Freud stated that healthy adulthood and full maturity are defined as the ability "to love and to work" - to have some lasting relationships and to be able to keep a job. Within all the challenges of life, those are big achievements. But we now see that there is more growth and happiness available beyond the point where we have our basic needs met.
Self-actualizing people have a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection for human beings in general. They feel kinship and connection, as if all people were members of a single family.
Abraham Maslow, Motivation & Personality
Self-actualizing persons' contact with reality is simply more direct. And along with this unfiltered, unmediated directness of their contact with reality comes also a vastly heightened ability to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy, however stale those experiences may have become for others.
Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, 1962
