Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs and Person-Centred Theory
Abraham Maslow’s Theory
American psychologist Abraham Maslow is best known for creating Maslow‟s
hierarchy of needs. In the late 1950s, humanistic psychology became increasingly
popular, with Maslow widely regarded as its founding father. Maslow‟s humanistic
psychology is based on the belief that people are born with the desire to achieve their
maximum potential or reach a point Maslow termed self-actualisation (Maslow,
1943). His hierarchy of human needs model suggests that human needs will only be
fulfilled one level at a time. According to Maslow‟s theory, when a human being
ascends the levels of the hierarchy having fulfilled the needs in the hierarchy, one may
eventually achieve self-actualisation.
Abraham Maslow created the original five level Hierarchy of Needs model, and for
many this remains entirely adequate for its purpose. The needs contained in the
original model were: biological and physiological needs, safety needs, belongingness
and love needs, esteem needs and self-actualization needs (Maslow, 1954). The seven
level 'hierarchy of needs' model discussed below is a later adaptation by others, based
on Maslow's work which includes the five needs in the original Maslow‟s model and
also includes cognitive and aesthetic needs. According to Maslow, needs are arranged
in terms of priority and range from the lower level to higher level needs. The theory is
based on the assumptions that: -
(a) When a person‟s lower needs are addressed at one level, the person advances
to the next higher level needs.
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(b) If satisfaction is not maintained, then it becomes a priority need once again.
(c) The needs depend on each other and they overlap and therefore a person
moves up from the lower to the higher level needs and also a person can move
up and down the hierarchy.
The needs in Maslow‟s hierarchy are discussed below starting from the most basic to
the highest level needs:
Physiological needs: These are biologically based and survival related needs.
They include food, shelter, clothing, heat and light. Once these needs are met, the
security needs arise.
Security Needs: Once physiological needs have been met, the individual will seek
security at home, tenure at work, protection against reduced living standards,
purchase of life, house and medical insurance and collective activities through
trade unions are examples of attempts to achieve security.
Love and Belongingness: These are psychological needs; when individuals have
taken care of themselves physically, they are ready to share themselves with
others, such as with family and friends. Most people desire affection; they want to
belong to a community, and to feel wanted. Hence, social groups, religious,
cultural, sporting, and recreational organisations are formed.
Esteem needs: These are needs related being recognised and competent such as
through status and level of success. Esteem needs include needs for recognition,
authority and influence over others. They also include desires to acquire
possessions and internal demands for self-respect.
Cognitive needs involve individuals intellectually stimulating themselves and
exploring more knowledge.
Aesthetic needs: These include the need for harmony, order and beauty.
Need for Self-actualisation: This is the highest level of need of in the Maslow
hierarchy and it concerns with being creative and hence searching for personal
fulfilment. Self-actualisation occurs when individuals reach a state of harmony
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and understanding because they are engaged in achieving their full potential but
only few people ever reach this final stage.
Figure 1: Maslow‟s Hierarchy of Needs
Secondary school students encounter different challenges which fall in the different
categories in Maslow‟s hierarchy of human needs. These problems include social,
psychological, educational, vocational and economic among other problems. These
needs range from most basic physiological needs to higher level psychological needs.
Moving up the hierarchy of needs depends on one‟s ability to satisfy a lower need.
The most basic needs according to Maslow are the physiological needs such as
hunger, thirst and pain avoidance among others. These needs are followed by the need
for safety and security, the need for affiliation, the need for esteem, cognitive
aesthetic and finally the need for self-actualisation.
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Unsatisfied human needs, therefore, may be sources of problems and when the needs
of the students are not met then the higher level needs like esteem, aesthetic, cognitive
and self-actualisation may never arise and this may hinder the development of
students to their full capacity. Furthermore, unmet needs and challenges make a
person incapacitated and hence this may make students feel helpless as they may have
low self-esteem. This may trigger their urge to seek help and this may lead to
development of help-seeking behaviour. Through help-seeking, students may feel that
they are able to move on and handle challenging situations, develop positive self-
esteem which may even make other higher level needs like, aesthetic, cognitive and
self-actualising arise. Students with help-seeking behaviour will ensure that they do
not let any challenges stand on their way to their success as they will seek help from
teacher counsellors when they encounter different challenges. They will also become
their own counsellors through counselling process and hence in some instances get
solutions to their problems. Therefore, help-seeking can play a great role in assisting
students overcome the challenges which stand on their way to self-actualisation and
hence the students get a chance of achieving all that they were supposed to get from
school and life in general.
