Needs
Needs are physiological, psychological, emotional, and spiritual requirements necessary to the health, well-being, and full development of the Physical Unit. The LP postulates the Seven Essential Needs as Essential Needs.
Related LP Terms
Needs > Essential Needs, Health, School of Human Development
Non-LP Related Terms
Needs > Physical Unit, Seven Essential Needs, Sufficient Satisfaction
Notes
Satisfaction of needs leads to health, happiness, and longevity. Failure to satisfy even a single need leads to agitation, anxiety, depression, pathology, illness, and even death.
Humans start with Seven Essential Needs. If they group in toxic environments and are subjected to Toxic Socialization, additional toxic needs develop.
Pathology: When needs are satisfied, an individual naturally grows, matures, and connects with consciousness. When needs thwarted psychopathology ensues.
Sociology: Ruling class ideology, capitalist individualism, holds that humans are powerful individuals capable of surviving on their own and meeting their own needs. That is a lie. In fact, human needs can only be met in interdependent social relationship as a result of equitable Human Exchange.
Social: In childhood, all needs are met socially, i.e. by your relationship with someone else (specifically your parents). In adulthood, most needs are met socially, i.e., in mature relationships with equitable exchange. E.g., Our need for Self Esteem can only be met by the kind and uplifting words of others. Our need for Love can only be filled by mature, fully functioning, adults.
Adults: In adulthood individuals who have been properly nurtured and socialized support their own Development and work towards the satisfaction of their own needs by pursuing healthy social and/or intimate relationships. Adults who have been improperly socialized or damaged by toxic childhoods, require additional guidance and assistance, and possibly healing interventions.
Children: Children are weak, undeveloped, innocent, naive, and vulnerable. Children are totally dependent on the adults in their life (i.e. parents, teachers, uncles, and aunts) to properly satisfy their needs. If the adults in a child's life are unhealthy, toxic, sick, the child experiences a Toxic Childhood where needs go unmet. Toxic childhood's can lead to disastrous consequences in adolescence and early childhood.
Guidance and Direction: In addition to a family and society geared towards satisfaction of needs, children also need positive support, encouragement, guidance and direction in order that they may learn to properly satisfy their needs as adults. By the time children are legal drinking age they should know how addictive certain substances are (i.e. alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, crack, etc.), they should understand their own needs, and they should have the basic skills so that they can satisfy these needs for themselves, either by seeking human contact, engaging in activity (to eat dinner, get love, have healthy sex, etc.). In other words parents (and society) need to specify the right way and the wrong way to do things, otherwise need satisfaction in adulthood becomes challenging for the individual. Obviously if guidance and direction is to be provided, parents and society must themselves know the right way and the wrong way to meet needs, and they must also be able to put human need satisfaction before all other things (including competition and profit).
Footnotes
