Self-Actualization Tendencies in Interpersonal Relationships in Philip Roth’s The Professor of Desire

ABSTRACT

Actualization of the self is observed as the paramount detriment for maintaining healthy and long-lasting relationships. The current article is focused on analyzing the self-actualizing tendencies in the protagonists Herbie Brataskky and David Kapesh in Philip Roth’s novel The Professor of Desire. In our current era married relationships are at stake. The divorce rate is increasing day by day and so many people are experiencing trauma. This article is an attempt to locate the solution of such deteriorating relationships through fictional characters. A good relationship between husband and wife is the source for the growth of every civilization. It also helps the people to remain happy and healthy. Through the analysis of the novel, The Professor of Desire, it has been observed that when the protagonist tends to move toward self-actualization, he is able to establish a good and healthy relationship with his partner at the end of the novel by learning self-actualizing techniques.

摘要

自我的实现通常被认为会损害健康持久的人际关系。本文集中于分析《欲望教授》中两位主角的自我实现倾向。目前离婚率高涨，人们对婚姻逐渐失望。本文尝试通过这些小说人物，发现解决此种境况的出路。夫妻的健康关系是每种文明成长的源泉所在。本文通过分析发现，当小说人物学会了自我实现技巧时，就能保持健康的夫妻关系。

KEYWORDS:

• Self-actualization
• marriage
• interpersonal
• relationship
• self-realization

KEYWORDS:

• 关键词 自我实现
• 已婚
• 人际关系

1. Introduction

In this article entitled “Self-Actualization Tendencies in Interpersonal Relationships in Roth’s The Professor of Desire,” the character analysis of the protagonists, Herbie Brataskky and David Kapesh, is explored from a psychoanalytical perspective. The Professor of Desire was published in 1977 and is revolving around the protagonist, David Kepesh, who tries to address questions that can hound readers of serious literature, or readers of books that explore desire, passion, and sex, sometimes subconsciously. As he leaps (or more slowly enters) into new relationships with women, David himself is dogged by these questions. In terms of appearance, attitudes, and opinions about sex in a relationship, all women are very different, and David discusses how these women through the writers he teaches in his work at a university fit into his ever-changing views of femininity. With the help of a psychoanalyst, he also explores these relationships. The fascinating aspect of this novel is witnessing David, an igniting and self-actualizing protagonist, who simultaneously runs away from people and responds to the characters he reads about in stories by writers like Chekov and Kafka. Will he pass on to himself the elements of these stories? What precisely makes a man? Is a man who spends his life finding fulfillment from a man who pursues satisfaction from a good book by pursuing women any different? In this article, these questions are beautifully discussed and analyzed, through self-realization and self-actualization.

2. Self-realization

Self-realization is the process and the aim of understanding one’s personality or character and the subsequent total self-knowledge and achievement of one’s ability. It is said that self-realized people have inner peace and effective spiritual fulfillment. To understand self-realization, it is mandatory to understand the importance of ambivalence of the self. As Kaufman writes, “Our inner conflicts typically penetrate the boundaries of self and cause us to take out our frustration and aggressive impulses on others. Our inner conflicts are a significant component of our struggle toward self-realization” (Kaufman, Transcend the New Science). So, in psychological terms, self-realization implies the aspiration of a man to attain goals and fulfill his potential, while self-realization is to recognize himself. Karen Horney, in her New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939), talks about such realization as, “A realization of a mistake is merely painful, but by intensifying this feeling and wallowing in self-accusations and feelings of unworthiness the masochistic person may narcotize the pain and derive satisfaction from an orgy of self-degradation” (Ch. 15).

