01.The important mentors who made my Epileptic Journey possible. (Article 5 of the history of my epilepsy.)

Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/abraham-maslow-and-the-all-american-self

According to Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs we have the basic human needs, which consist of physiological needs, security needs, social needs, which first must be satisfied before the appreciation and self-development can be met. Maslow studied healthy populations and what he called exemplary people rather than mentally ill or neurotic people. He claimed that studies of different types of handicapped, sick and immature beings only lead to a stunted and weakened psychological philosophy ...

Since Maslow’s pyramid or Hierarchy of Needs was fully expressed during the same decade that I developed epilepsy and started to study and got my first management training, I could not help but evaluate my own situation, with or without epilepsy, according to the Maslow theory a number of occasions. When the Primal Therapy came into the picture, I have also occasionally wondered about how the effectiveness of therapy activities best could be organized to provide patients with the minimum of subjective well being necessary to make a holistic dynamic treatment process successful. DR Janov is a brilliant pioneer and writer, but leadership and organization are not part of his specialities (according to himself, he cannot) and therefore, therapy has been stunted.

                                                                                                                                         

At one point in the early 1980is,  there were plans to build a pan-European organization, which I was invited to participate in. The work of investigation was too psychotherapeutic one - dimensional, and it called for no modern management strategies or tools to take care of other dimensions of a holistic treatment.

With the support of my epileptic / therapeutic ballast, my career and my experiences growing up, I have met many interesting mentors / bosses (including spouses) and  leaders. I will try to appreciate in special which advantages different leadership styles have had in order for me to maintain my subjective well being and how I have managed to find an equilibrium between private life, career, neuroses, epilepsy and therapy.

It has been a trial and error activities, which sometimes has been off the track but with good support it has, for the most part, come up back on the track again. I had during more than 25 years, within ambitiously oriented organizations, been given the opportunity to be specially trained while working with many of the tools that modern leadership and management over the years have developed. The collected experience has later given me a new perspective of why my epileptic life was possible and why I experienced so much subjective well-being during the journey.