Better News — Part 1

Part 1 — A Very Brief Introduction To Psychological Needs

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

What Is A Need

I was 17 when I discovered how desperately the human body needs sleep. I had just graduated high school and was spending time with a friend of mine who had also just graduated. We decided that a good way to celebrate our newfound freedom from child prison (aka, school) was to stay awake as long as possible. It seemed like a good idea at the time and I think we even made a bet about it, but I’m fuzzy on the details. In any case, we loaded up with sugary snacks and soda and proceeded to deny ourselves that basic biological need of sleep. The first night, I lost the bet. Didn’t even make it through one night. It must have been 3 in the morning and we were watching Independence Day. I remember watching the first air battle scene and the next thing I knew, my friend was snapping a picture of me sleeping. I woke up to the camera flash in my face and him laughing hysterically.

That felt good.

Not really.

But, the shame I felt in that moment isn’t the point of this particular story, though it is worthy of its own discussion. The point here is that my body knew what it needed and it demanded it. My “will” be damned, my body was going to sleep. Sleep was a need. There are a couple of different, yet related, definitions of the word “need.” MW defines it as “a lack of something requisite, desirable, or useful” and also “a physiological or psychological requirement for the well-being of an organism.” Given that if we don’t sleep, we will die, I would argue that sleep is a physiological requirement for human well-being. Like food. And like water. Biological needs seem to have a straightforward heuristic: “if I don’t have X, then will I die?” If the answer is yes, then, well, it’s a need. Simple. Understandable. Relatable. Obviously, it is more nuanced than this, but that is the general idea. But what about psychological needs?

The heuristic for psychological needs is not as straightforward. If you do not receive love from your parents, will you die? Maybe. Probably not. But, your well-being will be impacted. Mine certainly was. Realistically, though, that question brings its own question of what love looks like in that context. What if the parent is offering the love they understand, but the child perceives love differently? Which manifestation of love counts as the need? Which manifestation of love is good for human well-being? We have some idea of which manifestations of love move us toward well-being and which ones don’t; however, love itself is a rather vague term, so it might not even be useful to speak of love as a need at all. In that case, we would need to get much more specific about the needs underneath the idea of love that is being expressed and expected. You might see now how psychological needs are not as clear cut as physiological ones.

The truth is that psychologists debate about what qualifies as a need and the answer depends on what school of psychology they were trained in and adhere to. I am not a trained psychologist and am not claiming to have settled the debate. I do, however, think that a brief overview of psychological needs and our understanding over the last century would be useful. From there, I would like to argue that it is less important that we settle the debate than it is to show how a subset of needs put forth by one of these schools is a reasonable subset to begin with. I am not arguing that it is an all inclusive list, rather that it can serve as a basis for understanding how literalism acts as an antagonist to at least a subset of our basic psychological needs, without which, as we will see, we simply will not have the motivation to flourish.

There are entire textbooks written on the history and development of the science of psychology and I am not going to do that. I am likely to leave out some major schools of thought in the world of psychology and I’m certain that someone, somewhere, will be offended. I apologize in advance. But we have limited space (and I have limited time), so I have chosen to start with Freud and his idea of the unconscious mind. From Freud, we will then move on to Piaget and the idea of developmental psychology, and then Maslow and Rogers and Humanistic Psychology, and then Bowlby, Ainsworth and Attachment Theory, and ending with Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory, or more specifically Basic Needs Theory. My hope is that you will see how our understanding of psychological needs has progressed and built on previous understandings and led to the idea that there are essentially three main psychological needs that every human has: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. After this whirlwind tour, the remainder of the chapters are going to establish how literalism actively undermines these needs at every level of the human experience: the personal, the relational, and the societal.

