OOH! You've hit on a subject dear to my heart!! You might want to look into M.M. Neef's ideas about fundamental human needs, as well as Maslow's hierarchy of needs. With some deft manuevering and serious stripping of the extraneous you have the Franklin Reality Model. For fun you can check out what Freud had to say about basic needs. I find all of their postulations interesting but somehow I need to keep searching for the answer to why people do the crazy things they do. Myself included.
Cheers!
Chelle | 07.11.08 - 3:54 pm | #

I need to hie myself over to the library this week so I will look for Neef there.

Everyone has their own version of the basic needs model based on their own experiences. I was asking people at the country fair about it and they were coming up with "food, water, shelter" and some other, more green varieties of sustenance. Ha.

But strip it all away, as you say, and there you have it; what we really want and need goes deeper than where we will sleep tonight.

Chelle, if I had a clue as to why people do the crazy things they do, I probably wouldn't be writing this blog!

Myself included.
Lisa | Homepage | 07.15.08 - 4:16 pm | #