MASLOW,AH _The Farther Reaches of Human Nature_
pg 30-31 Ch. 2 "Neurosis as a Failure of Human Growth"

                          Human Diminution

One consequence of this usage of [the term] "full humanness" rather than
"psychological health" is the corresponding or parallel use of "human
diminution," instead of "neurosis," which is anyway a totally obsolete word.
Here the key concept is the loss or not-yet-actualization of human
capacities and possibilities, and obviously this is also a matter of degree
and quantity.  Furthermore, it is closer to being externally observable,
i.e., behavioral, which of course makes it easier to investigate than, for
example, anxiety or compulsiveness or repression. Also it puts on the same
continuum all the standard psychiatric categories, all the stuntings,
cripplings, and inhibitions that come from poverty, exploitation,
maleducation, enslavement, etc., and also the newer value pathologies,
existential disorders, character disorders that come to the economically
privileged. It handles very nicely the diminutions that result from drug
addiction, psychopathy, authoritarianism, criminality, and other categories
that cannot be called, "illness" in the same medical sense as can, e.g.,
brain tumor.

This is a radical move away from the medical model, a move which is long
overdue. Strictly speaking, neurosis means an illness of the nerves, a relic
we can very well do without today. In addition, using the label
"psychological illness" puts neurosis into the same universe of discourse as
ulcers, lesions, bacterial invasions, broken bones, or tumors.  But by now,
we have learned very well that it is better to consider neurosis as rather
related to spiritual disorders, to loss of meaning, to doubts about the
goals of life, to grief and anger over a lost love, to seeking life in a
different way, to loss of courage or of hope, to despair over the future, to
dislike for oneself, to recognition that one's life is being wasted, or that
there is no possibility to joy or love, etc.

These are all fallings away from full humanness, from the full blooming of
human nature. They are losses of human possibility, of what might have been
and could yet be perhaps. Physical and chemical hygiene and prophylaxes
certainly have some little place in this realm of psychopathogenesis, but
are as nothing in comparison with the far more powerful role of social,
economic, political, religious, educational, philosophical, axiological, and
familial determinants.

pg 32 'Subjective Biology'
I believe that helping a person to move toward full humanness proceeds
inevitably via awareness of one's identity (among other things).
A very important part of this task is to become aware of what one
/is/, biologically, tempermentally, constitutionally, as a member of a
species, of one's capacities, desires, needs, and also one's vocation,
what one is fitted for, what one's destiny is.

To say it very bluntly and unequivocally, one absolutely necessary aspect of
this self-awareness is a kind of pheomenology of one's own inner biology,
of that which I call "instinctoid", of one's animality and specieshood.
This is certainly what psychoanalysis tries to do, i.e., to help one to become
conscious of one's animal urges, needs, tensions, depressions, tastes,
anxieties. So also for Horney's distinction between a real self and a
pseudo-self. Is this not also a subjective discrimination of what one
truly is? And what /is/ one truly if not first and formeost one's own
body, one's own constitution, one's own functioning, one's own specieshood?