence and our responsibility to one another, to society, to culture, and to the future. New research tools are needed to uncover the rich possibilities in the depth of human being.
Although Freud focused on the unhealthy personality displaying disturbed behavior and the humanistic approach focuses on the healthy personality, psychoanalysis also brought important findings about the healthy personality.

Psychoanalysis pointed out the strength, differentiation, and flexibility of the functions of the ego. The ego is a powerful agency of the psyche with multiple functions (10), the maturity of which expresses a relatively healthy personality.

  • Functions of „reality testing“—the ability for objective perception, differentiation of one’s own fantasy from reality, perception of the outer and inner world, perception and differentiation of one’s own goals and impulses, desires, and the ability to express them
  • Ability to think and symbolize, anticipate consequences of one’s behavior
  • Ability to regress in the service of the ego (to release cognitive personality and form new configurations: to give in to reverie and fantasies, to give up usual defenses—as observed in a child—while retaining the ability to regulate regression)
  • Ability to regulate and control affects and impulses
  • Ability to tolerate conflicts (frustration tolerance) and solve them, the ability to learn from experiences
  • Ability to create and regulate interpersonal relationships—object relations—the ability to relate at all, to attach and maintain, and to end a relationship. Flexibility in pursuing and asserting one’s own goals, while also the ability to perceive and empathize with other people
  • Defensive functions—(primitive, neurotic, mature defenses)
  • Autonomous functions—perception, intentionality, language, productivity, motor development
  • Synthetic-integrative function—the ability to preserve the function of life and adaptation, to form gestalts, to ease what is incompatible
  • Mastery—competence—the degree of coherence between feelings of competence and demonstration of competence

Ľudovít Juráš, Katedra psychológie SZU Bratislava

The contribution was published in the conference proceedings ,,Health Psychology - Health and Wisdom. Health Psychology and Burnout Syndrome. Gender Differences in Health“. The conference took place in 2009. Editors: PhDr. Dušan Selko, CSc., MPH, Mgr. Róbert Ďurka, PhD. The volume was published with financial support from Národného ústavu srdcových a cievnych chorôb, a. s., Bratislava
Publisher: Národný ústav srdcových a cievnych chorôb, a. s., Bratislava published by MAURO Slovakia s.r.o., Bratislava 2010, ISBN 978-80-968092-6-4