Resumen

GONZALEZ CABALLERO, Ángel. Relevance of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises as a Tool for Human Development from the Maslow’s Theory of Self-Actualization. En-clav. pen [online]. 2024, vol.18, n.35, e647.  Epub 11-Mar-2024. ISSN 2594-1100.  https://doi.org/10.46530/ecdp.v0i35.647.

Aristotle said: “The supreme goal of man is happiness”. All people are looking for happiness, and throughout the history of humanity, different proposals have emerged that pretend to achieve this goal. Two thousand years ago, Jesus of Nazareth lived in the region of Palestine and Israel, who with his life and doctrine has proposed a path of human fulfillment. Among his followers, between the 15th and 16th centuries, in the Basque Country lived saint Ignatius of Loyola, whose spirituality originated from a “peak experience “in Pamplona is still followed and lived by thousands of people around the world. The Spiritual Exercises, developed between 1521 and 1548, are the “itinerary” in which Íñigo López de Loyola discovered God, and he developed his purpose of life and some other elements that may let us call him a “self-realized person”, according to the definition and studies that, almost four hundred years later in America were developed and published by the psychologist Abraham H. Maslow, providing the basis for Humanist Psychology. Throughout this research, a hermeneutical analysis will be made between the writings of Saint Ignatius of Loyola and those of Maslow to establish what elements they have in common, and thus contextualize and update the Ignatian proposal, which is none other than a radical follow-up of Jesus of Nazareth, archetype of the “eternal self-actualization”.

Palabras llave : Psychology; spirituality; self-actualization; Human Development; Spiritual Exercises; Ignatian.