3. Self-actualization

Self-actualization is the full understanding of one’s potential and the complete growth of one’s life skills and appreciation. Kurt Goldstein, a German neurologist and psychiatrist, first presented and discussed the term. This notion is also at the top of the hierarchy of needs in Maslow. Scott Barry Kaufman, in his book, Transcend the New Science of Self-Actualization (2020), mentioned the idea of Maslow in an unpublished essay from 1966 called “Critique of Self-Actualization Theory” as:

It must be stated that self-actualization is not enough. Personal salvation and what is good for the person alone cannot be really understood in isolation … . The good of other people must be invoked, as well as the good for oneself … . It is quite clear that a purely intrapsychic, individualistic psychology, without reference to other people and social conditions, is not adequate. (Kaufman, Transcend the New Science)

Self-actualization is at the highest level in the hierarchy pyramid among the five needs of human motivation mentioned by Abraham Maslow in his book Motivation and Personality (1954). Maslow defines self-actualization as, “What a man can be, he must be. He must be true to his own nature. This need we may call self-actualization” (46). The other needs which are below the need for self-actualization in the order of decreasing preference are, need for self-esteem, need for belongingness and love, need for safety, and physiological need at the bottom of the hierarchy pyramid. According to Maslow, self-actualization represents the highest order of motivation which drives us to understand and realize our true potential through which we can achieve our ideal-self. Self-actualization includes personal and creative self-growth which are achieved through the fulfillment of our full potential. Formation of relationship and maintaining it for a longer time, self-actualization plays a paramount role.

4. David Kepesh character analysis about his interpersonal relationships

Abraham Maslow points about the traits of self-actualizing people in his Motivation and Personality as:

… self-actualizing people distinguished far more easily than most the fresh, concrete, and idiographic from the generic, abstract, and rubricized. The consequence is that they live more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs, and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world. They are therefore far more apt to perceive what is there rather than their own wishes, hopes, fears, anxieties, their own theories and beliefs, or those of their cultural group. (154)

In the beginning of the novel The Professor of Desire, the protagonist David Kepesh is a kind of confused stereotype who is unable to understand the relationship. When Kepesh attends college, he starts living with a lazy, masturbating, homosexual, and draft-dodging fellow student, who unintentionally adds to the vulnerability of Kepesh. He seems to embrace the peculiar facts about his colleague at first, but then he is surprised when others tell him that he has deviated from too many societal standards.

The protagonist David always strives for a good relationship but has never had a good date, instead of lusting for female co-students, by telling them that they have gorgeous body features, but in turn he annoys those ladies. In the search for intimacy, with a Fulbright grant in his wallet, Kepesh goes to London, where he meets Birgitta and Elisabeth, two sexually interested Swedish girls. He does not understand his feelings about these girls and only longing for sexual experiences. Many times, Kepesh expresses his insights for instigating emotions of realization of the fact as he expresses his feeling for another girl, Bettan:

In my own letters, I confess again and again that I had been blind to the nature of her real feeling for me—blind to the depth of my feelings for her! I call that unforgivable too, and “sad,” and “strange,” and when the contemplation of this ignorance of mine brings me nearly to tears, I call it “terrifying”- and mean it. (The Professor of Desire 34)

Back in America, he travels to California, where Helen, who was a woman fantasizing about starting a shop, meets him. Helen has a history of promiscuity that goes back to when she lived in Hong Kong and other locations in Asia in her early twenties. Helen does not believe that Kepesh is loved. She denies performing domestic duties as Kepesh bounces her only sexual attention; Kepesh submits to that “fact” and culminates in doing all the household jobs as well as giving classes on literature and writing papers on Anton Chekhov, unable to talk about his emotions. Kepesh goes to New York by splitting himself from Helen and starts giving literature lectures, but he has countless sessions with a psychoanalyst and also uses his literature class to equate his own wishes and skills with those depicted in works such as Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. He also convinces the students to learn about his own love life and explore it. He dreams of meeting the still-living whore of Kafka on a trip to Prague, the birthplace of the similarly sexually innocent Franz Kafka, inviting him to look at her crotch, assuming he wants to see why it has held Kafka’s attention for so long. Kepesh is in the dream of a beautiful and successful future. His actions in life are driven by the goal of the future, what Maslow calls individual psychology. But Kepesh has a lack in his conscience of self-actualization. This lack of potential of self-actualization makes him roam around in search of his ideal self and he is unable to establish any intimacy in his life.

