16 driving motivations of the human soul

Sigmund Freud used to think that sex is the main motivation in our life. His intellectual legacy illustrates very clearly the principle according to which we put at the basis of our existence, what dominates us, what we miss, or what we are obsessed with. One of the first to try to establish a hierarchy of human needs and desires was Abraham Maslow. In an approach called "a human hierarchy of need", he conceives a pyramidal stratification of these needs, which he presents to us in the following form:

Broadly speaking, the needs identified by Abraham Mallow can be detailed as follows:

1. Physiological needs - the basic needs of the organism, starting with the maintenance of the internal pH - balance, and ending with the need for activity, rest, or having sex.

2. Safety needs - when the physiological needs are satisfied, the human being can dedicate himself to the search for safe circumstances of stability and protection. Concerns related to the structuring of personal life now appear (work, friends, neighborhood, pension etc.).

3. Love and belonging - any human being needs to establish affectionate relationships with a beloved person, and their own family. At the same level the major psychological impact of existential anxiety and of the individual's loneliness and alienation appear.

4. Esteem needs - these appear on two distinct levels. "The lower need" is related to respect for others, need for glory, the esteem and respect of others, the need for attention, reputation, appreciation, dignity, or even domination. The "superior level" is especially related to the need for self-esteem, associated to some concepts like trust, sense of competence, skill, fulfillment, independence, and freedom.

5. Self-actualization - the need reserved for those very few who permanently feel the impulse to become "everything one is capable of becoming". Ultimately, an imperious need for developing and realizing the full potential of self.
40 years after Abraham Maslow, a group of psychologists from Ohio University, U.S.A., led by professor Steven Reiss, made a far more thorough study of the fundamental impulses of the human being. They worked with a group of 2500 subjects, who were solicited to fill in a questionnaire, in which they accepted or rejected 300 pre-fabricated statements.
According to the results published on different successive deadlines, the arrangements of the answers highlighted 16 fundamental values (desires), from which 13 are similar to those found in animals, and are connected to survival.

Let's see what the 16 driving motivations of the human soul are:
- CURIOSITY: the preoccupation for investigating the surrounding environment, which in the case of man includes the desire for learning
- FOOD: the need for food
- HONOR: the desire to respect a certain code of behavior in the context of the following two motivations
- FEAR OF REJECTION: the fear of being rejected by society
- SEX: sexual desires, with their whole array of specific behaviors and emotional feelings
- PHYSICAL: the need to have physical activity
- ORDER: the need to have an ordered everyday life
- INDEPENDENCE: the need for independence in decision-making
- REVENGE: the need to revenge (a reaction to offence and aggression)
- SOCIAL CONTACTS: the need to have social contacts, to be in the company of other human beings
- FAMILY: the need to have a family, to have a family life
- SOCIAL PRESTIGE: the desire for social prestige, to attract the positive attention of others
- SAVINGS: the need for savings
- AVERSION: the fear of pain and worrying situations
- CITIZENSHIP: the civic spirit (the need for social justice and civic involvement)
- POWER: the need for power (the capacity to influence and dominate others)

According to the opinion expressed by Steven Reiss, the 3 needs, the origins of which are not genetic, are the civic spirit, independent decision-making, and the fear of being rejected by society. The reasoning regarding the third need seems false to me, as it constitutes a reflex connected to how the individual's security is affected, in circumstances in which he is isolated from the group to which he belongs.
As a general note, what we have to keep in mind is that any human behavior has a genetic determination in its primary phase, and is inspired by 3 instincts that are well-implanted in the genes: security, food, and reproduction. But from a sophiological point of view, we are interested in specialization itself, and the 3 specializations outlined above (which we call fundamental specializations), are the same for all life forms on this planet. Still, we know that there are an important number of typically human specializations, borne from the specific complexity of human social life, with its psychological and emotional reflections. We call these specializations secondary (as they are directly generated by the fundamental specializations, but they situate themselves in the secondary plane of our existence), or derived (if they are almost exclusively connected to the internal dynamics of the human psyche). Until now, cultural evolution (namely the extra-genetic transmission or shaping of the secondary and derived specializations) prevented us from seeing clearly two distinct situations:
a. fundamental specializations are ubiquitous in all living CAP, and determine a high proportion of their behaviors (almost until the human stage of evolution, it virtually determines it completely)
b. secondary specializations, which are typically human manifestations, can be related almost without exception to the 3 fundamental specializations, by which they were generated at certain moments of human evolution. What Steven Reiss calls "desires" are actually nothing other than the appearance, in the conscious register of our psyche, of the action of the package of specializations with which the genetic and cultural evolution endowed our species.

