Abraham Maslow
Abraham Harold Maslow was an American psychologist who created Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization.
Maslow was a psychology professor at Cornell University, Brooklyn College, Brandeis University, The New School for Social Research, and Columbia University. He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a "bag of symptoms". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Maslow as the tenth most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Biography
Youth
Born in 1908 and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Maslow was the oldest of seven children. His parents were first-generation Jewish immigrants from Kyiv, then part of the Russian Empire, who fled from Czarist persecution in the early 20th century. They had decided to live in New York City and in a multiethnic, working-class neighborhood. His parents were poor and not intellectually focused, but they valued education. He had various encounters with antisemitic gangs who would chase and throw rocks at him.He eventually developed a strong revulsion towards his mother. He is quoted as saying,
What I had reacted to was not only her physical appearance, but also her values and world view, her stinginess, her total selfishness, her lack of love for anyone else in the world—even her own husband and children—her narcissism, her Negro prejudice, her exploitation of everyone, her assumption that anyone was wrong who disagreed with her, her lack of friends, her sloppiness and dirtiness...He also grew up with few friends other than his cousin Will, and as a result, he
grew up in libraries and among books.It was here that he developed his love for reading and learning. He went to Boys High School, one of the top high schools in Brooklyn, where his best friend was his cousin Will Maslow. Here, he served as the officer to many academic clubs and became editor of the Latin magazine. He also edited Principia, the school's physics paper, for a year. He developed other strengths as well:
As a young boy, Maslow believed physical strength to be the single most defining characteristic of a true male; hence, he exercised often and took up weight lifting in hopes of being transformed into a more muscular, tough-looking guy, however, he was unable to achieve this due to his humble-looking and chaste figure as well as his studiousness.
College and university
Maslow attended the City College of New York after high school. In 1926, he began taking legal studies classes at night in addition to his undergraduate course load. He disliked it and almost immediately dropped out. In 1927, he transferred to Cornell University but left after just one semester due to poor grades and high costs. He later graduated from City College and went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin to study psychology. In 1928, he married his first cousin, Bertha, who was still in high school. The pair had met in Brooklyn years earlier.Maslow's psychology training at University of Wisconsin was decidedly experimental-behaviorist. At Wisconsin, he pursued a line of research that included investigating primate dominance behavior and sexuality. Maslow's early experience with behaviorism would leave him with a strong positivist mindset. Upon the recommendation of professor Hulsey Cason, Maslow wrote his master's thesis on "learning, retention, and reproduction of verbal material". Maslow regarded the research as embarrassingly trivial, but he completed his thesis in the summer of 1931 and was awarded his master's degree in psychology. He was so ashamed of the thesis that he removed it from the psychology library and tore out its catalog listing. However, Cason admired the research enough to urge Maslow to submit it for publication. Maslow's thesis was published as two articles in 1934.
Academic career
Maslow continued his research on similar themes at Columbia University. 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. His family life and his experiences influenced his psychological ideas. After World War II, Maslow began to further what psychologists came to with their conclusions, and while not in complete discord, he had his own ideas on presenting the human mind. He called this new discipline humanistic psychology. Maslow was already a 33 years old and had two children when the United States entered World War II in 1941. He was thus ineligible for military service. However, humanistic psychology was inspiring a vision of potential in him, leading to his groundbreaking psychological studies detailing mental health's development. The studies began under the supervision of two mentors, anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, whom he admired both professionally and personally. They accomplished a lot in both realms. Being such "wonderful human beings" also inspired Maslow to take notes about them and their behavior. This would be the basis of his lifelong research and thinking about mental health and human potential.Maslow extended the subject, borrowing ideas from other psychologists and adding new ones, such as the concepts of a hierarchy of needs, metaneeds, metamotivation, self-actualizing persons, and peak experiences. He was a professor at Brandeis University from 1951 to 1969. He became a resident fellow of the Laughlin Institute in California. In 1967, Maslow had a serious heart attack and knew his time was limited. He considered himself to be a psychological pioneer. He pushed future psychologists by bringing to light different paths to ponder. He built the framework that later allowed other psychologists to conduct more comprehensive studies. Maslow believed that leadership should be non-intervening. Consistent with this approach, he rejected a nomination in 1963 to be the Association for Humanistic Psychology president because he felt the organization should develop an intellectual movement without a leader.
Death
While jogging, Maslow had a severe heart attack and died on June 8, 1970, at the age of 62 in Menlo Park, California. He is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.Maslow's contributions
Humanistic psychology
Most psychologists before him had been concerned with the abnormal and the ill. He urged people to acknowledge their basic needs before addressing higher needs and ultimately self-actualization. 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.The basic principles behind humanistic psychology are simple:
- Someone's present functioning is their most significant aspect. As a result, humanists emphasize the here and now instead of examining the past or attempting to predict the future.
- To be mentally healthy, individuals must take personal responsibility for their actions, regardless of whether the actions are positive or negative.
- Each person, simply by being, is inherently worthy. While any given action may be negative, these actions do not cancel out the value of a person.
- The ultimate goal of living is to attain personal growth and understanding. Only through constant self-improvement and self-understanding can an individual ever be truly happy.
However, Maslow was highly critical of Freud, since humanistic psychologists did not recognize spirituality as a navigation for our behaviors.
To prove that humans are not blindly reacting to situations, but trying to accomplish something greater, Maslow studied mentally healthy individuals instead of people with serious psychological issues. He focused on self-actualizing people. Self-actualizing people indicate a coherent personality syndrome and represent optimal psychological health and functioning.
This informed his theory that a person enjoys "peak experiences", high points in life when the individual is in harmony with themself and their surroundings. In Maslow's view, self-actualized people can have many peak experiences throughout a day while others have those experiences less frequently. He believed that psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin can produce peak experiences in the right people under the right circumstances.
Peak and plateau experiences
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 are more likely to have peak experiences. In other words, these "peak experiences" or states of flow are the reflections of the realization of one's human potential and represent the height of personality development.In later writings, Maslow moved to a more inclusive model that allowed for, in addition to intense peak experiences, longer-lasting periods of serene being-cognition that he termed plateau experiences. He borrowed this term from the Indian scientist and yoga practitioner, U. A. Asrani, with whom he corresponded. Maslow stated that the shift from the peak to the plateau experience is related to the natural aging process, in which an individual has a shift in life values about what is actually important in one's life and what is not important. In spite of the personal significance with the plateau experience, Maslow was not able to conduct a comprehensive study of this phenomenon due to health problems that developed toward the end of his life.