Learner therapist (13)……Needs and wants, revisited
Torrey Orton
Sept. 12, 2011
"…and if you try sometimes you get what you need"
It's commonly thought that needs and wants are a pair of related concepts, with wants in the role of supplicant to needs while seeking to become their surrogates. The pair is a basic unit of therapeutic assessment, in particular for all manner of relationship issues. Often I encourage patients to list the wants and needs they have of significant others in their lives – usually the relatively more powerful and distorting others at home, work or play. This exercise normally includes their perceptions of the other(s)' wants/needs of them, as well.
This is the starting place for reshaping the world to their own designs, lack of which leaves it shaped intractably by the powerful, and the social arrays around them. The outcome of the exercise, if seriously pursued, is always a focus on a few critical needs and possible pathways to them. This is the playground of little steps. The challenge, according to the Stones' famous ditty is: "you can't always get what you want, and if you try sometimes you get what you need".
Here's where wants come in developmentally. While being discretionary, they are also usually very specific, concrete and time-limited in their operation (even if repeated over long spans). People can list wants more easily than needs. So, as for the Stones, our wants are signposts of our possible needs. Following the posts may bring us to our needs as we currently understand them.
Wants are seen to be more discretionary; needs more necessary. Needs more solid; wants more fleeting, evanescent (though more concrete, strangely – wherein lies both their essential contribution to our need fulfilment and their potential for misleading us about the very needs we seek to fulfil). Certainly in couples therapy, for instance, a bunch of wants are expressions of needs. They are instruments of the directions needs propose to us, and often they elicit subject matters of resonant disputability.
Our needs have a fundamental reality and truthfulness about them. This is why people know eventually when some offered need fulfilment (a want) is wrong; not merely inappropriate, wrong. Being inappropriate is a matter of misconceiving a need, often an under-developed one; being wrong is a fake, manipulative, oppressive fulfilment like the binge sex and drugs and rock 'n roll micro-culture can be. Such self-knowledge, or the pursuit of a glimmer of it, is what brings people into developmental activities like therapy, study, etc. They are seeking need fulfilment by learning to negotiate their wants with themselves and others.If we have a framework for the needs which may compose a life for any human, we are therapeutically on better grounds than threshing around in the swarm of wants which modernity proposes as the answer to the question 'what does it all mean?' Acquire enough fulfilled wants and that's a life! Maybe even a brand.
Following is one such framework. There are others. I offer some signposting wants which may attach to each.
Elements of well-being (basic human needs)
*From: The Treatment of Sex Offenders: Risk Management and Good Lives.
Tony Ward, University of Melbourne, Claire A Stewart, Deakin University, 2005
Without specified needs we cannot decide how we are doing and what trade-offs are required to improve well-being. One approach to defining basic needs is this:
| Needs | Wants specifications of needs |
| 1) Life (including healthy living and functioning) | Adequate sleep, food, exercise |
| 2) Knowledge | Knowing that…Knowing how to….knowing why…etc. |
| 3) Excellence in play and work (including mastery experiences) | Play an instrument, a sport; Practice a profession, trade, art, hobby… |
| 4) Excellence in agency (i.e., autonomy and self-directedness) | Cooperative activities; enlisting others in our activities |
| 5) Inner peace (i.e., freedom from emotional turmoil and stress) | Meditation, martial arts, |
| 6) Friendship (including intimate, romantic and family relationships) | Appropriate care, affection, connectedness…. |
| 7) Community | Authentic membership, identification, … |
| 8) Spirituality (in the broad sense of finding meaning & purpose in life) | Relevant belief, imagery, contemplation…. |
| 9) Happiness | In my view this is not a need; it is one outcome of well-being |
| 10) Creativity | Opportunities to invent at whatever level or domain of life activity (also a doubtful need) |
