Maslow's Hierarchy: Objective and Experiential Needs

Applying this distinction to the first four types of needs in Maslow's scale:

• The needs that Maslow called physiological or biological are objective.
• The needs that Maslow called social (or affection and belonging) and esteem are called existential.
• Security is of a mixed type because it covers the two levels of conservation and development of life: the body and the intimate.

This is a principle called the principle of general correlation between aspects of reality and human needs.

Dependence and Interest in Human Relationships

All the needs arising in the gap function within the relationship between scarcity and resources. This relationship provides a general framework within which many specific human relations are accommodated: both relations with objects and relationships with subjects.

Man establishes all motivated pushes for these relations originating in lack, and this makes them present some fixed features. These two stand out:

• Relations of dependence: Man is motivated by a need that requires him to seek in the other what he lacks in himself.
• Involved relationships: The other being is never sought and valued solely for themselves, but always in a way conditioned by the satisfaction of one's own need.

Lack as a Principle of Human Motivation

Deficiency originates needs, and these motivations are calls originating from lack. All of them work in the relationship between scarcity and resources.

Maslow's Classification of Human Needs

The theory on which we rely to study human motivation is Maslow's hierarchy. Maslow classifies human needs into five types: Self-actualization, Esteem, Social, Security, and Physiological.

Distinction Between Objective and Experiential Needs

The first four types of needs—needs which are all originated in lack—can be systematized into two groups: the needs that humans have to cover to preserve life at the body level, and the needs that humans have to cover to preserve and develop the intimate level. The first we call objective needs, and the second experiential needs.

Basic needs are covered with objects (objective), and the latter are covered by life experiences (experiential). The motivational role they play is pushing the search for resources; the difference is that objective needs drive us to seek resources of the physical and experiential milieu.