5. Analysis of Herbie Bratasky regarding his interpersonal relationships

To build another of the Manichean binaries, Roth uses Herbie’s character to give The Professor of Desire much of his anxiety and discovery moments. Herbie is, after all, the focus of the novel’s opening pages, and even the opening line itself, “Temptation comes to me first in the conspicuous figure of Herbie Bratasky, social director, bandleader, crooner, comic, and m.c. of my family’s mountainside resort hotel” (Roth, The Professor of Desire 3). To a reader unfamiliar with the text, it may be unclear exactly what sort of “temptation” Herbie portrays. Even though he can be put among the ranks of the iconoclasts of the novel, the role of Herbie appears oddly eligible by the way he is initially portrayed. Kepesh names the hotel guests discussing Herbie as “A-Owitz,” “B-Owitz” and “C-Owitz” (The Professor 4–5); interchangeable and anonymous characters. Herbie is a transitional figure, a cultural dilettante whose mastery of a variety of roles reaches its ultimate manifestation in a mimicry talent, which itself reaches its ultimate manifestation in an ability to portray the full spectrum of defecation-related sounds, a performance that David is the only resident in the hotel to experience this. Herbie might be guilty of playing something to his audience while selecting this subject to entertain a young child (toilet habits being a traditional mainstay of pre-adolescent humor). Nevertheless, Kepesh refuses to interpret the motives of Herbie, instead of retaining the pose of childish naivete that characterized his early encounters as being Herbie’s “awestruck acolyte” (The Professor 6). The interest of Herbie in defecation is not limited to any conversations with the narrator of the book. Lambasting Herbie after his request to perform some of his more controversial “imitations,” Abe proclaims that “the Shofar is for the high holidays and the other stuff is for the toilet” (The Professor 6). That Abe bans Herbie in a single, aphoristic blow from both religious impersonation and scatological forthrightness that indicates continuity and disconnect between notions of transgression at the same time. The revolt of Herbie is at once composed of high seriousness and the secret truth of bodily frailty; farting and diarrhea demonstrate the loss of power over our bodies.

Body frailty is an understandable concern for a character such as Herbie, whose main position in the resort hotel is partly clarified by the “damaged eardrum” (The Professor 4) that prevents his World War II enlistment. Unable to obtain verifiable proof of his adherence by service in the military to the dictates of American masculinity, Herbie is reduced to imitating the sound of “a fighter plane nose-diving over Berchtesgaden” (The Professor 6). Herbie’s imitation, configured at a distance from the generation of young men fighting for the Allied forces, becomes a plaintive gesture of his own anxieties. These anxieties call for Jewish physical skills and military service to be revised. He was discussing the Jewish foot depictions in the fin-de-siècle. The lack of justification for the injury to Herbie positions him as part of a historical dialogue in which it was believed that Jewish men were incapable of matching their Gentile peers’ military feats. In this respect, his position in the Hungarian Royale has an aspect of exile, a conflict between the dominant American culture and the Jewish community. Such conflict creates a hindrance in forming the self-ideal of Herbie. He lacks the self-actualizing tendencies as mentioned by Maslow in his Motivation and Personality as:

… self-actualizing people tend to be good animals, hearty in their appetites and enjoying themselves without regret or shame or apology. They seem to have a uniformly good appetite for food; they seem to sleep well; they seem to enjoy their sexual lives without unnecessary inhibition and so on for all the relatively physiological impulses. They are able to accept themselves not only on these low levels, but at all levels as well; e.g., love, safety, belongingness, honor, self-respect. (156)

During the off-season, Herbie’s job as a salesman merely confirms this liminal position, a sense of discomfort permeating his positions in either a cosmopolitan or a more homogeneously Jewish environment.

