Abraham Maslow
1908-1970 Biography
"I was awfully curious to find out why I didn't go insane," remarked Abraham Maslow, one of the founders of humanistic psychology.
Abraham Harold Maslow was born April 1, 1908 in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was the eldest of seven children who were born to uneducated, Jewish parents that immigrated from Russia.
He was smart but shy, and remembered his childhood as lonely and unhappy. Maslow attended City College in New York. After three semesters, he transferred to Cornell, then back to City College of New York He married Bertha Goodman, his first cousin against his parents wishes. He and Bertha had two daughters.
They moved to Wisconsin, there he attended the University of Wisconsin, here he became interested in psychology and pursued an original line of research, investigating primate dominance behavior and sexuality. Maslow spent time working with Harry Harlow, who is famous for his experiments with baby rhesus monkeys and attachment behavior. He went on to further research at Columbia University, continuing similar studies. Maslow found another mentor in Alfred Adler, one of Freud¹s early followers.
He received his BA in 1930, his MA in 1931, and his PhD in 1934, all in psychology, all from the University of Wisconsin. A year later after graduation he returned to New York to work with E.L. Thorndike at Columbia.
From 1937 to 1951, Maslow was on the faculty of Brooklyn College. In New York he found two more mentors, anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, whom he admired both professionally and personally. These two were so accomplished in both realms, and Maslow considered them such ³wonderful human beings², that he began taking notes about them and their behavior. This became 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. Peak experiences are profound moments of love, understanding, happiness, or rapture, when 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.
Maslow's thinking was surprisingly original - most psychology 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 this. The most famous of these was client-centered therapy developed by Carl Rogers.
Maslow became the leader of the humanistic school of psychology that emerged in the 1950¹s and 1960's, which he referred to as the "third force" - beyond Freudian theory and behaviorism.
In 1951, Maslow served as the chair of the psychology department at Brandeis for 10 years. Here he met Kurt Goldstein (who introduced him to the idea of self-actualization) and began his own theoretical work. It was also here that he began his crusade for a humanistic psychology--something ultimately much more important to him than his own theorizing. He spend his final years in semi-retirement in California, until, on June 8, 1970, he died of a heart attack after years of ill health.
Description of contributions
Theory: Hierarchy of needs. Maslow begins with the bottom of the pyramid with the "Deficit Needs" or D-needs which are the first four levels (if you don't have enough of something--i.e. you have a deficity - you feel the need. He moves upward to the "Being Needs". This level he calls growth motivation (incontrast to deficit motivation), being needs or B-needs and self-actualization. Beyond the details of air, water, food, and sex, he laid out five broader layers: the physiological needs, the needs for safety and security, the needs for love and belonging, the needs for esteem, and the need to actualize the self.
The self-actualized person with the driving needs or B-needs, need the following in their lives in order to be happy:
Truth, rather than dishonesty.
Goodness, rather than evil.
Beauty, not ugliness or vulgarity.
Unity, wholeness, and transcendence of opposites, not arbitrariness or forced choices.
Aliveness, not deadness or the mechanization of life.
Uniqueness, not bland uniformity.
Perfection and necessity, not sloppiness, inconsistency, or accident.
Completion, rather than incompleteness.
Justice and order, not injustice and lawlessness.
Simplicity, not unnecessary complexity.
Richness, not environmental improverishment.
Effortlessness, not strain.
Playfulness, not grim, humorless, drudgery.
Self-sufficiency, not dependency.
Meaningfulness, rather than senselessness.
When a self-actualizer doesn't get these needs fulfilled, they respond with metapathologies - a list of problems as long as the list of metaneeds! This list can be summarized by saying that, when forced to live without these values, the self-actualizer develops depression, despair, disgust, alienation, and a degree of cynicism.
Some criticism
The most common criticism concerns his methodology: Picking
a small number of people that he himself declared self-actualizing, then
reading about them or talking with them, and coming to conclusions about
what self-actualization is does not sound like good science to many people.
Another criticism is that Maslow placed such constraints on self-actualization. First, Kurt Goldstein and Carl Rogers used the phrase to refer to what every living creature does: To try to grow, to become more, to fulfill its biological destiny. Maslow limits it to something only two percent of the human species achieves. While Rogers felt that babies were the best examples of human self-actualization, Maslow saw it as something achieved only rarely by the young.
Thirdly, he asks that we pretty much take care of our lower needs before self-actualization comes to the forefront. Yet we can find many examples of people who exhibited at very least aspects of self-actualization who were far from having their lowers needs taken care of. Many of our artists and authors, for example, suffered from poverty, bad upbringing, neuroses, and depression. Some could even be called psychotic! Galileo prayed often ideas that would sell, Rembrandt could barely keep food on the table, Toulouse Lautrec body tormented him, or van Gogh was poor and wasn't quite right in the head. Weren't these people engaged in some form of self-actualization?
www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhmasl.html
www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/maslow.html
Publications - Books in print by Maslow
Maslow
on Management With added interviews by Deborah Stephens and Gary Heil, |
BOOKS IN PRINT ABOUT MASLOW
The
Growth Hypothesis in Psychology: The Humanistic Psychology of Abraham
Maslow and Carl Rogers Rox Jose DeCarvalho, Edwin Mellen
Press, 1991 |
BOOKS OUT OF PRINT
|
AUDIO / VIDEO MATERIAL
Maslow
and Self-Actualization Psychological Films, Santa Ana,
CA |
ARTICLES
Harlow,
Harry & Harold Uehling. "Delayed Reaction Tests on Primates
from the Lemur to the |
AUDIO TAPES
ABRAHAM MASLOW
Informal Weekend "Education should help people toward being world citizens," says Maslow, in these passionate talks and dialogues about what it means to be fully human, about self-actualizing people, mystical and peak experiences, friendship and intimacy, education, and other pertinent issues of his life's work. |
Criteria for Judging "There is embedded in most discussions of instinctoid needs the belief that our most primitive impulses are only greedy or evil, selfish or destructive: this is innaccurate." Maslow argues that neglecting these impulses causes psychological illness. |
Self-Actualization Maslow defines self-actualization as living on the sacred level in everyday life without denying the bodily life. He also explores the biological roots of the spiritual life. |
Psychology of Religious Awareness In his study of self-actualized individuals, among those with a mission outside themselves Maslow found examples of states written about by great religious teachers and mystics. He speaks about integrating the spiritual search with everyday existence. |
01403Farther Reaches of Human Nature Maslow speaks from the perspective of the 1960s where he sees a general revolution in every area of human life, like a "tree where the apples ripen all at once." This talk contains the seeds of his vision, as elaborated in the book, Farther Reaches of Human Nature. |
The Eupsychian Ethic Maslow, in discussion with workshop participants, makes an effort to critique the work of organizations like Esalen and to make explicit the implicit philosophy behind them. He discusses ways in which the benefits, including peak experiences, can be carried over into other learning situations and everyday life. |