Maslow on Management

Self-Actualized Duty

Every age but ours has had its model, its ideal. All of these have been given up by our culture; the saint, the hero, the gentleman, the knight, the mystic ... Perhaps we shall soon be able to use as our guide and model the fully growing and self-fulfilling human being. The one whom all potentialities are coming to full development, the one whose inner nature expresses itself freely ...

At the point where the S-A job is assimilated into the identity or into the self by introjection, then such work can be therapeutic and self-therapeutic. This is because the work or the task out there which has become part of the self can be worked on, attacked, struggled with, improved, corrected in a way that the person cannot do directly with his own inner self. That is to say, his inner problems can be projected out into the world as outer problems where he can then work with them far more easily and with less anxiety, less repression than he could by direct introspection. As a matter of fact this may be one main unconscious reason for projecting an inner problem into the outer world i.e., just so that it can be worked on with less anxiety. I think probably the best examples here and the most easily acceptable ones are, first, the artist (certainly everybody will agree that he does exactly this with his inner problems, putting them on his canvasses), and second, many intellectual ...