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Abraham Harold Maslow was born on April 1, 1908 in Brooklyn, New
York. He was the oldest of seven children born to his parents, who were
uneducated Jewish immigrants from Russia. His parents, wanting the best
for their children in the “new world”, pushed him hard in his academic
studies. He was smart but shy, and remembered his childhood as being
lonely and rather unhappy. He sought refuge in his books and studies.
His father hoped he would study as a lawyer, and Maslow enrolled in the
City College of New York.
After three semesters at CCNY, he transferred
to Cornell and then back to CCNY again. He married his first cousin
Bertha, against his parents wishes and moved to Wisconsin, where he
would attend the University of Wisconsin for graduate school. Here he
met his chief mentor Professor Harry Harlow, and became interested in
psychology, and his schoolwork began to improve dramatically.
He
pursued a new line of research, investigating primate dominance
behavior and sexuality. He recieved his BA in 1930, his MA in 1931, and
his PhD in 1934, all in the field of psychology, all from the
University of Wisconson. Ayear after he graduated he returned to New
York to work with E.L. Thorndike at Colombia, where he studied similar
topics. From 1937 to 1951, Maslow worked full-time on staff at Brooklyn
College. In NY he found two more mentors, anthropologist Ruth Benedict
and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, whom he he admired both
professionally and personally. These two people were so accomplished in
what they did and such “wonderful human beings”, that Maslow began
taking notes about them and their behavior. This would be the
foundation for his lifelong research and thinking about mental health
and human potential. He wrote extensively on the subject, taking ideas
from other psychologists and adding significantly to them, especially
the concepts of a hierarchy of human needs, metaneeds, self-actualizing
persons, and peak experiences.
Maslow became the leader of the
humanistic school of psychology that emerged in the 1950's and
1960's, which he referred to as the “third force”, beyond Freudian
theory and behaviorism. Also during this period of his life, he came
into contact with the many European intellectuals that were immigrating
to the United States, Brooklyn in particular, people like Adler, Fromm,
Horney, as as well as several Gestalt and Freudian psychologists. In
1951, Maslow served as the chair of the psychology department at
Brandeis for 10 years, where he met Kurt Goldstein, who introduced him
to the idea of self-actualzation, and helped him begin 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. In, 1969 he became a resident fellow of the
Laughlin Institute in California. A year later after several years of
ill health he died of a heart-attack on June 8th.
One of the many interesting things that Maslow noticed, while early
in his career working with monkeys, was that some needs take precedence
over others. For example, if you are hungry and thirsty, you will tend
to try and take care of the thirst first. After all, you can live
without food for several weeks, but you can only live a few days
without water. Maslow took this idea and created his now famous
Hierarchy of human needs.
Beyond the details of air, water, food, and
sex, he laid out five broader layers. These layers are physiological
needs, safety and security needs, the needs for loving and belonging,
esteem needs, and self-actualzation, in that order. The physiological
needs include the needs we have for oxygen, water, protein, salt,
sugar, calcium, and other minerals and vitamins. They also include the
need to maintain a pH balance and temperature. There are also the needs
to be active, to sleep, to get rid of wastes, to avoid pain, and to
have sex.
Maslow believed that these are in fact individual needs, and
that a lack there of, say vitamin C for example, will lead to very
specific hunger for things which have, in the past, provided that
vitamin C, for instance orange juice. When physiological needs are
largely taken care of, the second layer, or the safety and security
needs layer, comes into play. You will become increasingly interested
in finding safe circumstances, stability, and protection. You might
develop a need for structure, for order, or some limits.
Looking at it
negatively, you may become concerned, not with needs like hunger or
thirst, but with your fears and anxieties. In the ordinary American
adult, this set of needs manifest themselves in the form of our urges
to have a home in a safe neighborhood, a little job security, a good
retirement plan, a bit of insurance, and so on.
When physiological and
safety needs are mostly taken care of a new layer starts to show, this
is the love and belonging needs layer. You begin to feel the need for
friends, a sweetheart, children, affectionate relationships in general,
and even a sense of community. The negative side to this is that you
can become extremely susceptible to loneliness and social anxieties. In
our everyday life we show these needs with our desires to get married,
have a family, be part of a community, a member of a church, a brother
or sister in the fraternity or sorority, a member of a gang or maybe a
social club. It is also a part of what we look for in a career.
Next,
we look for a little self-esteem. Maslow noted two versions of esteem
needs, a lower one and a higher one. The lower one is the need for the
respect of others, the need of status, fame, glory, recognition,
attention, reputation, appreciation, dignity, even dominance. The
higher form involves the need for the need for self-respect, including
such feelings as confidence, competence, achievement, mastery,
independence, and freedom. The negative version of these needs is
low-self esteem and inferiority complexes.
Maslow felt that Adler was
really onto something when he proposed that these were the roots of
many, if not most, of our psychological problems. In modern countries,
most of us have what we need in regard to our physiological and safety
needs. We usually have quite a bit of love and belonging too. It’s
respect that often seems difficult to attain. The last level is a bit
different. Maslow used a variety of terms to describe this level. The
most widely used term is self-actualization. These are needs that do
not involve balance. Once engaged, they do not go away, they continue
to be felt. In fact, they are likely to become stronger as we feed them
or stimulate them. They involve the continuous desire to fulfill
potentials, “to be all you can be”. They are a matter of becoming the
most complete, the fullest, “you”, hence the term, self-actualization.
If you truly want to be self-actualizing, you need to have all your
lower needs at least mostly fulfilled. This makes sense, if you are
hungry you are trying to get food; if you are unsafe, you have to be
continuously on guard; etc. When lower needs aren’t met , you can’t
fully devote your time and energy to fulfilling your potentials. It
isn’t surprising, the world being as difficult as it is, that only a
small percentage of the world’s population is truly self-actualizing.
Maslow at one point said only about two-percent. Maslow doesn’t think
that self-actualizers aren’t perfect, of course.
There were several
flaws or imperfections he discovered along the way as well: First, they
often suffered considerable anxiety and guilt, but realistic anxiety
and guilt, rather than misplaced or neurotic versions. Some of them
were absent minded and overly kind. And finally, some of them had
unexpected moments of ruthlessness, surgical coldness, and loss of
humor. Maslow hoped that his work at describing the self-actualizing
person would eventually lead to a “periodic table” of the kinds of
qualities, problems, and even solutions characteristic of higher levels
of human potential. Over time, he devoted increasing attention, not to
his own theory, but to humanistic psychology and the human potentials
movement.
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