Maddy Spell's Archive

Maslow felt that psychology had spent too much time focusing on the sick and psychologically disturbed and decided to start studying individuals he believed to be self-actualizing. A self actualizing individual was explained by Maslow as being outstanding humans. They are people who have a number of extremely desirable characteristics, however, this does not leave them without fault. Even people who are strong, give into the lesser of human characteristics. Maslow grouped people into the self-actualizing catagory if he felt they were above the average man.
I want to take this idea Maslow had of ideal characteristics and apply it to what I think God had in mind when he began creating humans. I know Maslow only thinks the above average individual can achieve self-actualization, but what if we are all capable of being above average? I want to focus on a couple of the characteristics Maslow thinks are particularly important.
I like the idea of being independent of environment and culture. I think it can go along with God calling us to be in the world but not of the world. I also like the idea of perceiving reality accurately and fully. God tells us that we can live life to the fullest because he sent his son for us. If we were to perceive that reality accurately and fully, our lives would be so much more meaningful just from that.
What if we look back at what God created us for and try to become self-actualizing Christians?

Carl Jung believed in personal unconscious. The personal unconscious consists of experiences that had either been repressed or simply forgotten. It it the information from one’s life that for one reason or another has been forgotten. Some of this information is easy to retrieve and some of it is not. I think the idea of the unconscious can go into the category of restoration. The ability to forget things can be and usually is frustrating. However, repressing memories into the unconscious can be a good thing. The concept of restoration is bringing the world back to a more ideal way of life. This is the same way the personal unconscious works. One’s mind has the ability to remove the things that it does not like or that it finds not pleasant. When thinking about creation/fall/redemption/restoration there is an understanding of a continuous working progress. That is how our mind is. It is continuously changing and shaping. The conscious mind goes through all of the stages, and I think that the unconscious fits into the restoration part of the mind. In restoring your mind and world to a point of pleasure your mind places things into your personal unconscious so it can begin to restore your world into what your mind thinks it should be. Jung had ideas of reaching meaning in you life, and I think this comes with having a personal unconscious.

I believe that Rousseau’s ideas can be used in any four of the categories but I am going to focus on the fall. Rousseau had a view on human nature, that all people are born basically good. He insisted that people are born good and can be made bad by society. He thought if he could find someone not contaminated by society, he would be a person driven by feelings but would not be selfish. If humans were able to develop free from society they would be happy, fulfilled, free, and socially minded. They would then do things that were best for themselves and others because they were simply free to do so.

I think this fits in with the Fall because the Fall is where bad and evil comes from. God had planned on a perfectly peaceful world, like what Rousseau was describing, but the fall is what took man away from that. People are born good and innocent to evil, until they are exposed to it. This exposure is a burden of the Fall of man.

This all implies that people do not become good or bad. We are all born good, as good as we will be, and depending on how we handle our experiences and society we may become bad.

David Hume believed that all sciences have a relation to human nature. He saw that all important matters reflect human nature, so understanding that nature is essential. He wanted to develop the study of moral philosophy, which is what we call social sciences today. The science of man became an experimental science through Hume’s movement. The terms experience and experiment took on specific definitions through Hume. Experience meant mental experience and experiment meant careful observation of how experiences are related to one another. Human nature was what Hume was specifically interested in; he wanted to create a science of human nature. Through all his studying and research Hume developed an understanding of impressions, ideas, and imagination. Hume was a huge influence in what is now psychology.
I think this can very closely relate to the fall or new creation, but I am going to talk about the fall. God created a perfect world for us to live in; it was man who messes that up. Human nature and the human mind is something extremely complex, which is why it is so hard to study. The mind is not something you can hold in your hand and observe. Hume placed a lot of his focus on morality of man, which I think comes from the fall. After the fall there was no longer blissful ignorance. All of the sudden there was knowledge of what was good and what was bad, creating an ever present issue in the mind of man. I think what Hume did for the study of the mind of man is extremely helpful in understanding the moral battles that are faced by man every day.  

I think that Heraclitus’ concept of “it is impossible to step in the same river twice” can be applied to all of the categories, but I want to talk about creation. If it is impossible to step in the same river twice, that could mean that everything is in a constant state of change; nothing stays exactly as it was before. Creation could be viewed with this same concept. Everything is continually a part of creation since things are always changing. The universe in which we find ourselves is in a constant state of creation. It came from a God who is never finished working on the world he is creating. If you think of Heraclitus’ dictum, it could be hard to say something has been created rather than is being created.