"Self-actualization means giving up this defense mechanism and learning or being
taught to resacralize." - Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
In this essay we are going to talk about two crucial terms for the concept of self-actualization: resaralization and desacralization.
Don’t worry if you’ve never heard about them. To set the tone for this essay, it’s worth sharing what Abraham Maslow says about these two terms in one of the footnotes of The Farther Reaches of Human Nature.
"I have had to make up these words because the English language is rotten for good people. It has no decent vocabulary for the virtues. Even the nice words get all smeared up—"love," for instance."
But let’s take a few steps back and address self-actualization in general before we move on to the missing link in this process that (hopefully) all of us want to engage in.
According to Abraham Maslow, all of us have an impulse to improve ourselves, an impulse towards actualizing our potentials, an impulse towards self-actualization, or, my favorite term that Maslow used, "full humanness."
If everyone has this impulse, and Maslow believed that truly everyone does, then the question is: what is holding us up? Why do so few of us even attempt to satisfy this impulse for self-actualization?
Maslow dedicated his career to studying what it is that stops us from self-actualizing, as well as studying self-actualizing people, in order to answer what are the things that could help us on this journey of reaching full humanness.
Among different things, he identified something he had to, as mentioned above, make up a name for.
Desacralizing is a defense mechanism against self-actualization. In describing it, Maslow might sound like a grumpy old man since he often talks about "these youngsters" as the generation who engages in desacralizing. However, he was far from grumpy or being too hard on the youth. In fact, he put most of the blame on the older generations, who have let down the younger ones by not providing them with the right example. But what does desacralizing mean?
It means refusing to recognize the higher human nature. It means being cynical about the potential for growth in yourself as well as others. Desacralizing means refusing to see your life, as well as life as a whole, as something miraculous.
"The youngsters have learned to reduce the person to the concrete object and to refuse to see what he might be or to refuse to se him in his symbolic values or to refuse to se him or her eternally."
Therefore, a necessary step toward self-actualization is dropping this defense mechanism of desacralization and learning to resacralize.
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