In "The Night Trilogy" Maslow’s
hierarchy is shown throughout the book. For example when the Jews where
verbally assaulted they lost their self-esteem. They were brought out into the
streets and humiliated in front of their friends and family. There was nothing
they could do about it either. When they lost that, they couldn’t go on to
self-actualization without regaining their self-esteem. Then when the Jews were taken from their homes
and put into ghettos they also had their safety taken from them. They had to
fight to get food and keep their families safe from people who started to rob
other families, families that they knew for years. Since that was taken away
from them, they focused more on getting themselves to safety rather than
working and trying to build up their self-esteem and self-actualization, along
with belonging. No one was there to give them love and affection. They were
left on their own. After some time, the Nazi soldiers took away the Jews’ physiological
part in the pyramid. With this gone the Jews lacked good health, filing food,
and proper sleep. Now that these things were gone they had nothing to work on,
everything was taken from them. Before they could even feel better about
themselves, they needed to regain their physiology and safety, which would take
a lot of effort to rebuild after it was all taken away.
A real world example would be when you have
children who get severely abused. They often lack the trait in Maslow’s
hierarchy. When there are verbally hurt they lost their Esteem and
self-actualization. Since their parents were abusing them I doubt they felt
like they belonged in the house they were in. Then with all the physical abuse
the child didn’t feel safe either. Lastly, the parent(s) could’ve starved their
child, so then the physiological aspect was taken away also.
