Introducing the Intrapsychic Motivations

Abstract

There is no more crucial relationship for us humans to develop than the one we have with ourselves. That’s why intrapsychic motives are a gateway to other areas of our study. The ability to distinguish ourselves from the world around us is an early, critical developmental task that helps us establish our place in the world, discover and form our relationship to it and the people in it, and finally, build a positive, lifelong relationship with ourselves. Cause and effect, action and reaction, inside and outside—all of our most basic ideas about how the world works rest first on our ability to recognize what is “I” and “me” and what is not. Only after this distinction is made are we free to enter into a lifelong pursuit of protecting, understanding, evolving, expressing, and improving our vision of ourselves. All of the strivings in regard to the critical sense of self belong to the first column of the Forbes Matrix, the intrapsychic motives.