Freud and The Unconscious

Freud lived, studied, and practiced medicine (and then psychoanalysis) in 19th century Vienna, until he fled in 1939 when the Nazis annexed Austria. He was trained in medicine, studied and became a lecturer in neuropathology, had some interesting thoughts on cocaine, and then met Anna O. Anna O, whose name was actually Bertha Pappenheim, was a patient of Freud’s partner Josef Breuer and is where Freud learned about the benefits of talk therapy — the idea that a person could see an improvement in their psyche by virtue of simply talking about their perceived problem. This was new. It was also the experience that led to Freud’s development of “free association” as a method of giving the psychologist a peek into their patient’s subconscious. The subconscious mind, in fact, was also a revolutionary idea of Freud’s.

Freud was the first person to suggest that we can have motives for behavior that exist outside of our conscious awareness. This is not to say Freud thought there were multiple consciousnesses inside each person or that there was any such thing as a collective or universal consciousness (see Carl Jung), but that the subconscious existed as a holding place for repressed ideas. The stuff that is too much for us to think about and deal with in our conscious life. Repression, he said, “was some force that prevented them from becoming conscious and compelled them to remain unconscious … pushed the pathogenetic experiences in question out of consciousness.” An example, perhaps, might be the anxiety a child feels from being raised to believe that every thought and desire was seen by an all knowing God and that that God would punish the child for any “impure” thought. You might guess that this anxiety would be too intense and pervasive to deal with in the child’s day to day life, so repression would do the work of sparing the child this anxiety and putting it below the surface of conscious awareness and into that reservoir of the unconscious mind. Where all the other fun stuff hides, like fear of death and wanting to have sex with our moms.

The analogy Freud supposedly used for the human mind was an iceberg, with the tip of the iceberg being our conscious mind and the bulk of the ice under the surface our unconscious mind. The analogy may not have been Freud’s, but a Freudian biographer, but in either case it is representative of one of his main contributions to Psychology: humans have causes for behavior that they may not even be aware of. Deep beneath the surface of conscious awareness lurks intense feelings, motives, and desires that compel our conscious selves to behave in a variety of counterproductive and maladaptive ways. You might be familiar with the term “ego defense mechanism.” This represents Fredu’s idea that our unconscious desires are so unbearable, either to ourselves or to our idea of those around us (hello, again, shame), that we retreat into patterns of behavior that hinder a full and satisfying life. Repression is an example of this. Another one might be something like intellectualization. Have you ever had a conversation with someone where you offered them new information that was contradictory to some core belief that they held? Did they try explaining everything they felt or thought in highly rational and academic terms, rather than just sit with discomfort? If you have, then according to Freud, you triggered something in their subconscious and now they’re unknowingly defending themselves using a mechanism that allows that deep fear or anxiety or desire to remain beneath the surface, unconfronted. Sounds fun, right?

In Freud’s view the main cause of mental suffering is, in fact, defense mechanisms. Mostly repression, but others too. His idea was that if he could bring awareness to ego defense mechanisms, which were preconscious (as opposed to unconscious), then he could help this individual dismantle that mechanism and deal with the deeper anxiety or fear that lurked below. To put it a different way, to live a full and satisfying life, humans need to identify and feel their feelings and sometimes they don’t know what those feelings are; therefore, we need the help of others to uncover them. When we subconsciously repress our feelings, we end up hurting ourselves in the long run. If we take the term “need” to mean something that is required for our well-being, then well, Freud might argue we need to feel the real thing.

It’s been a century since Freud’s revolutionary work and psychology has come a long way and many of Freud’s ideas have been emphatically rejected by the psychological community. This idea of actually feeling our feelings, however, is still essential in psychology today. Especially when it comes to treating a history of trauma, which I argue is what happens when our basic needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are actively frustrated or outright rejected. In his book, The Body Keeps The Score, Dr Bessel van der Kolk argues that “until we know what we know and feel what we feel, we cannot heal.” This idea is critical to the rest of this book and you’ll see this theme repeat itself over and over: your feelings are valid and it’s good to feel them

Piaget and Developmental Psychology

Piaget was a Swiss psychologist in the early 20th century. He was originally interested in biology, but focused his efforts in psychology and psychoanalysis while at the University of Neuchâtel. After graduation, he moved from Switzerland to Paris and worked alongside Alfred Binet (of Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales fame). It was there that Piaget noticed differences in how children processed questions as opposed to adults. Through those observations, other experiments, and observations of his own children and family, he developed what would become a universal theory of childhood cognitive development.

