characteristics of the "selfactualizing" personality, Maslow started with a rough definition and applied it to those of his friends, acquaintances, and students who seemed to fit the bill. He also studied a number of historical characters and living personalities, about 60 or 70 people altogether, who seemed to meet the requirements. Some of them were famous, some obscure. Some he thought to be self-actualizing turned out, on closer examination, not to be as healthy as they looked at first. After much careful screening, he narrowed down his list to some forty people whom he found to be self-actualizing to a large degree.
Here we shall lump together Rogers' "fully functioning person" with Maslow's "self-actualizing personality" and call this combined abstraction the "genuinely sane individual."
The most impressive fact, as described by both Rogers and
Maslow, is that these sane people are not, on the ordinary sense of the term, "well-adjusted" (Ames, 1990 ). The unreflective layman and many schoolteachers and administrators, even some psychiatrists
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