From Healthy Self-realization to Transcendence

During Maslow’s later years, he became increasingly convinced that healthy self-realization is actually a bridge to transcendence. Many of the individuals he selected as self-actualizing people experienced frequent moments of transcendence in which awareness was expanded beyond the self, and many of them were motivated by higher values. At the same time, Maslow observed that these individuals had a deep sense of who they were and what they wanted to contribute to the world.
 
This created a deep paradox for Maslow: How could so many of his self-actualizing individuals simultaneously have such a strong identity and actualization of their potential, yet also be so selfless? In a 1961 paper, Maslow observed that self-actualization seems to be a “transitional goal, a rite of passage, a step along the path to the transcendence of identity. This is like saying its function is to erase itself.”
 
Maslow believed that striving toward self-actualization—by developing a strong sense of self and having one’s basic needs met—was a crucial step along this path. As he wrote in his 1962 book Toward a Psychology of Being: “Self-actualization . . . paradoxically makes more possible the transcendence of self, and of self-consciousness and of selfishness.”
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020