Piaget introduced the idea that children think differently than adults — a concept that seems obvious today, but was revolutionary at the time. Imagine living in a world where the common understanding of children was that the way they processed information was just like adults, they simply had less experience. In this world, explaining abstract concepts like an all-knowing divine being that cannot be seen with any of our senses would be perfectly reasonable. After all, an adult mind can think abstractly, why wouldn’t a child’s be able to? Enter Piaget.

Piaget’s theory of childhood cognitive development is typically broken into four stages, with the first stage having its own sub-stages. First, There is the sensorimotor stage, ages birth to 2 years old, which is where children do a ton of learning very quickly. It is in this stage that children go from having no concept of distinctness to an understanding of an environment that says, “there exists things that are not me.” This is also where the ideas of object permanence and cause-and-effect are learned. Second, is the preoperational stage, ages 2–7, where language is formed and the representation of ideas in the form of symbols like pictures and words takes place. Third, is the concrete operational stage, ages 7–11, where children learn to be more logical and organized in their thoughts, start to develop a sense of empathy, but are still quite rigid in their thoughts. The fourth stage is the formal operational stage, ages 11 and up, where children increase their logical view of the world, develop abstract thought, and allow for the possibility of multiple solutions and perspectives to exist at the same time.

The important thing to note here is that Piaget was not saying that a child’s cognitive development was simply additive. In other words, the development was not about the content of the child’s experience, but about the process. This was his revolutionary idea. Before Piaget, the common idea of children was that the process they went about in discovering information was the same as an adult. All they were missing was content. Piaget said, “no, actually, children just think differently.”

Similar to Freud, Piaget’s ideas of childhood development are seen as antiquated in psychology today. The concept of a “stage” itself is not seen as something representative of the complex developmental processes we witness in humans. Nevertheless, Piaget was foundational in this general idea that humans don’t all process their experiences in the same way. Different humans have different ways to process the world and go through different evolutions of those processes at different times and in different ways. Sometimes, especially when influenced heavily by a rigid familial and social environment, people can become “stuck” in certain ways of thinking or processing. For example, someone who struggles with psychological rigidity might have difficulty seeing how every individual has their own unique set of experiences that have led them to the belief system they now have and those beliefs might be different, even exclusive. Two opposed views can exist in the same world. This is difficult information to process if one is stuck in a more “rigid” stage of development.

This doesn’t mean a rigid individual is “bad” or “wrong.” But since being stuck like that is frustrating the well-being of that individual, I argue that there is a psychological need to be flexible in our understanding of others (ahem, relatedness). Piaget’s stages of development may not be accurate today, but they demonstrate an advancement in the field of psychology when it comes to understanding the needs of the individual. Each person is unique and allowed (expected) to have their own experiences, feelings, and development.

Maslow, Rogers, and Humanism

Of course, we can’t talk about psychological needs without talking about Abraham Maslow. Born and raised in New York, Maslow attended, dropped out, attended again, and then graduated from City College of New York before studying psychology at the University of Wisconsin. He continued to research and teach psychology for the remainder of his life and was influenced by both behaviorists like Skinner and Watson and psychoanalysts like Freud and Adler. Both of these schools of psychology, according to Maslow, emphasized the more abnormal aspects of human behavior and weren’t necessarily relatable to the everyday person. Maslow suggested a more positive approach where the assets of healthy individuals are studied. This research, as well as observations from his own life, led to the introduction of the now-famous “hierarchy of needs.” This hierarchy was first introduced by Maslow in 1943 and was refined throughout the rest of his life. The hierarchy is best described in visual form and the classic description can be found in diagram 1.