As a role model, it is neither just the military dismissal of Herbie that labels him as a peripheral character, nor is this rejection. The construction of Herbie’s Jewish personality by Roth is a significant part of Herbie’s qualifications for being a figure of temptation which is constructed communally by a set of cultural and social references that consistently illustrate the contrast between a traditional religious definition of Jewish identity and popular culture’s more frenetic statements. Some hotel guests discuss his paradoxical self-construction and question whether the playfulness of Herbie prevents him from succeeding; one guest claims that, if he shed his clownish antics, Herbie could be “in the Metropolitan Opera,” another that he could become a cantor in a synagogue (The Professor 5). Such contrasts reflect, in part, a change of generation. The guests at the Hungarian Royale still have a close link to the generation of refugees that preceded them, and their speech reflects an ambiguous relationship between Judaism’s cultural affiliations and American capitalism’s materialistic mythologies: references to Jewish religious practices can be found alongside a deep knowledge of “the annals of show business” (The Professor 5). For Herbie, whose iconoclasm and scatological obsessions allow for an element of demystification, such issues are irrelevant. Torn from secret myths of an internalized religious ideology and the human body’s puritanical, oppressive skepticism, Herbie becomes a perpetually peripheral character, apparently able to comment with a proto-authorial detachment on the worlds between which he resides. Herbie as a character structure is more removed from reality, more determined by his own laws than by the laws of physics and logic. Such types of personality, Maslow called surface personality.

6. Comparison and contrast of relationship traits portrayed by David Kepesh and Herbie Bratasky

Herbie’s anxieties about his masculinity place him as the one who is concealed by his flamboyant subversion of group ideals, within another secret narrative. As a consequence, he ends up emulating the unease underlying many of the hotel’s guests, ongoing trust in American culture, twinned in the same culture with an acute sense of their status as outsiders. In other words, it is the role of Herbie as an outsider that gives him his power as a commentator, but this position, paradoxically, often places him between Jewish cultural tropes and anxieties most thoroughly. Thus, Herbie is built as the template for the irreverent shamelessness to which Kepesh aspires but also exposes a secret narrative of cultural anxiety transformed into various forms in the account of Kepesh’s own sexual background. Herbie tends to neglect the higher need of realization of his mistakes and self-actualization. Maslow in his Motivation and Personality states that, “The neglect of higher needs and neglect of the differences between lower and higher needs dooms people to disappointment when wanting continues even after a need is gratified” (284). Thus Herbie struggles between the two facets of a slave to Eros and a master of the suppression of his character as he comes to the actualization and self-realization of David Kepesh. But through his other relationships, this established pattern of restlessness, frustration and destruction continues. David Kepesh marries Helen Baird, a stunning femme fatale who is daring, and then goes on to try to domesticate her.

David Kepesh always tries to express his selflessness to prove his actualization as he mentions, “ … so in my room in Syracuse solitude goes to work on me and gradually I feel the lightweight and the show-off blessedly taking his leave. Not that, for all my reading, underlining, and note-taking, I become entirely selfless” (The Professor 16). Sometimes, Kepesh proves to be a narcissistic character in the novel when he emphasizes the self-identity, “At twenty I must stop impersonating others and Become Myself, or at least begin to impersonate the self I believe I ought now to be” (12). This is the point where Kepesh needs a kind of self-actualization for the discovery of the self. Just as Maslow expected, those with cosmic consciousness ratings were far more driven by progress, discovery, and love of humanity than the satisfaction of shortcomings in essential necessities. When Kepesh explains about his daughter Helen who, according to him, is fully beyond his understanding and feels senseless, “I cannot discover the truth about anything”(The Professor 77). Believing that “my desire is desire, it is not to be belittled or despised” (The Professor 23), young David uses his literature-in-London grant to become a “visiting fellow in erotic daredevilry” (The Professor 44) in the Swedish company of anything-goes Birgitta and secretly shy Elisabeth. Saddled with the guilt of having corrupted Elisabeth, David moves on and West-to “hopeless misalliance” (The Professor 82) with wife Helen, “runner-up for Queen of Tibet,” (The Professor 82) a dramatic heroine radiantly ruined by her long affair with a colonial tycoon. An inertial move back East-to Long Island classes, family ties, and analysis, “I cannot maintain an erection, Dr. Klinger. I cannot maintain a smile, for that matter” (The Professor 103).

