Grant Schiller's List: Personality theories

Maslow's Holistic Dynamic Needs Hierarchy

P = Physiological
S = Safety
L = Belongingness and Love
E = Esteem
SA = Self-Actualization
= deficiency needs
= growth needs

functionally absent refers either to a need that has been sufficiently gratified such that behaviour and resources are no longer primarily organized towards its fulfilment, or to needs which have not emerged yet, due to prepotent lower needs being insufficiently gratified. Note that they are only functionally absent in that sense. Self-actualized folk still need to eat and drink, and children are capable of "growth-through-delight".

A person's level of gratification within this hierarchically integrated framework would be represented by a horizontal line across all needs, and growth would be represented by that horizontal line moving upwards through all needs.
NOTE: THE SCHEME MASLOW PROPOSES MIGHT BE REGARDED BY STATISTICIANS AS AN ORDINAL SCALE AND IS NOT READILY AMENABLE TO QUANTIFICATION. It's value is primarily heuristic, that is, this is the general idea, the overall shape. Maslow's theory is weak on exact points of transition. You can (and he does) for illustrative purposes speak of someone being 85% satisfied in physiological needs, for instance, but so far as I know there isn't a test which provides a quantified measure of gratification across needs.

Physiological Needs - Food, water, oxygen, etc. Anything the physical organism needs to survive. Very fundamental life or death needs. Perhaps because Maslow was well fed, he didn't spend a lot of time on these. "...it seems impossible as well as useless to make any list of fundamental physiological needs, for they can come to almost any number one might wish, depending on the degree of specificity of description." (MP 16).

Safety Needs - "If the physiological needs are relatively well gratified, there then emerges a new set of needs, which we may categorize roughly as the safety needs, (security; stability; dependency; protection; freedom from fear, anxiety, and chaos; need for struc