"The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short." -- Abraham Maslow
Abraham Harold Maslow (April 1, 1908 — June 8, 1970) was a professor of psychology at Brandeis University who founded humanistic psychology and created Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
"A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.""A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.""All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.""But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.""Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self actualization and the love for the highest values.""Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.""He that is good with a hammer tends to think everything is a nail.""I was awfully curious to find out why I didn't go insane.""If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I'd still swim. And I'd despise the one who gave up.""If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be unhappy for the rest of your life.""If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.""If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.""One's only rival is one's own potentialities. One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.""The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.""The fact is that people are good, Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.""We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.""We may define therapy as a search for value.""What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.""What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself."
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Maslow was the oldest of seven children. His parents were uneducated Jews from Russia. He was slow and tidy, and remembered his childhood as lonely and rather unhappy, because, as he said, "I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I was isolated and unhappy. I grew up in libraries and among books." He would pursue law, but he went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin to study psychology. While there, he married his first cousin Bertha in December 1928, and found as his chief mentor, professor Harry Harlow. At Wisconsin he pursued an original line of research, investigating primate dominance behaviour and sexuality. He went on to further research at Columbia University, continuing similar studies; there he found another mentor in Alfred Adler, one of Sigmund Freud's early colleagues.
From 1937 to 1951, Maslow was on the faculty of Brooklyn College. In New York he found two more mentors, anthropologist Ruth Benedict andGestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, whom he admired both professionally and personally. These two were so accomplished in both realms, and such "wonderful human beings" as well, that Maslow began taking notes about them and their behaviour. This would be the basis of his lifelong research and thinking about mental health and human potential. He wrote extensively on the subject, borrowing ideas from other psychologists but adding significantly to them, especially the concepts of a hierarchy of needs, metaneeds, self-actualizing persons, and peak experiences. Maslow became the leader of the humanistic school of psychology that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, which he referred to as the "third force" -- beyond Freudian theory and behaviourism. In 1967, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year.
Maslow was a professor at Brandeis University from 1951 to 1969, and then became a resident fellow of the Laughlin Institute in California. He died of a heart attack on June 8, 1970.
Many psychologists have made impacts on society's understanding of the world. Abraham Maslow was one of these; he brought a new face to the study of human behavior. He called his new discipline, "Humanistic Psychology."
His family life and his experiences influenced his psychological ideas. After World War II, Maslow began to question the way psychologists had come to their conclusions, and though he didn’t completely disagree, he had his own ideas on how to understand the human mind.
Humanistic psychologists believe that every person has a strong desire to realize his or her full potential, to reach a level of "self-actualization". To prove that humans are not simply blindly reacting to situations, but trying to accomplish something greater, Maslow studied mentally healthy individuals instead of people with serious psychological issues. This informed his theory that people experience “peak experiences", high points in life when the individual is in harmony with himself and his surroundings. In Maslow's view, self-actualized people can have many peak experiences throughout a day while others have those experiences less frequently.
Hierarchy of needs
A visual aid Maslow created to explain his theory, which he called the Hierarchy of Needs, is a pyramid depicting the levels of human needs, psychological and physical. When a human being ascends the steps of the pyramid he reaches self actualization. At the bottom of the pyramid are the “Basic needs or Physiological needs” of a human being, food and water and sex. The next level is “Safety Needs: Security, Order, and Stability.” These two steps are important to the physical survival of the person. Once individuals have basic nutrition, shelter and safety, they attempt to accomplish more. The third level of need is “Love and Belonging,” which are psychological needs; when individuals have taken care of themselves physically, they are ready to share themselves with others. The fourth level is achieved when individuals feel comfortable with what they have accomplished. This is the “Esteem” level, the level of success and status (from self and others). The top of the pyramid, “Need for Self-actualization,” occurs when individuals reach a state of harmony and understanding. (The Developing Person through the Life Span, (1983) pg. 44)
Maslow based his study on the writings of other psychologists, Albert Einstein and people he knew who clearly met the standard of self actualization. Maslow used Einstein's writings and accomplishments to exemplify the characteristics of the self actualized person. He realized that all the individuals he studied had similar personality traits. All were "reality centered", able to differentiate what was fraudulent from what was genuine. They were also "problem centered", meaning that they treated life’s difficulties as problems that demanded solutions. These individuals also were comfortable being alone and had healthy personal relationships. They had only a few close friends and family rather than a large number of shallow relationships. One historical figure Maslow found to be helpful in his journey to understanding self actualization was Lao Tzu, The Father of Taoism. A tenet of Taoism is that people do not obtain personal meaning or pleasure by seeking material possessions.
