Maslow regarded peak experiences as vital to mental health and creativity.

He found that even life-changing peaks can be difficult to describe with ordinary language.

He developed a new approach that he called "rhapsodic communication."

Have you had a peak experience lately, replete with great happiness and personal fulfillment? If so, you've probably found that sharing it meaningfully isn't easy. For paradoxically, while disappointments and frustrations are easily described, not so with extraordinarily positive feelings. As Abraham Maslow discovered decades ago in his seminal studies, peaks are often elusive to recount (even to ourselves afterward) and may therefore elicit indifference or outright skepticism.

Why does this matter? Because our closeness with friends, romantic partners, and family members depends heavily on our ability to relate our experiences. And, as Maslow realized in interviewing college students and others, our ordinary language is woefully inadequate for such exploration into "the farther reaches of human nature" (the poetic title of his influential, posthumously-published book). Almost invariably, his interviewees struggled to verbalize the joy, wonder, gratitude, or ecstatic delight that they had felt during these soaring moments.

As Maslow's biographer, I wasn't surprised that he empathized on this matter, for he grappled with it in his own life: the challenge of sharing subtle emotions borne from evocative dreams, reveries, and visionary glimpses of what he termed the unitive "Being Realm." He passionately argued that we lack an experientially-based vocabulary to catalyze the science of human potentiality—particularly concerning somatic sensations, and not just uplifting mental states.

In seeking to build a phenomenology of positive psychology in the 1960s, Maslow chose aspects that seemed most accessible to people in everyday life—such as romantic love. For this reason, he liked to ask in his lectures at Brandeis University, the Esalen Institute, and elsewhere, "How does it feel in your body when you're in love, when you've just fallen in love, or when you gaze at your beloved? Don't intellectualize it, describe what you actually feel!" In modern Western society, he insisted, most people haven't a clue.

In Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, Maslow highlighted his technique of "rhapsodic communication" (as he called it) to remedy this situation, because "sober, analytic" verbalizations were inadequate. "As I went on interviewing (individuals about their peak-experiences), I...learned...to shift over, more and more, to figures of speech, metaphors, similes...and (generally) use more and more poetic speech." In this way, he found, interviewees could recall and describe their peaks far more effectively. At the time of Maslow's death from heart disease in 1970, he was busily at work on expanding this approach. But it still remains largely undeveloped. As communications researcher Ronald Gordon recently noted, "'Peak' communication experiences have received scant conceptual and empirical attention."

In a vivid example of how scientific innovators often work independently on the same questions, Maslow was seemingly unaware that Carl Jung had also encountered this issue—and devised methods to help overcome the limitations of verbal language. For example, Jung stated in an influential essay for therapists on dreamwork: “Often the hands know how to solve a riddle with which the intellect has wrestled in vain.” For Jung, such techniques as painting and clay-modelling were effective for “shaping the dream in greater detail in the waking state...even though it remains at first (incomprehensible and) unconscious to the subject.”

Jung’s own lifelong engagement with sculpting and stonework also helped to forge the contemporary practice known as sandplay therapy—to promote personality growth in children, adolescents, and adults. Initially created by his protégé Dora Kalff in the 1960s, it has gained adherents around the world. In sandplay therapy, clients create a three-dimensional scene in a large tray filled with sand, using a selection of miniature figures and objects including animals, fantastical images, fences, landscapes, plants, and stones. Clients are encouraged to tell a story about the scene, or express their feelings or mental associations about it. Certainly, this technique is relevant to Maslow’s notion of “rhapsodic communication.”

Sharing Your Peak Experiences

To strengthen your ability to communicate rhapsodically, I recommend three different methods. Try each separately in describing a past peak experience, and see what's most effective for you. First, following Jung’s dreamwork advice, try drawing, painting, or clay-modeling your lofty moment of happiness and fulfillment. Many different artistic media exist, so you may discover a predilection for watercolors versus acrylic, or charcoal pencil versus pen-and-ink. Choose colors that most express your emotions at the heart of your peak, rather than minor details of images. Second, try music to recount your peak using rhythm and melody—either by playing a musical instrument, or by singing/chanting. Finally, improvisational dance offers another sensory modality—and one that Maslow greatly prized—to express the seemingly ineffable. With practice, you'll find it easier to let others know you better through these exalted, and potentially transformative, moments.

Gordon, R.D. (2023). Peak and plateau communication experiences (PCEs): An international call for inquiry. KOME--An International Journal of Pure Communication Inquiry. Published online.

Hoffman, E. (1996) (Ed). Future Visions: The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow. Sage.

Hoffman, E. (1999). The Right to be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow, 2nd edition. McGraw-Hill.

Hoffman, E., & Compton, W. C. (2022). The Dao of Maslow: A new direction for mentorship. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 66(2), 295-314.

Hoffman, E. & Bey, T. (2023) Educating for eupsychia: Maslow's unfinished agenda and Aldous Huxley's role in its advancement. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 63 (4), 459-476.

Maslow, A.H. (1970). Religions, Values and Peak-Experiences, 2nd edition. Viking.

Maslow. A.H. (2019). Personality & Growth: A Humanistic Psychologist in the Classroom. Maurice Bassett.

Special thanks to Tass Bey for his conceptual contributions to this article.

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