Diagram 1

Maslow’s hierarchy suggests that healthy individuals are motivated by basic needs like food and water first and only after satisfying those needs can move on to the higher needs of safety, love, esteem, and finally culminating in self-actualization. There is some debate as to whether Maslow proposed a linear progression through these needs or if they were more fluid. There is also the issue of the lack of empirical evidence for this hierarchy and the lack of inclusion of different perspectives on individualism and community across cultures. Despite the lack of empirical evidence it is still widely used in different areas including the education system and corporate life, especially in the United States.

If we take a step back here, what Maslow is arguing for is the idea that humans have a priority of needs. And this makes intuitive sense to us. We cannot focus on our employment or our schoolwork if we are starving to death, for example. So, if we take with a grain of salt the fact that Maslow’s hierarchy is not actually empirically validated and not try to be too rigid about the specifics of the framework, we can see how this model of psychological needs would be a progression from Piaget. Humans not only have different needs at different times, but there is a priority of needs. This priority might be fluid and might not be precisely defined, but there is a priority nonetheless. Additionally, what makes Maslow’s hierarchy unique is his idea to focus on “healthy” individuals. This focus gave birth to what’s known as Humanistic Psychology.

Humanistic Psychology espouses that all individuals are inherently good and capable of achieving their goals (aka, autonomy and competence). This school of psychology has been called the “third force” in psychology, after psychoanalysis (see Freud and Jung) and behaviorism (see Skinner and Watson). Its main focus is helping individuals see themselves as their own agents of change with the inherent strength and ability to achieve their goals. Arguably, the most well known of this school’s adherents would be Carl Rogers.

Rogers grew up in suburban Chicago in the early 1900’s. From all accounts, Rogers was an intelligent and disciplined person, with varied interests like agriculture, history, and religion. He actually attended seminary, but eventually left the faith altogether and instead attended Columbia where he earned his PhD in clinical psychology. During his PhD, Rogers began work at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children as its director. It was there that he learned of the idea of relationship therapy from associates of Otto Rank, another psychoanalyst at the time. Rogers continued his career as a professor and clinician and developed his theory of client-centered therapy. The central idea behind client-centered therapy was that if an individual’s ultimate goal is to achieve self-actualization (see Maslow), then that individual must have two things: the ability to be their true selves and be truly accepted by others (ahem, autonomy and relatedness).

Roger’s theory, as described in 1951 by Rogers himself in his book Client-Centered Therapy, consisted of 19 propositions. It is too much to cover in this space, but the general progression of the propositions is as follows:

• We all live in an ever changing world full of different experiences, the perception of which becomes our reality.
• Part of this perception is what we would call the “self” and our journey in this life is about enhancing the experiences of the self with the end goal of self-actualization.
• What we do and what we feel are a result of how we think we can either achieve self-actualization, or how we can avoid what we consider a threat to our self-actualization.
• Maladjustment occurs when we have experiences that are incongruent with our existing perception, therefore a threat to the self, and there is no safe space to examine these experiences.
• Self-actualization occurs when we can examine and integrate these incongruent experiences, which can only occur in circumstances where we feel safe and that we will be accepted by others exactly as we are.

Probably the most well known of Roger’s propositions is related to the last bullet point and is known as “unconditional positive regard,” which argues for accepting every individual “without negative judgment of…[a person’s] basic worth.” This is the fundamental idea in humanism and a central point of this book: everyone has value exactly as they are and they have the innate ability to work through maladjustment and become their true selves.

Bowlby, Ainsworth, and Attachment

John Bowlby was a British psychiatrist in the early to mid 20th century, who experienced a tremendous lack of parental involvement and significant losses in childhood. He would often only see his mother for an hour or so a day and was largely raised by his nanny. When his nanny left the family at age 4 Bowlby would describe that experience as just as tragic as the loss of a mother. Bowlby attended boarding schools throughout childhood (this was typical of the time) and eventually went on to study medicine, following in the footsteps of his father. After attending Trinity College, Cambridge, and achieving his medical degree from University College Hospital he went on to study psychoanalysis and was certified in 1936. During World War II Bowlby worked at the London Child Guidance clinic in Canonbury and worked with children, which is where he would later develop his theory of attachment. While at Canonbury, Bowlby studied a group of children who had a history of stealing and compared them to those who were also being treated for various reasons, but lacked the same history of stealing. He found there was a correlation between those with the history of stealing and having a significant period of separation from their primary caregiver before the age of 5. This research would be furthered after the war where Bowlby worked as the director of the Tavistock Clinic. This is where Bowlby would posit that childhood attachment to primary caregivers was an evolutionary adaptive behavior and was not simply learned as the behaviorists would suggest. It is also at the Tavistock clinic where Bowlby’s research would be further refined by Mary Ainsworth.