When Maslow introduced these ideas some weren't ready to understand them; others dismissed them as unscientific. Sometimes viewed as disagreeing with Freud and psychoanalytic theory, Maslow actually positioned his work as a vital complement to that of Freud. Maslow stated in his book, “It is as if Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.” (Toward a psychology of being, 1968) There are two faces of human nature...the sick and the healthy...so there should be two faces of psychology.
Consequently, Maslow argued, the way in which essential needs are fulfilled is just as important as the needs themselves. Together, these define the human experience. To the extent a person finds cooperative social fulfillment, he establishes meaningful relationships with other people and the larger world. In other words, he establishes meaningful connections to an external reality...an essential component of self-actualization. In contrast, to the extent that vital needs find selfish and competitive fulfillment, a person acquires hostile emotions and limited external relationships...his awareness remains internal and limited.
Ruth Benedict and Max Wertheimer were Maslow's models of self-actualization. From them he generalized that, among other characteristics, self-actualizing people tend to focus on problems outside themselves; have a clear sense of what is true and what is false; are spontaneous and creative; and are not bound too strictly by social conventions.
Beyond the routine of needs fulfillment, Maslow envisioned moments of extraordinary experience, known as Peak experiences, which are profound moments of love, understanding, happiness, or rapture, during which a person feels more whole, alive, self-sufficient and yet a part of the world, more aware of truth, justice, harmony, goodness, and so on. Self-actualizing people have many such peak experiences.
In studying accounts of peak experiences, Maslow identified a manner of thought he called "Being-cognition" (or "B-cognition", which is holistic and accepting, as opposed to the evaluative "Deficiency-cognition" or "D-cognition") and values he called "Being-values". He listed the B-values as:
TRUTH (honesty; reality; nakedness; simplicity; richness; oughtness; beauty; pure, clean and unadulterated; completeness; essentiality).
SELF-SUFFICIENCY (autonomy; independence; not-needing-other-than-itself-in-order-to-be-itself; self-determining; environment-transcendence; separateness; living by its own laws).
Maslow's thinking was surprisingly original ... most psychologists before him had been concerned with the abnormal and the ill. He wanted to know what constituted positive mental health. Humanistic psychology gave rise to several different therapies, all guided by the idea that people possess the inner resources for growth and healing and that the point of therapy is to help remove obstacles to individuals' achieving them. The most famous of these was client-centered therapy developed by Carl Rogers.
Maslow's influence extended beyond psychology - his work on peak experiences is relevant to religious studies, while his work on management is applicable to transpersonal business studies.
In 2006, conservative social critic Christina Hoff Sommers and practicing psychiatrist Sally Satel asserted that due to lack of empirical support for his ideas, Maslow's ideas have fallen out of fashion and are "no longer taken seriously in the world of academic psychology."Sommers, Christina Hoff and Sally Satel, M.D. (2006) One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-reliance. McMillian, ISBN 0312304447, p. 74 & passim in chapter 2[1] But Maslow's has enjoyed a revival of interest and influence among leaders of the positive psychology movement such as Martin Seligman.Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification by Christopher Peterson, Martin E. P. Seligman. Oxford University Press: 2004 ISBN 0195167015 pg 62[2]
Cooke B, Mills A and Kelley E in Group and Organization Management, (2005) Vol.Situating Maslow in Cold War America, 30, No. 2, 129-152
Roy Jose DeCarvalho, The Founders of Humanistic Psychology
Edward Hoffman, The Right to be Human: a biography of Abraham Maslow, (ISBN 0-07-134-267-2)
Mook, D.G. (1987). Motivation: The Organization of Action, London: W.W. Norton & Company Ltd (ISBN 0-393-95474-9) Motivation:
Nicholson, I., (2001). Giving Up Maleness: Abraham Maslow, Masculinity, and the Boundaries of Psychology. History of Psychology, 2, 79-91
Jessica Valdez, Self Actualization through Humanistic Theories
Wahba, M.A. & Bridwell, L. G. (1976). Maslow Reconsidered: A Review of Research on the Need Hierarchy Theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 15, 212-240
Wilson, Colin (1972) New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the post-Freudian revolution. London: Victor Gollancz (ISBN 0-575-01355-9)
