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JOURNAL OF METAPSYCHOLOGY
431 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, California 94025

 

Article 62
October 23, 1990

Needs and Wishes

I have earlier defined "desire" as follows:
Definition:  Desire is affinity directed toward an entity (rather than toward a person). It is an impulse toward having or continuing to have an entity.
Corresponding to a person's desires are the entities in the person's world that are the objects of desire: pleasures of one kind or another. For every desire, there is a corresponding pleasure that would constitute the fulfillment of that desire. I am thirsty and there is the pleasure of drinking; I want some ice cream, and there is the pleasure of eating it. I want to make love with someone and there is the pleasure of doing so. A "pleasure" can thus be defined as follows:
Definition: A pleasure is an entity that would satisfy a person's desire or desires. It is that which, on the world side of the person-world polarity, corresponds to desire on the person side.
Furthermore, there are two kinds of desire: negative desires, or "needs", and positive desires, or "wishes":
Definition: A need is a desire for something the absence of which would be experienced as painful to the person.
or, equivalently:
Definition: A need for something is an aversion to the absence of that thing.
whereas:
Definition: A wish is a desire for something the absence of which would not be experienced as painful to the person.
or:
Definition: A wish is a desire for something to whose absence the person does not have an aversion.
Clearly, wishes are much lighter things than needs. If you don't get what you wish, you aren't necessarily unhappy. You may, at worst, be slightly disappointed. But if you don't get what you need, then you will experience pain or even a threat to survival. If I wish for a bowl of ice cream and I don't get it, it's no big deal. But if I am starving and I need food and don't get it, it is a big deal, because I will suffer or die as a result.

Note that, from the person-centered viewpoint, when we talk about needs, we mean felt needs, not things that someone else might look upon as needs. Someone might look at me and say that I need better clothing. But if I don't feel that need, it does not exist as a need for me. I might (from my viewpoint) experience a desperate need for heroin, but someone else looking at me might think I need to get away from it.

Furthermore, I may need some things much more than I need others. The degree of need varies with the amount of pain or aversion that I would experience in the absence of the needed item. The need I feel to have a nail clipper in order to handle a hangnail is not as strong as the need I would feel for water if I were dying of thirst. Nevertheless, both are legitimate needs, as above defined.

Just as desires are of two types, so are pleasures: negative pleasure is "relief", and positive pleasure is "joy":

Definition: A relief is a pleasure that comes from the satisfaction of a need and results in the reduction, avoidance, or elimination of pain.
whereas:
Definition: A joy is a pleasure that comes from the satisfaction of a wish and does not necessarily result in the reduction, avoidance, or elimination of pain.
Many (but not all) joys, as defined above, are aesthetic. I may wish to see the Mona Lisa, but I will not feel pain if I don't see it. I don't have a need to see it; I don't have any "Mona Lisa hunger", latent or otherwise. It is just that I would like to see it. But other joys are not particularly aesthetic: a game of Monopoly or Charades, for instance, or a bowl of ice cream.1

Wishes (and joys) do not constitute a source of difficulty in life. It does not make us unhappy not to have our wishes fulfilled. It is the frustration of our needs that causes pain and suffering.

But why are certain desires needs, rather than just wishes? I think the the trouble lies in having fixed desires -- desires one cannot easily put aside.

What could cause a desire to be fixed? There are at least three possibilities:

  1. The desire is at the top of the motivational tree and is thus inescapable. I have stated elsewhere that the highest motivations are toward empowerment and communion. A person cannot change his mind about wanting power and communion in general, although he should have considerable freedom of choice about the forms that power and communion can take.
  2. A person -- because of aberration or for lack of experience, knowledge, imagination, or intelligence -- may have a scarcity of desires -- of things that he can conceive of having -- and might thus cling to the one or the few desires he has that represent things he can conceive of having. His concept of power and communion might be very limited, for instance. He might think that money is the only form of power and that sex is the only form of communion. He then feels compelled to seek money and sex and becomes extremely distressed when they are not there. In other words, sex and money become needs for him because he doesn't see any other alternatives.
  3. Not attaining the object of a certain desire might actually result in emotional or physical pain -- either primary pain or secondary pain (pain based on restimulation). An unwillingness or inability to confront that pain keeps the desire in place.
Once a desire is fixed, it becomes a need. As the person continues to fail to attain the object of that desire, he becomes more and more frustrated, descends into the lower regions of the emotional scale, and experiences painful negative emotions. So we can offer yet another definition of "need":
Definition: A need is a fixed desire.
The Buddha teaches that the basic difficulty in life, the basic source of pain, is craving or fixed desires -- in other words: needs. It seems that this teaching is correct.
Frank A. Gerbode, M.D.
Director, IRM
1 My earlier division of pleasure into relief and aesthetics was thus not entirely accurate and complete. The more accurate division is into joy and relief, with aesthetics existing as a sub-category under "joy". I am indebted to Chuck McDougall for pointing out this inaccuracy.
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