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2007-02-03 03:00:18 · 4 answers · asked by sen 1 in Social Science Psychology

4 answers

1. Love and Compassion
2. Food, clothing, shelter, and oxygen
3. Faith, Hope, and Dreams
4. Yahoo Q&A!!

I know this is really more than 4. Forgive me!!

2007-02-03 03:53:16 · answer #1 · answered by JOURNEY 5 · 0 0

There are two answers to this question, but I'm going to look at this as the four things humans cannot emotionally live without.

I believe that humans cannot live a full life and function emotionally without affection, goals, security, and companionship. This is true of most humans, there are always execptions.

Companionship and affection are similar, but not exactly the same. Companionship, as I'm using it, is actual physical companionship, having at least one or preferably more people to talk to, to hear and touch and feel. Companionship is crucial to normal mental health. There are cases of people stranded by themselves making up imaginary friends, talking to animals as if they were people, things designed to give them actual physical companionship.

Affection is closely tied to this. While companionship is physical, affection is emotional. Everyone needs someone to trust and to care for, someone to care for them. You can have affection without companionship, by being stranded alone but knowing that you are loved, and you can have companionship without affection, if you are trapped in an environment with uncaring or hostile people. If a person does not have affection, they will either find a non-human substitute, such as a doll, stuffed toy, or an animal, or they will develop affection for a non-affectionate person. We see this in things like Stockholm Syndrome, where captives grow fiercely loyal to their captors in rder to be valued, and abused children fiercely protectiong their abusers and lying to cover for them because they desperately want their abusers to love them, they believe that if they do this one thing right they will finally be loved.

Goals are also important. Without goals, a person will spiral, they will believe they have no purpose, that they are useless. Some suicidal people believe they have no purpose in life, that they have nothing to live for. Many people who sink into drugs or alcoholism do so because they have nothing to work towards.

The final thing is security. Everyone needs to be secure, it is a basic animal instinct. People work their whole lives for security, they get a job to put food on the table, join a gang to have somewhere to belong, move to a safer environment to be secure when they sleep, buy health insurance for security in case they get sick, car insurance for security in case of a crash, life insurance to know their loved ones will have something when they die.

Without these things, a person could perhaps live, but it would not be a full life. They would slowly become embittered, or they would constantly feel empty and settle into a depression. Many people who i know who've fallen to drugs and alcohol are missing one or more of these things. It is possible to help them, by filling the hole where one of these things was missing, you can give them what they need to pull out, but as long as it is gone, that will isn't there. There ae other things people need, but i think that covers the main points.

2007-02-03 12:10:01 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

live in general- food, saftey (or protectino from predators), shelter from nature, and clothing to keep our bodies at a warm temp

not to be alive and live productivly:

our basic needs as written above, companionship, sense of idenitity, achieveable goals/some kind of job/hobby (a career, volenterr work, parenting, caring for others, ect)

2007-02-03 14:08:41 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

food, water, oxygen and shelter.

2007-02-03 11:08:56 · answer #4 · answered by david d 5 · 0 0

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