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Murray's psychogenic needs


In 1938, Henry Murray published Explorations in Personality, his system describing personality in terms of needs. For Murray, human nature involved a set of universal basic needs, with individual differences on these needs leading to the uniqueness of personality through varying dispositional tendencies for each need. In other words, specific needs are more important to some than to others. Frustration of these psychogenic (or psychological) needs plays a central role in the origin of psychological pain.

Murray differentiated each need as unique, but recognised commonalities among the needs. Behaviors may meet more than one need: for instance, performing a difficult task for your fraternity may meet the needs of both achievement and affiliation.

For Murray, human nature involves a set of universal basic needs. Individual differences of these needs lead to the uniqueness of a person's personality due to varying amounts of each need. In other words, specific needs are more important to some than to others. He believed that the study of personality should look at the entire person over the course of their lifespan (Flett, 2008). According to Murray, human psychogenic needs function on an unconscious level, but they can play a major role in our personality (Cherry, 2015). According to Murray, personality can be determined in four major ways. These include constitutional determinants, group membership determinants, life role determinants, and situational determinants (Flett, 2008).

He defines a need as a "potentiality or readiness to respond in a certain way under certain given circumstances" (1938). Murray defines needs in two ways- primary and secondary. Primary needs are any biological need, such as food, water, and oxygen and secondary needs as needs that are generally psychological- such as nurturing, achievement, and independence. Murray identified a total of 17 needs—each belonging to one of five particular need categories. The five categories of needs that Murray identified are Ambition, Materialism, Power, Affection, and Information.

While each need is important in and of itself, he also believed that needs can support other needs, conflict with one another, and can be interrelated. He coined the term subsidation of needs when two or more needs are combined in order to satisfy a more powerful need and fusion of needs when a single action satisfies more than one need (Flett, 2008). For example, the need for dominance may conflict the need with affiliation when overly controlling behavior drives away family, romantic partners, and friends. Environmental factors play a role in how these psychogenic needs are displayed in behavior.


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