Maslow Hiarchy

Maslow stresses that a person cannot move to next level of the hierarchy until the present level is fully achieved. The second layer of the Maslow hierarchy is the need for safety and security. In order for this need to be fulfilled, a person needs to experience a sense of security in their lives and to live without fear. When the physiological needs are met then the human turns towards safety needs, safety attains the highest priority over all other desires. A functioning society tends to provide this to its member. However acute danger, safety comes before things like eating. Safety and security needs can include physical safety, security of employment, financial security, security of good health and security of family.

Physical safety means freedom from physical harm. Such harm can come from other people, such as when an attacker threatens a person, or it can come from the environment, such as when we are standing in a burning building. We can also sensitively threaten ourselves, as that little voice inside speak angrily to us for our wrong doings. We cannot get away from the repeated self-harming cycles of memories or future projections and much treatment is designed to stop us from continuing to harm ourselves.

In children we can also see a much more direct reaction to bodily illnesses of various kinds. Sometimes these illnesses seem to be immediately and per se threatening and seem to make the child feel unsafe. For instance, vomiting, stomach pain or other sharp pains seem to make the child look at the whole world in a different way. At such a moment of pain, it may be postulated that, for the child, the appearance of the whole world suddenly changes from brightness to darkness, and becomes a place in which anything at all might happen, in which previously stable things have suddenly become unstable. Thus a child who because of some bad food is taken ill may, for a day or two, develop fear, nightmares, and a need for protection and comfort never seen in him before his illness.

Another indication of the child's need for safety is his preference for some kind of undisrupted routine or rhythm. Children seem to want a predictable, orderly world. For instance, injustice, unfairness, or inconsistency in the parents seems to make a child feel anxious and unsafe. This attitude may be not so much because of the injustice in any particular pains involved, but rather because this treatment threatens to make the world look unreliable, or unsafe, or unpredictable. Young children seem to thrive better under a system which has at least a wasted outline of inflexibility, In which there is a schedule of a kind, some sort of routine, something that can be counted upon, not only for the present but also far into the future. Perhaps individual could express this more accurately by saying that the child needs an organized world rather than an unorganized or unstructured one.

The central role of the parents and the normal family setup are indisputable. Disagreeing, physical assault, separation, divorce or death within the family may be particularly terrifying. Also parental outbursts of anger or threats of punishment directed to the child, calling him names, speaking to him harshly, shaking him, handling him roughly, or actual [p. 378] physical punishment sometimes elicit such panic and fear in the child that we must assume more is involved than the physical pain alone. While it is said to be true that in some children this fear may represent also a fear of loss of parental love, it can also occur in completely unwanted children, who seem to adhere to the hating parents more for absolute safety and protection than because