Little Children

I wrote this earlier in the week, began to think it was stupid, but figured I'd post it anyway.

I have been thinking about Maslow's pyramid of needs and self-actualization, and then I watched a movie, Little Children, that seems to depict a fundamental component behind his scheme. Maslow's pyramid describes how he believes people prioritize their needs, starting with the fulfillment of basic physiological processes (level 1) up through our need for safety (2), love (3), self-confidence and proficiency (4) - and even beyond that to more the cognitive scientific and artistic pursuits (5-7). The idea is that you satisfy your needs on one level, and then your priorities shift to satisfying the needs on the next level. You progress up and up, with the ultimate goal of reaching a state of complete self-fulfillment, "to become everything that one is capable of becoming". However, sometimes a previously satisfied need all of a sudden becomes a problem again. You regress to prioritize things that level again.

In Little Children, Kate Winslet's character, Sara, was a PhD candidate in English Literature. She married an older man. At that point she was probably reasonably fulfilled. Then, she had a baby. She stopped working on her thesis. She became a stay-at-home suburban Mom, and her husband grew distant. She dropped down from the advanced levels of prioritizing her intellectual pursuits, she lost her self-esteem and sense of achievement in life (4), and she no longer felt loved by her husband (3). She doesn't even feel a strong bind with her daughter. Thus, she regresses, seeking intimacy elsewhere to satisfy her level 3 needs.

A similar analysis could be applied to some of the other characters in the movie: her lover loses his self-esteem as he is emasculated by his loving wife, which he attempts to regain through this affair and his attempts at regaining his youthful masculinity; his friend loses everything, his job on the police force, his family, and ultimately his sense of security, leading him to lash out against the new-to-the-neighborhood pedophile; etc. (I imagine the pedophile never progressed beyond level 1.)

The movie essentially is about how adults, when their lives no longer fulfill them, revert to acting irresponsibly, like children, or alternatively how they fall back, unconsciously, to lower levels of Maslow's pyramid, trying to fill in the needs they suddenly miss.

Why is it that their instincts drive them to a quick patch job? And why do they only realize their mistake when a catastrophe threatens their lives?