2.10.2 Person Centred Theory
Carl Rogers was an influential psychologist and among the proponents of the
humanistic approach to psychology. The person-centred approach, was Carl
Rogers own unique approach to understanding personality and human relationships.
Rogers postulated that persons possess resources of self-knowledge and self-healing,
and that personality change and development are possible if a definable climate of
facilitative conditions is present (Rogers, 1957; Rogers, 1980a). The implication of
Rogers‟ position is that some persons and environments foster growth and
development in human beings, and some undermine and inhibit growth. The person‟s
inherent self-directive processes promote greater self-differentiation, more efficient
self-regulation, self-understanding, and acceptance (Ryan & Deci, 2000).
Rogers utilised the construct of the “actualising tendency” to describe the organism‟s
motivation to realise and enhance inherent potentials (Goldstein, 1963; Rogers, 1959;
Bozarth & Brodley, 1991). Rogers felt that this actualising tendency best described
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the unfolding of human potential he witnessed in his interviews with clients. This
construct postulates that all living organisms are continually actualising their
potentials, even under unfavourable circumstances. This actualising tendency is an
underlying basis of the person-centred approach (Rogers, 1980).
The actualising tendency makes the therapist hold the hypothesis that the client
possesses the capacity for self-determination and he or she is more likely to perceive
the client‟s ideas, feelings, and actions as aspects of growth instead of pathology. It
should be stated that the actualising tendency does not mean that Rogers believed that
people are “good,” simply that organisms realise their potentials limited only by
internal and external environmental constraints (Rogers, 1951, 1959, 1961; Brodley,
1998).
Rogers was always reluctant to tell people what they should do, when found with
problems but always had strong personal interest in helping people change and grow
their self-actualising tendencies. The researcher strongly supports this view that
student clients should be allowed to explore their problems through help seeking since
one of key counselling goals is to help people to counsel themselves. Rogers
maintains that people are trustworthy, resourceful and capable of self-understanding
and self-direction, able to make constructive changes and able to live effective and
productive lives.
Rogers (1961) maintains three therapist attributes that can create a growth promoting
climate in which individuals can move forward and become what they are capable of
becoming. These are: unconditional positive regard, congruence and empathy.
According to Rogers, the construct of congruence refers to a state of wholeness and
integration within the therapist. It is a dynamic inner state of being in which the
therapist is un-distracted by his or her own concerns, and is able to be fully present in
the relationship with the client (Bozarth, 1998; Brodley, 1998).
The second condition is described as the therapist‟s experience of prizing, non-
judgmental caring, or unconditional positive regard towards the client, the client‟s
beliefs, ideas, behaviours, or ways of being. Unconditional positive regard, as Rogers
(1961) pointed out, is a condition that exists upon a continuum; we are sometimes
conditional in our regard for the client, but strive to realize greater and greater
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acceptance in the relationship. Effective therapy, Rogers asserted, probably would not
occur to any significant degree if the therapist were to experience consistently
negative feelings or attitudes toward the client. The therapist‟s conscious value as it is
lived out with clients gradually leads to spontaneous feelings of warm caring and
acceptance of the client.
The third condition is the therapist‟s experience of empathic understanding of the
client‟s. A therapist should be accurate, empathic and understanding. One of the main
tasks of the therapist is to understand client‟s experiences and feelings sensitively and
accurately as they are revealed in the moment to moment interaction during the
therapy session. The therapist strives to sense clients‟ experiences especially in the
here and now. The aim is to encourage clients to get closer to recognise and resolve
incongruity that exists within them. Empathic understanding implies that the therapist
will sense the client‟s feelings as if they were his or her own without becoming lost in
those feelings.
