Maslow discovered several other characteristics common to psychologically
healthy people. It may surprise you to find that these people have relatively
few friends. However, the friendships they do have are deep and rewarding.
Self-actualized people also have a “philosophical, unhostile ”sense of humor.
They poke fun at the human condition and at themselves but rarely target
a particular person or group with their humor. These individuals also have a
strong need for solitude, as we ’ll explore in the next chapter.
Perhaps the most intriguing characteristic Maslow discovered in psycho-
logically healthy people is the tendency to have peak experiences. During a
peak experience, time and place are transcended. Anxieties and fears disap-
pear, replaced by a sense of unity with the universe and a momentary feelingof power and wonder. However, peak experiences are different for each per-
son. Maslow likened them to “a visit to a personally defined Heaven. ”
Above all else, they are growth experiences. People typically report that the
problems that concerned them before the peak experience no longer seem so
important. Old fears are replaced with a sense of spontaneity and a greater
appreciation of life.
Maslow soon discovered that psychologically healthy people are not the
only ones who have these experiences. But he maintained self-actualized peo-
ple had more intense and more frequent peak experiences than the average
person. Maslow also discovered that not all self-actualized people had peak
experiences, which led him to talk about two kinds of psychologically healthy
individuals, the “peakers” and the “nonpeakers. ”Nonpeaking self-actualizers
are“the social world improvers, the politicians, the workers of society, the re-
formers, the crusaders. ”They have their feet planted firmly on the ground
and have a clear direction in life. The peakers tend to be less conventional
and more concerned with abstract notions. They “are more likely to write
the poetry, the music, the philosophies, and the religions ”(1970, p. 165).
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OPTIMAL EXPERIENCE
What makes people happy? This question threads its way through much of the
writings of the humanistic personality theorists. As Maslow argued, people are
not content simply because they have no pressing problems. Moreover, attain-
ing the prescribed goals most of us think of as signs of success —ag o o dj o b ,a
nice car, an attractive family —fails to provide the sense of meaning and value
to one ’s life that most people desire. So where does one find happiness?
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Chick- Sent-Me-High) has
one suggestion. He maintains that opportunities for happiness lie all around us
in the everyday, routine activities that fill our lives.
Optimal Experience
Can people structure the events in their daily lives in a way that promotes a
sense of personal fulfillment and self-worth? One starting point for answeringthis question is simply to ask people to describe the activities that make them
happy. That’ s what Csikszentmihalyi did. Try it yourself. Think of a time when
you felt alive and totally engaged in an activity, when what you were doing was290 CHAPTER 11 The Humanistic Approach