Korzybski, the father of general semantics, gave the first clear, definite, functional definition of sanity. The sane person, he said, does not confuse levels of abstraction. He does not treat the map as if it were the territory. He does not copy animals in their reactions, and therefore he is not a dogmatist or a categorist. He does not treat as identical all things that have the same name. He does not exhibit two-valued orientations in which absolute good is pitted against absolute evil. He does not confuse reports with inferences, inferences with judgmental statements. He is cautious about applying generalizations to particulars, and so on.
Korzybski's account of sanity is at a high level of abstraction. He said, for example, that if our evaluative processes were not crippled by built-in misevaluations, we would all function so well that we could be regarded as geniuses. Some people have laughed at Korzybski because they thought this a vast overstatement, but there is nothing to laugh at here. We all know people, including people who are very dear to us among our friends and relatives, who we feel would be enormously creative if they got the bugs out of their systems. Often we feel that way about ourselves.
Professor A.H. Maslow of Brandeis University has done a study of what he calls the "self-actualizing person" in his book, Motivation and Personality. Also, Dr. Carl Rogers of the University of Chicago, in his book On Becoming a Person, tried to isolate the characteristics of what he called the "fully functioning person" or the "creative person." From their work and that of others in the same general direction, we get a picture of what modern psychologists--specifically those psychologists whose position is most closely allied to that of general semantics--regard as the psychologically healthy person, that is, the person whose search for security has been successful (Gendlin, 1988).
In order to isolate the...