announce themselves through signals of pain, illness, and death. (If, somehow, a need were always and everywhere
satisfied automatically—if no one ever suffered from any frustration of the need—it is difficult to surmise how
scientists would be able to isolate and identify it.)
Even when symptoms do appear, it is often a long process to discover the underlying need-deprivation. Men died of
scurvy for many centuries before scientists traced the causal connection to a lack of green vegetables; and only in
comparatively recent history did they learn that the crucial ingredient supplied by the vegetables is Vitamin C.
Man is an integrated organism, and it is not surprising that the frustration of physical needs sometimes produces
psychological symptoms—and that the frustration of psychological needs sometimes produces physical symptoms.
As an example of the first: the hallucinations and loss of memory that can result from a deficiency of thiamin. As
an example of the second: any psychosomatic illness—migraine headaches, peptic ulcers, etc.
It is the conditional nature of life that gives rise to the concept of need. If a being were indestructible —if it were not
confronted with the alternative of life or death—it would have no needs. The concept could not be applicable to it.
Without the concept of life, the concept of need would not be possible.
"Need" implies the existence of a goal, result, or end: the survival of the organism. Therefore, in order to maintain
that something is a physical or psychological need, one must demonstrate that it is a causal condition of the
organism's survival and well-being.
While biologists recognize this fact, many psychologists do not. They ascribe to man a wide variety of
psychological needs, without offering any justification for their claims, as though the positing of needs were a
matter of arbitrary choice. They seldom specify by what criterion they judge what are or are not needs; nor do they
show how or why their lists of alleged needs are entailed by man's nature as a living organism.
Among the things that various psychologists have asserted to be inherent needs of man are the following: to
dominate other men, to submit to a leader, to bargain, to gamble, to gain social prestige, to snub someone, to be
hostile, to be unconventional, to