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This paper is a condensation of a longer one of the same title, delivered as the presidential address at the Fifty-Second Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association in September 1944. Murphy points out that man has been able to remake the order of the world wherever his task has been objective and his intelligence free, but on problems concerning his own nature, where his impulses have beclouded the process of his thinking, he still relies upon exhorting, moralizing and argumentation. The author then attempts a systematic statement of what is known today about the relation of our needs to our process of thought. He distinguishes the following steps: perception, recall and thought tend to take a direction such as to bring to the individual a cognitive situation satisfying to his needs. This movement is often unconsciously directed, the individual remaining unaware that the pseudological steps taken serve an unconscious need. This tendency of thinking processes appears to be a special case of the law that behavior in general goes in the direction of need satisfaction; thought, like perception, is bipolar, in that both depend on the need patterns of the individual. Not only the wish but the fear may be father to the thought. The impulse to perceive the nature of the threat is activated by the need to escape.
Murphy states that there is no intellect which stands apart from the concrete personal, drive-directed efforts at contact with reality. One portion of his paper is concerned with curiosity, which he considers a craving for contact with reality stronger than the individual's need to escape from reality. Finally, Murphy discusses relaxation and its relationship to creative thinking. He believes that creative intelligence can best spring from the mind which is not strained to its highest pitch, but utterly at ease. He deplores the fact that in our practical Americanism it is considered sensible to devaluate the dream, which is an extraordinary