David is well aware from the beginning of his marriage with Helen that his love life is poisoned by mutual criticism by each other. The self-actualization is totally missing from the beginning of their marriage as David states:

We marry, and, as I should have known and couldn’t have known and probably always knew, mutual criticism and disapproval continue to poison our lives, evidence not only of the deep temperamental divide that has been there from the start, but also of the sense I continue to have that another man still holds the claim upon her deepest feelings, and that, however she may attempt to hide this sad fact and to attend to me and our life, she knows as well as I do that she is my wife only because there was no way short of homicide (or so they say) for her to be the wife of that very important and well-known lover of hers. (The Professor 67–8)

David tries hard to digest this marriage with Helen and he makes plenty of effort, resolutions, apologies and behavioral amendments to adjust with his wife and maintain a good relationship but instead of making him pacify, these actions divide his psyche and he becomes more ambivalent. This is evidenced in his statement:

At our best, at our bravest and most sensible and most devoted, we do try very hard to hate what divides us rather than each other. If only that past of hers weren’t so vivid, so grandiose, so operatic—if somehow one or the other of us could forget it! If I could close this absurd gap of trust that exists between us still! Or ignore it! Live beyond it! At our best we make resolutions, we make apologies, we make amends, we make love. But at our worst … well, our worst is just about as bad as anybody’s, I would think. (The Professor 68)

David and Helen used to quarrel over very small and irrelevant issues like once they quarreled over burnt toast and misplaced letters. David as a character has a good realization of the reasons for his deteriorating relationship with Helen, as he consciously confronts:

What do we struggle over mostly? In the beginning—as anyone will have guessed who, after three years of procrastination, has thrown himself headlong and half convinced into the matrimonial flames—in the beginning we struggle over the toast. Why, I wonder, can’t the toast go in while the eggs are cooking, rather than before? This way we can get to eat our bread warm rather than cold. (The Professor 68)

Although David is conscious in his realization of the facts but simultaneously he is an ambivalent character who has no control over his actions and expressions and frequently quarrels with Helen. Helen blames him for such a rubbish discussion when she says, “I don’t believe I (David) am having this discussion” (The Professor 68). Helen tries to actualize the self-ideal of David by making him understand that, “Life isn’t toast” (The Professor 68), but the ambivalence of David doesn’t allow him to do so and he replies, “I hear myself maintaining. ‘When you sit down to eat toast, life is toast. And when you take out the garbage, life is garbage. You can’t leave the garbage halfway down the stairs, Helen … ’” (The Professor 68). She even apologizes for her mistakes when she says, “I forgot it” (The Professor 68). David thinks that his wife is of a careless nature and unreliable, when he asked her, “What makes you so forgetful Helen?” (The Professor 69). This was not the only instance when she burnt the toast for breakfast but she forgot twice more like this. Once when David asked her to mail a letter, she forgot to stamp the letter and for the second time she forgot to put her signature on the checks: “She forgets to affix her signature to the checks she writes and to stamp the letters she mails, while the letters I give her to mail for me and the household turn up with a certain regularity in the pockets of raincoats and slacks months after she has gone off to deposit them in the mailbox” (The Professor 68–9). Because of their personal differences their relationship begins to suffer dysfunction. David felt that Helen is an unreliable wife while Helen felt David was stodgy. Eventually after three years of their marriage, their relationship is over and Helen flees to visit her former lover who lives in Hong Kong. Abraham Maslow in his Motivation and Personality says such breakdowns occur because of lack of coping and a good expression:

