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All Dynamic Psychologies proceed from the premise that unconscious emotional forces direct the many dimensions of human behavior. The basis of these emotional forces is of the nature of meaning. These essential meanings in the human being organize around frameworks for action which are known as attitudes or values. Therefore the operative attitudes of a human being must be abstracted from observation of his actions rather than from what he professes to believe. This is the equivalent of stating that a person's operative values are to be understood from his behavior, rather than from verbal statements he makes about himself. In the very young and still evolving field of psychoanalysis, man directs himself to observe upon his own nature. As the eminent mathematician, Heisenberg, stated, “In Science, one cannot separate the seer from the seen.” Observations cannot validly be weighed apart from the person making them. In attempting to see into our own nature, whether one is looking at himself or another individual, into the perceiving runs that whole confluence of attitudes and values which might very well be called one's unconscious philosophy of life.
Broadly speaking, theories as to what is essential human-ness are either consonant with Abraham Maslow's basic sense of things as expressed through his work, Toward a Psychology of Being, or they depart from the premises which he both emanates and conceptualizes so well. He writes: (p. 161) “Since man's instinctoid tendencies, such as they are, are far weaker than cultural forces, it will always be a difficult task to tease out man's psychobiological values. Difficult or not, it is possible in principle. And also it is quite necessary, even crucial… The great difficulties here are theoretical ones, problems of the definition and conceptualizations of health.”
Maslow goes on to expose the most crucial error to a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of healthy human nature—an understanding which must be fundamental