Rogers (1961) further notes that through counselling a person can develop fully and
lead a good life. According to him optimal development results in a certain process
rather than static state. Rogers describes this as the good life, where the organism
continually aims to fulfil its full potential. He further gives the characteristics of a
fully functioning person which include: openness to experience which means they
move away from defensiveness, have an increasingly existential lifestyle that is living
each moment fully and also increasing organism‟s trust on its own judgement and in
choosing behaviour. Other characteristics include freedom of choice from restrictions
which result to incongruent behaviour, creativity, constructiveness, and hence having
a rich full life.
Rogers (1961) further notes that this process of the good life involves the stretching,
growing and becoming more and more of one's potentiality. Therefore, the essence of
help-seeking is to live a good life. This is because according to the Person-centred
theory, students who engage in seeking help will be in a position to get the solutions
to their problems and hence be able to self-actualise themselves. When these students
go through the process of seeking help from a counsellor having the core conditions
for counselling, they learn to trust themselves and their potentialities. They will even
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find it imperative to go for counselling on their own volition since they will have
learnt that the process not only offers solutions to their current obstacles but also arms
them with strategies applicable in future to handle challenges. Similarly, through self-
seeking there will be development of congruence within a person and this will further
lead to students becoming self-actualised and hence living more fulfilling life.
Therefore, through help-seeking, the students will be able to come up with solutions
to their problems and hence reach high levels of achievements in different aspects of
their lives.
2.11 Conceptual Framework
A conceptual framework is a hypothesised model that is used to show the relationship
between variables. In this study it was used to help the reader quickly see the
relationship between the independent variables which are students‟ attitudes towards
psychological help, gender, perceived problem severity and student locus of control
and the dependent variable which is the help-seeking behaviour. This conceptual
framework shows the flow of arrows indicating the relationship between the different
variables. The implication is that the independent variables impact on help-seeking
behaviour. The female students are expected to seek help more than the male ones
since social relationship are generally more important to females than males, students
with positive attitude towards psychological help seek counselling more than those
with negative one since a positive attitude towards an action makes a person view the
action in a favourable manner hence do things which go in line with the attitude while
the ones with negative attitudes tend to move away from the attitudinal action. The
internals seek counselling more than externals, this is because the internals believe
that when in problem, something can be done to overcome it while externals feel that
the forces causing challenges are beyond them. The researcher further tried to
establish how perceived problems severity influenced help-seeking since those
students who experienced more severe problems were expected to seek help more
because as severity increases the discomfort increases and this may make a person to
seek counselling in the process of trying to restore the body comfort. There are some
moderator variables (students‟ culture, school environment, students‟ needs, self-
esteem and self-actualising tendencies) which come between the independent and
dependent variables. This is because students in a school might have a culture of
seeking help hence score highly in help-seeking behaviour than those in another
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school that do not have help-seeking behaviour culture. Also the social environment
in a school especially the type of interactions between students and the teachers might
influence help seeking because when students interact freely with their teachers they
can easily share with them their problems. The students‟ needs, levels of self-esteem
and self-actualising tendencies may vary and hence have an impact on help-seeking.
Those students with higher levels of self-esteem, many needs and self-actualising
tendencies may have a higher help-seeking behaviours that those with fewer needs,
lower self-esteem and without self-actualising tendencies in the process of ensuring
that the challenges do not become hindrances to their success. Figure 1 shows factors
influencing help-seeking behaviour among public secondary school students in Nyeri
and Nairobi Counties.
Independent Variables Moderator Variables
Dependent
Variable
Factors Influencing
Student’s Help-
Seeking Behaviour
Attitude
Gender
Locus of control.
Perceived
problem severity
Help- Seeking Behaviour
Frequency of
seeking counselling.
Seeking counselling on
own volition.
Preferences in
counsellor‟s
characteristics
Figure 2: Factors Influencing Help-Seeking Behaviour among Public Secondary
School Students in Nyeri and Nairobi Counties