Mary Salter was born in 1913 and the child of two college educated parents, a rare thing at the time. She showed an early interest and aptitude in learning and began to read at age 3. At age 15, Mary decided to go into the field of psychology and began coursework at the University of Toronto the next year. She continued her studies there and earned her bachelor’s, master’s, and her PhD in 1939. Her dissertation focused on the idea that individuals that lack security from their caregivers as children are hindered in their ability to move towards goals from a place of security within themselves. After a stint serving in the Army during World War II, Mary returned to Toronto where she taught psychology before marrying Leonard Ainsworth, who moved to London to pursue his own PhD at University College London. It was here that Mary met Bowlby and furthered his research in attachment theory.

Mary’s formulation of attachment theory essentially boiled down to three specific attachment styles (eventually a fourth would be added by Mary Main, a colleague of Ainsworth’s).

1. Secure attachment, where a child feels safe and free to explore the world around their mother (Mary’s research focused on the mother as caregiver) and will return when they feel insecure.
2. Anxious/Resistant insecure attachment, where a child is clingy or resentful when their mother would leave the child alone and were difficult to comfort.
3. Anxious/Avoidant insecure attachment, where a child ignores their mother when the mother leaves or returns and has a limited range of emotions during separation.
4. Disorganized/Disoriented insecure attachment, where the child showed a combination of the other insecure attachment styles, sometimes clinging and sometimes avoiding and oftentimes showing confusion upon the mother’s return.

Attachment theory is one of the main theories underpinning contemporary understanding of childhood social development and continues to be referred to today, though not without criticism. As is the case in the other theories mentioned previously, the criticism largely revolves around the limitations of categorizing attachment styles into the four buckets proposed, as well as a lack of acknowledgment of the complexity of human social relationships (i.e., there is no one-size-fits-all explanation of the way humans interact with one another). Even so, attachment theory has been hugely influential in contemporary psychotherapy and is often a main focus for clinicians and clients. Though not directly, there is a progression from Maslow and Rogers to Bowlby and Ainsworth in the sense that humanistic psychology emphasizes the universal worth and competence of the individual, but that worth and competence needs to be accepted by others, which necessarily requires a secure attachment.

Not everyone has the privilege of a secure attachment as children. In fact, Ainsworth found that about 30% of children showed an attachment style other than secure. If we take the humanistic suggestion of worth and competence at face value, then the hope for those 30% is that they can earn a secure attachment style, through working through the difficulties of their current insecure attachment. The point here is one that we’ll explore further in the remaining chapters. Namely, I need secure and supportive relationships in my life, especially as a child, and if I don’t have those, I am hindered in my journey to live a flourishing life.

Self-Determination Theory and Basic Needs Theory

Self-determination theory (SDT) is a relatively recent theory in psychology that can trace its influences to humanistic psychology (see Maslow and Rogers) and suggests that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are essential in an individual’s journey towards self-actualization. SDT acknowledges the importance of external factors (like rewards and punishments) in the motivation of individuals, but argues that intrinsic motivation (the “why”) is more important in achieving this goal. SDT came out of the research of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan in the 1970s. Edward Deci is a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and Richard Ryan is a professor at the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, as well as a research professor at Rochester. Together, they collaborated on the book Self-Determination and Intrinsic Motivation in Human Behavior, which was the introduction of SDT as a scientific psychological theory. Their research was a result of other studies on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (see Maslow) and has been a significant focus of study since the 2000s. SDT is actually an umbrella theory of human motivation, consisting of a number of mini-theories that are more specific in terms of the sources of intrinsic motivation. The theory most relevant in our tour is what is known as Basic Needs Theory (BNT).

