Human Diminution
In Maslow's Framework, 'Human Diminution refers to the "loss or not-yet-actualization of human capacities and possibilities."[1] According to Maslow, human diminution is caused by toxic environments.
Abraham Maslow Terms
B-Cognition, B-Realm, Big Problem, D-Cognition, D-Realm, Deficiency Diseases, Eupsychia, Eupsychian Theory, Good Person, Good Science, Good Society, Good Specimen, Hierarchy of Basic Needs, Hierarchy of Cognitive Needs, Human Diminution, Inner Signals, Intrinsic Consciousness, Normalcy, Normative Biology, Peak Experience, Plateau Experience, Real Self, Self-Actualization, Transcending Self-Actualizers, Transhumanistic
Syncretic Terms
Diminishment > Human Diminution
Notes
Maslow was very clear on the importance of environment.
"...it puts on the same continuum all the standard psychiatric categories, all the stunting, cripplings, and inhibitions that come from poverty. exploitation, maleducation. enslavement. etc., and all the newer value pathologies, existential disorders, character disorders that come to the economically priviledged. It handles very nicely the diminutions that result from drug addiction, psychopathym authoritarianism. criminality. and other categories that cannot be called"illness" in the same medical sense as can, e.g., brain tumor.
This is a radical move away from the medical model, a move which is long overdue. Strictly speaking. neurosis means an illness of the nervesm a relic we can very well do without today. In addition, using the label "psychological illness" puts neurosis ulcers, lesions, bacterial invasion, broken bones, or tumors. But by now. we have learned very well that it is better to consider neurosis as rather related to spiritual disorders, to loss of meaning, to doubts about the goals of life, to grief and anger over a lost love, to seeing life in a different way. to loss of courage or of hope, to despair over the future, to dislike for oneself, to recognition that one's life is being wasted. or that there is no possibility of joy or love. etc.
These are all failings away from full humanness, from the full blooming of human nature. They are losses of human possibility, of what might have been and could yet be perhaps. Physical and chemical hygiene and prophylaxes certainly have some little place in this realm of psychopathogenesis, but are as nothing in comparison with the far more powerful role of social, economic, political, religious, educational, philosophical, axiological, and familial determinants."[2]
Footnotes