In the light of our concept, the 16 motivations catalogued by Steven Reiss can be grouped as follows:
a. Security motivations: curiosity, honor, the desire to have physical activities, the desire to have an ordered everyday life, independent decision-making, need for revenge, need for social prestige, savings, fear of pain, and civic spirit.
b. Security and sex motivations: the fear of being rejected by society, the need to have a family, the need to have social contacts, and the desire for power.
c. sex motivations: sexual desires and sexual life.
d. food motivations: the need for food (which is actually also in connection with the concept of family and the need to have social contacts).

There are many other processes that marked the evolution of mankind, and which we can't place precisely into one category. Incest, for example. The interdiction of having consanguineous sexual relationships has a strong justification in practical genetics. But such an interdiction was sometimes extended, especially in the early stages of humanity, to the level of the whole community. The situations whereby marriages within a clan were entirely forbidden were by no means rare. This facilitated the improvement of inter-neighbor relationships by establishing relations on a marital line with other clans.
Even if this is cantoned sexually, the prohibition of incest mainly has a security function - assuring the necessities of peaceful cohabitation with the neighboring human communities. But let's see first what the structuring of the 16 basic desires is, from the point of view of sophiology (grouped depending on their positioning in relation to the 3 fundamental specializations), to which we add 4 distinct derived specializations:

Encoding S(security) R(eproduction) F(ood)
SRF1 POWER
SRF2 SOCIAL CONTACT
SRF3 FAMILY
SR1 REJECTION
SR2 SOCIAL PRESTIGE
SR3 HONOR
SF1 SAVINGS

S1 AVERSION
S2 CURIOSITY
S3 PHYSICAL
S4 INDEPENDENCE
S5 VENGEANCE
S6 ORDER
S7 CITIZENSHIP
F1 FOOD

R1 SEX

D1 POETRY
D2 RELIGION
D3 ARTISTIC CREATION
D4 INTELLECTUAL CREATION

The codification of the Reissian domains is very clear, the group of 1, 2, or 3 letters indicating to which one (or more) of the three fundamental specializations the related domain is subordinated. The encoding suggests what would be the hierarchy of these domains. The hierarchy shows us the age of the related specializations, which also correspond, on the whole, to the intensity of their action (wouldn't you easily give up the civic spirit, or the spirit or order when having to deal with the direct threat of a physical pain?).
On the other hand, I'd like to emphasize a feature that Steven Reiss, lacking a global overview of the human being, didn't notice: all the specializations that he very accurately classified are functional specializations, generated by the integration of CAP with the environment. These functional specializations interact with structural specializations, generating the complete picture of the existence of a CAP.
For example: saving is a functional specialization, which in the case of pre-human CAP, appears in food, water, or fat tissue storage, with the purpose of surviving cold or dry seasons. In the case of man the structural specializations of the human brain are to be added, like anticipation and provision, which can produce a coherent behavior of savings (planning of earnings, material and financial investment programs, pension funds etc.)

In order to ease general comprehensibility, especially for those who are familiar with Maslow and Reiss's theories, let's make a few general notes:
1. Maslow outlines a reasonably accurate inventory of the fields of specializations, but he lacks the philogenetical vision, which could have helped him to order these domains in a sequence which could bring to light their importance. It is a mistake to consider sex as a simple physiological need, when it is actually connected to the fundamental specialization of reproduction. Because of Maslow's incapability to highlight the fundamental specializations, security appears at the superior level of the pyramid, when actually the first ingredient in security for any living creature, is the provision of the basic necessities. As a result, Maslow's pyramid norms are based, not so much on causal relationships, or the sequence of their appearance, but strictly on the frequency of occurrences within the human population.

2. Reiss advanced much further than Maslow in the identification of human specializations. His work is remarkable, with very highly individualized and statistically well supported results, while Maslow based his work, when it came to details, far more on intuition.
Unfortunately Reiss didn't see out his study. He stopped looking for causal and temporal relations between the specializations that he highlighted, and he didn't try to build an explanatory system for human nature - in other words he didn't try to build "a pyramid of his own!".