NATURE OF NEEDS

A human need is a state of felt deprivation of some basic satisfaction. (food, clothing, shelter, safety, belonging, esteem etc.)

Abraham Maslow noticed that some needs take precedence over others. For example, if you are hungry and thirsty, you will tend to try to take care of the thirst first. After all, you can do without food for weeks, but you can only do without water for a couple of days! Thirst is a “stronger” need than hunger. Likewise, if you are very thirsty, but someone has put a choke hold on you and you can’t breathe, which is more important? The need to breathe, of course. On the other hand, sex is less powerful than any of these. Let’s face it, you won’t die if you don’t get it!
Maslow took this idea and created his now famous hierarchy of needs. Beyond the details of air, water, food, and sex, he laid out five broader layers:

1) Physiological needs. These include the needs we have for oxygen, water, protein, salt, sugar, calcium, and other minerals and vitamins. They also include the need to maintain a pH balance (getting too acidic or base will kill you) and temperature. Also, there’s the needs to be active, to rest, to sleep, to get rid of wastes (CO2, sweat, urine, and feces), to avoid pain, and to have sex.

2) Safety and security needs. When the physiological needs are largely taken care of, this second layer of needs comes into play. You will become increasingly interested in finding safe circumstances, stability, and protection. You might develop a need for structure, for order, some limits. Looking at it negatively, you become concerned, not with needs like hunger and thirst, but with your fears and anxieties. In the ordinary adult, this set of needs manifest themselves in the form of our urges to have a home in a safe neighborhood, a little job security and a good retirement plan and a bit of insurance, and so on.

3) Love and belonging needs. When physiological needs and safety needs are, by and large, taken care of, a third layer starts to show up. You begin to feel the need for friends, a sweetheart, children; affectionate relationships in general, even a sense of community. Looked at negatively, you become increasing susceptible to loneliness and social anxieties.
In our day-to-day life, we exhibit these needs in our desires to marry, have a family, be a part of a community, a member of a church, a brother in the fraternity, a part of a gang or a bowling club. It is also a part of what we look for in a career.

4) Esteem needs. Next, we begin to look for a little self-esteem. Maslow noted two versions of esteem needs, a lower one and a higher one. The lower one is the need for the respect of others, the need for status, fame, glory, recognition, attention, reputation, appreciation, dignity, even dominance. The higher form involves the need for self-respect, including such feelings as confidence, competence, achievement, mastery, independence, and freedom. Note that this is the “higher” form because, unlike the respect of others, once you have self-respect, it’s a lot harder to lose! The negative version of these needs is low self-esteem and inferiority complexes. Maslow felt that these were at the roots of many, if not most, of psychological problems. In many countries, most people have what they need in regard to their physiological and safety needs. Almost everyone, more often than not, has quite a bit of love and belonging, too. It’s a little respect that often seems so very hard to get!
All of the preceding four levels he calls deficit needs, or D-needs. If you don’t have enough of something -- i.e. you have a deficit -- you feel the need. But if you get all you need, you feel nothing at all! In other words, they cease to be motivating. As the old blues song goes, “you don’t miss your water till your well runs dry!”

Maslow also talks about these levels in terms of homeostasis. Homeostasis is the principle by which a furnace thermostat operates: When it gets too cold, it switches the heat on; when it gets too hot, it switches the heat off. In the same way, our body, when it lacks a certain substance, develops a hunger for it; when it gets enough of it, then the hunger stops. Maslow simply extends the homeostatic principle to needs, such as safety, belonging, and esteem that we don’t ordinarily think of in these terms. Under stressful conditions, or when survival is threatened, we can “regress” to a lower need level.

These things can occur on a society-wide basis as well: When society suddenly flounders, people start clamoring for a strong leader to take over and make things right. When the bombs start falling, they look for safety. When the food stops coming into the stores, their needs become even more basic. If one has significant problems along one’s development -- a period of extreme
insecurity or hunger as a child, or the loss of a family member through death or divorce, or significant neglect or abuse -- one may “fixate” on that set of needs for the rest of one’s life.