Coping behavior always has among its determinants drives, needs, goals, purposes, functions, or aims. … The term coping itself implies the attempt to solve a problem or at least to deal with it. It therefore implies a reference to something beyond itself; it is not self-contained. This reference may be either to immediate or to basic needs, to means as well as ends, to frustration induced behavior as well as to goal-seeking behavior. (132–3)

David’s intimate relationship is based on his extrinsic behavior of love and sexual desire where although he is consciously aware of his actions and expressions toward his wife but intrinsically he is unable to stimulate his self-actualization. He is only giving sexual attention to Helen and totally ignoring her emotions. Maslow differentiates between extrinsic love and self-actualization as:

The one main difference most pertinent to our present task is that love and respect, etc., may be considered as external qualities that the organism lacks and therefore needs. Self-actualization is not a lack or deficiency in this sense. It is not something extrinsic that the organism needs for health, as for example, a tree needs water. Self-actualization is intrinsic growth of what is already in the organism, or more accurately of what is the organism itself. (134)

Here Maslow has called love as a need but emphasizes self-actualization as the organism of an individual which is lacking in David. The ruins of marriage give rise to a time of despair and reluctant chastity in the life of David.

7. Developing self-actualization tendencies and building long-term relationships

Kepesh returns to New York City, where his sadness has left him in a state of spiritual despair and physical impotence. His elderly parents are puzzled by the disbalanced life of their only son. David entertains his parents in his rented apartment. He thinks about his future as a lover of anybody as a persistent gay stranger who performs a ludicrous siege at his door and a womanizer seeks to convert him to satyrism. His life takes a surprising and remarkable turn when he meets Claire Ovington, a loving and orderly young teacher. He remarked that this lady was his dream girl: “the most extraordinary ordinary person I have ever known” (The Professor 221). He feels an intrinsic stimulant of self-actualization after meeting her but his ambivalent psyche never leaves him alone. He keeps reiterating and questioning to himself even after framing a good relationship with Claire, “I am ready to think it is something about me that makes for the sadness; about how I have always failed to be what people want or expect; how I have never quite pleased anyone, including myself; how, hard as I have tried, I have seemed never quite able to be one thing or the other, and probably never will be … ” (The Professor 222). David is completely moved, when he came to know that Claire was once pregnant by him to which he was never aware of this fact. However, Claire managed to abort the unborn child but now she wanted to get pregnant again but legally this time. This act of sacrifice made by Claire enchanted David too much and he felt an intrinsic beauty in Claire’s face one night, “I cannot take my eyes from her face tonight. Between the Old Master etchings of the two pouched and creased and candlelit old men, Claire’s face seems, more than ever, so apple-smooth, apple-small, apple-shiny, apple-plain, apple-fresh … never more artless and untainted … never before so … ” (The Professor 251). David feels an intrinsic love for her as Maslow described the characteristics of an individual who is in intrinsic love as, “Self-actualizing love shows many of the characteristics of self-actualization in general. For instance, one characteristic is that it is based on a healthy acceptance of the self and of others. So much can be accepted by these people that others would not accept” (Motivation and Personality 188). He feels that he is going blind in her love, “Yes, and to what am I willfully blinding myself that in time must set us apart?,” (251) but simultaneously he is well aware of his nature and he always creates doubts in himself as he asks here, whether this blindness in love can be a cause of another relationship breakdown. Although he is very happy in the intimate relationship with Claire yet he is always afraid of his nature that has caused many breakdowns. He expressed such feelings to Claire at bedtime:

Oh, innocent beloved, you fail to understand and I can’t tell you. I can’t say it, not tonight, but within a year my passion will be dead. Already it is dying and I am afraid that there is nothing I can do to save it. And nothing that you can do. Intimately bound—bound to you as to no one else!—and I will not be able to raise a hand to so much as touch you … unless first I remind myself that I must. (The Professor 261)

