Gifted people and self-actualization
It is commonly accepted that when a person attains success he achieves significant financial and professional levels in agreement with his own standards and with those of the people around him. He is also expected to enjoy a condition of comfort and personal satisfaction. However, sometimes these results are not obtained. There are people who can achieve financial and professional success, and feel not satisfied with themselves. On the contrary, other ones may not seem successful to the eyes of other people but may enjoy emotional well-being and inner satisfaction. Finally, there are those that achieve no satisfaction and no success.
By the conventional definition of success, a successful person is someone who has achieved high social status and income. It happens, however, that some intelligent people do not aspire to this kind of success and that other ones, once they achieve it, do not seem to be fully satisfied with their achievement. It seems then convenient to use for these cases another definition of success, related with Abraham Maslow’s concept of self-actualization.
According to Maslow, the self-actualized person is one that has developed all his capacities. The application he makes of these capacities can be to obtain conventional success, but it is not necessarily so. This person considers that what really matters is his own satisfaction and not other people’s opinion. The measure of the degree of self-actualization of a person is how he has used his potential, either to obtain conventional success or to obtain his own personal happiness. A person that has achieved conventional success but not self-actualization may feel unsatisfied with what he has obtained.
The self-actualized person of Maslow has similar characteristics to the kind of person that other development theories situate at the top of the scale. It is a person that feels well with himself and the others, who tend to collaborate, and has confidence in himself and in his purposes.
The self-actualized person is not selfish because he has understood that personal well-being derives from general well-being. He does not accept life as it is, but tries to bring to reality his vision of what it should be. As a consequence, he suffers inner conflict, self-criticism, anxiety, and feelings of inferiority with respect to his own ideals.
Various obstacles can interfere with the actualization of a person’s talent: self-criticism, doubt, feelings of inferiority, and others. If talent is not allowed to manifest, it remains in a latent state and is a frequent cause of depression and distress. For example, a very strictly upbringing may hold the adult from living experiences that could enrich his creative development.
A person that is confined to a conventional role, such as that of being a good father or a good son, may have no possibilities to manifest his real self. This person needs to be assisted to show his creativity through the self-imposed role.
The main causes why talents are not externalized are shame and fear of humiliation. They make the person to avoid anything that may constitute a humiliation, and this hinders his capacity for expression. By reason of his extreme sensibility, the gifted person reacts intensely to a humiliation in childhood. When the inner drive to manifest creativity meets with the repression produced by shame, people are overwhelmed with feelings of rage and resentment, followed by episodes of depression and hopelessness.
When teachers and parents consider the precocious gifted child as a problem whose solution is to make him ‘normal,’ they produce a burden of guilt and resentment that is added to the child’s problem of expressing himself. Having been punished for being different the child will grow conflicted because he will feel guilty whether he follows or not his parent’s rules.