• home
• the firm
• our people
  • attorneys
  • staff
• experience
  • practice areas
  • cases
  • articles
  • tesitmonials
• contact us

Contact Us

(206) 726-6600

Continued... Page 5 > Developing a Theme that Sells

Maslow's conclusions are grounded in basic common sense. The gratification of fundamental needs, like safety or love, is essential, their frustration and deprivation breeds sickness. Maslow points out an important potential avenue approach to jurors and other decision makers ñ to focus on the special status of our basic needs and the great misfortune that follows having the satisfaction of these needs taken away, all, or in part.

Maslow also spoke to the frailty of the human condition:

[Our] inner nature is a very delicate and subtle something rather than being strong and overpowering as it is in lower animals, who are never in any doubt about what they are, what they want, and what they do not want. The human needs for love, or for knowledge or for philosophy, are weak and feeble rather than unequivocal and unmistakable; they whisper rather than shout.

Maslow, ìMotivation And Personalityî (1954) pp. 348: 49.

One of the classic works on the consequences of deprivation of basic human needs is Viktor E. Frankl's book Man's Search For Meaning . Dr. Frankl was an Austrian psychotherapist who was a longtime prisoner in German concentration camps during World War II. His entire family perished in these camps. Dr. Frankl came to realize what it was that kept people alive under these extreme, inhuman circumstances:

Hunger, humiliation, fear and deep anger and injustice are rendered tolerable by closely guarded images of beloved persons, by religion, by a grim sense of humor and even by glimpses of the healing beauties of nature ñ a tree or a sunset. But these moments of comfort do not establish the will to live unless they help the prisoner make larger sense out of his apparently senseless suffering. . . . In the concentration camp every circumstance conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All the familiar goals in life are snatched away. What alone remains is his last of human freedoms ñ the ability to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances. Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning (1946) pp. 10:12 : from the preface by Dr. Gordon W. Allport.

Despite the difficulties of daily life in the concentration camps, Dr. Frankl's powers of observation were undiminished. What emerged in his mind as the core of human existence is the following description:

An unrelenting struggle for daily bread and for life itself, for one's own sake or for that of a good friend . . . There was neither a time nor desire to consider moral or ethical issues. Every man was controlled by one thought only: to keep himself alive for the family waiting for him at home and to save his friends. (Frankl, supra at pp. 22 - 23.)

>>NEXT