They start building their relationship and while in Europe on a romantic holiday, they travel to Kafka’s grave in Prague, and afterward, asleep in his mistress’s arms, David dreams of a bizarre encounter with “Kafka’s Whore.” David starts accepting all the situations whether pleasing or gloomy which is the evidence that his self-actualization is being built-up. As Maslow in his Motivation and Personality remarks about the nature of such actualized characters,

They can accept their own human nature in the stoic style, with all its shortcomings, with all its discrepancies from the ideal image without feeling real concern. It would convey the wrong impression to say that they are self-satisfied. What we must say rather is that they can take the frailties and sins, weaknesses, and evils of human nature in the same unquestioning spirit with which one accepts the characteristics of nature. (155)

David and Claire spend an idyllic summer in a rented Catskill where David feels blessed by the permanence of relationship and love. David is the same character who felt that with Helen his relationship was poisoned from the beginning but with Claire he is quite comfortable and feels that she is a reliable lady. But unconsciously he is still stained by his inner turmoil. He even dreams frequently about the differences in Helen and Claire and tries to investigate the reasons which can give him an assurance that his relationship with Claire will survive longer. In a dream he anticipates, “Did all you said, followed every instruction, unswervingly pursued the healthiest of regimens – even took it on myself to study the passions in my classroom, to submit to scrutiny those who have scrutinized the subject most pitilessly … ” David feels that Claire is an obedient and reliable wife compared to Helen and he finds that the unflinching changes in his intrinsic self-actualization are the result of the reliable nature of his wife:

… and here is the result! I know and I know and I know, I imagine and I imagine and I imagine, and when the worst happens, I might as well know nothing! You might as well know nothing! And feed me not the consolations of the reality principle! Just find it for me before it’s too late! The perfect young woman is waiting! That dream of a girl and the most livable of lives! (The Professor 262)

It is apparent through this statement of David that, it is David’s newborn stimulant of self-actualization that causes him to be comfortable with Claire. The analysis of the protagonist David is the evidence that to maintain a healthy and faithful relationship an intrinsic self-actualization is the key factor. Abraham Maslow describes the nature of self-actualized people as:

Self-actualizing people can all be described as relatively spontaneous in behavior and far more spontaneous than that in their inner life, thoughts, impulses, etc. Their behavior is marked by simplicity and naturalness, and by lack of artificiality or straining for effect. This does not necessarily mean consistently unconventional behavior … His unconventionality is not superficial but essential or internal. It is his impulses, thought, consciousness that are so unusually unconventional, spontaneous and natural. Apparently recognizing that the world of people in which he lives could not understand or accept this, and since he has no wish to hurt them or to fight with them over every triviality, he will go through the ceremonies and rituals of convention with a good-humored shrug and with the best possible grace. (157)

8. Conclusion

It can be concluded that the efforts of man are put into the realization of his own possibilities. The protagonist David Kepesh is entangled in other needs and could not strive for transcendence at the beginning but after he tied himself in a relationship with Claire while his other basic needs were bypassed and he was able to achieve the tangible need for self-actualization. The analysis explores all the painful ramifications about the pursuit and loss of erotic happiness in the lack of self-realization and self-actualization. Unless he is honest to himself, one cannot possess the full human potential he has to be an involved and productive person, unless in the spirit of mutuality he relates to others. From two main points of view, self-idealization can be seen: it is the rational result of early expansion, and it is also the starting of a new one. The energy that contributes to self-realization is redirected to the task of actualizing the idealized self. This shift means no more and no less than a change in the direction of the entire life and growth of the person. The realization of the self is based on the potential of an individual. One cannot develop full human potentialities unless he is truthful to himself unless he is active and productive; unless he relates himself to others in the spirit of mutuality. Understanding individual psychology of the self is the key to strive for actualization and realization of the self. The characters that initially face an inferiority complex in life are more stimulated to strive for success.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.