Psychological Maturity
Closely related to the concept of mental health is that of psychological maturity.
"Maturity," in the broadest sense, is the state of being fully grown or developed. A living organism is mature when
its normal process of development is completed, and it functions on the "adult" level appropriate to its species.
"Psychological maturity," then, is a concept pertaining to the successful development of man's consciousness, to the
attainment of a level of functioning appropriate to man qua man.
Man is a rational being; to be guided in action by a conceptual form of consciousness, is his distinctive
characteristic among living species. His psychological maturity is an issue of the proper growth and development of
his conceptual faculty; it is a psycho-epistemological matter.
At first, a child knows only perceptual concretes; he does not know abstractions or principles. His world is only the
immediate now; he cannot think, plan, or act long-range; the future is largely unreal to him. At this stage, he is a
dependent, necessarily: his method of functioning (although biologically inevitable at this period of his life) is
inadequate to the requirements of survival as an independent entity.
As the child grows, his intellectual field widens: he learns language, he begins to grasp abstractions, he generalizes,
he makes increasingly subtle discriminations, he looks for principles, he acquires the ability to project a distant and
more distant future—he rises from the sensory-perceptual level of consciousness to the conceptual level. His power
to deal independently with the world around him, with the facts of reality, rises accordingly—in step with his
increasing knowledge and increasing proficiency at conceptual mental functioning.
The first and basic index of psychological maturity is the ability to think in principles.
More broadly, the basic index of successfully achieved adulthood is the policy of conceptualizing. This means: "an
actively sustained process of identifying one's impressions in conceptual terms, of integrating every event and
every observation into a conceptual context, of grasping relationships, differences, similarities in one's perceptual
material and of abstracting them into new