194 Christopher R. Bell
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs thus proposed a psychological theory that
reflected and attempted to resolve a nagging social contradiction of his
time, that between a populist democracy led by ‘the people’, which had
proven to be vulnerable to totalitarian cooptation, and a ‘democratic elite’
that apparently negated the universal participatory ideals of democracy,
with the ironic implication that democracy itself could only be artificially
maintained by a ‘power elite’. As such, Maslow’s tendency towards self-
actualization could be seen as a kind of liberal fantasy or wish-fulfillment,
the hope that the masses would naturally, given the right conditions, tend
towards ‘self-actualization’ as the psychological embodiment of liberal
over illiberal values. Meanwhile, the current elite of self-actualized
individuals could serve as a model for and safe-keeper of liberal
democratic values. Moreover, Buss argues that the very form of Maslow’s
theory, focused upon individual psychological development rather than on
broader social organization, was evidence that a potentially radical project,
due to being expressed in a psychologized form, had ended up with limited
radical potential. Buss (1979) states:
The excessive individualism contained in the doctrine of self-
actualization serves to mask the larger social questions surrounding
society’s structures and institutions. A theory that predisposes one to
focus more on individual freedom and development rather than the larger
social reality, works in favor of maintaining that reality. (p. 46)CONTEMPORARY THEORIES
Trait Theories
Trait theories of personality contrast with both Psychoanalysis and
Humanistic Psychology in so far as they offer descriptions of personality
traits rather than explanations of personality using theoretical models that
speculate about the nature of human motivation (Myers & DeWall, 2018).
Myers and DeWall (2018) recount how Gordon Allport, an early supporter