BNT suggests that in order for individuals to truly flourish, there are three basic needs that must be met. You’ve seen them already, autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

• Autonomy is defined as a “desire to be a causal agent of one’s own life and act in harmony with one’s integrated self.” The research done on autonomy suggests that offering external rewards for fundamentally internally motivated behavior actually undermines the individual’s autonomy and thus their motivation. People want to feel like they are their own agent of change. For example, if there is a project at work that an individual feels will really demonstrate their competence and that project has a strict deadline, the individual’s motivation will suffer because it will undermine their desire to show off their competence and instead focus them on meeting the deadline.
• Competence is defined as “seek[ing] to control the outcome and experience mastery.” If you have ever finished a project, whether at work or in a personal hobby, and received positive feedback like, “awesome job!” then you have received an external validation of the internal motivation of competence. Individuals want to be good at something. When we receive positive feedback like this, it fulfills our need for competence. Negative feedback, on the other hand, has the opposite effect and actually undermines the internal motivation to complete or continue the task. When we don’t feel competent at something, we no longer want to do that thing, which makes intuitive sense to us.
• Relatedness is defined as the “will to interact with, be connected to, and experience caring for others.” The research here, particularly with adolescents, suggests that affirming relationships leads individuals on a positive path towards self-actualization, whereas negative relationships undermine this journey. This also makes sense to us on an intuitive level when we think about the relationships we have had in our lives. If we have surrounded ourselves with supportive and positive relationships, we find that we have more motivation to be our best selves. And the opposite is obviously true. If our lives are surrounded by relationships that wear on us or are fundamentally toxic, we have no motivation to be our best selves.

SDT, and BNT specifically, focus on the idea that individuals have innate psychological needs that serve as the basis for motivation and also that individuals have both the desire and ability to grow and move closer towards self-actualization. Similar to Maslow, BNT suggests that we have needs that are foundational and that must be met in order for us to live well. If these are not met or are actively frustrated, then our journey towards living a fulfilling life will be undermined. This is the central theme of this book: I need to feel autonomous, competent, and have supportive relationships in my life in order to feel fully myself and live a life I enjoy.

Summary

We can see now how the development of basic human needs has meandered and built on top of previous understanding (and will continue to do so) to land us where we are today. Our needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are fundamental and must be met if we are to have the motivation to self-actualize. This idea stems from humanistic psychology, with an emphasis on relationships in attachment theory. Humanistic psychology argues for the priority of some needs over others as well as the ability of the individual to meet these needs. This in turn resulted from the idea that we have different needs throughout our life as we move from childhood to adulthood. All of which is founded in the idea that we have needs at all and that it is important to feel them. When these needs are frustrated, the only way to move through that frustration is to “know what we know and feel what we feel.”

With this understanding in mind, we can take a look at how literalism actively undermines this entire process. Most of the remaining chapters will be spent demonstrating how literalism works to remove the individual’s autonomy, competence, and relatedness. This undermining is not constrained to the individual and their relationships, however. We will also see how these needs are frustrated in society as a whole. The intention is to lay bare how literalism is actually hindering human progress on a species-wide level and until we decide that we’ve had enough, we will never be able to move past our current frustrations.

Before moving on to this, it is important to first take a quick tour of some underlying ideology of evangelicalism generally, and literalism specifically. My experience has been through this lens and thus the only lens I can speak to. There are certainly other manifestations of the type of psychological needs denial I am referring to (even secular ones) and I believe the lessons learned from my experience can be applied to those other manifestations as well. That being said, it is usually best to stay within the scope of our knowledge when writing a book. The next chapter will cover the fundamental tenet of American evangelicalism, and taken to the extreme in literalism, which will serve as a launchpad for the rest of the book: a central focus on the Bible.

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