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In our ‘A salute’ guest series from Robert L. Peters, please find below the next installment about psychologist Abraham Maslow.

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‘A salute: Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)’
by Robert L. Peters

Abraham Harold Maslow was an American psychologist noted for his conceptualization of a “hierarchy of human needs”—today he is considered the founder of humanistic psychology. Born into an uneducated family of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Maslow was raised in Brooklyn as the eldest of seven children. Reportedly he was slow and tidy as a youth, spending his time in libraries and among books, and largely without friends.

Maslow was encouraged to actively pursue an education: after initially studying law at the City College of New York, he transferred to Cornell University in 1927, and then on to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin where he entered the field of psychology (pursuing an original line of research in the investigation of primate dominance behavior and sexuality). He went on to further research at Columbia University, where he was mentored by Alfred Adler, one of Sigmund Freud’s early followers. From 1937 to 1951 Maslow served on the faculty of Brooklyn College, where he blossomed under the mentorship of anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer—these two were so accomplished and such “wonderful human beings,” that Maslow began taking notes about them and their behavior (most psychology before Maslow had been concerned with the abnormal and the ill—he turned the tables and concentrated on observing the healthy). This inspired shift in focus became the basis of his lifelong research and thinking about mental health and human potential, which he wrote about extensively.

Simply put, Maslow saw the needs of human beings arranged like a ladder (ergo, his pyramidal Hierarchy of Needs). The most basic needs, at the bottom, were physical. Then came safety needs, followed by psychological or social needs, then esteem needs, and at the top, the self-actualizing needs of self-fulfillment—“to become all that one is capable of becoming.” Maslow felt that unfulfilled needs lower on the ladder would actually inhibit a person from climbing to the next step (proof of concept: someone dying of thirst quickly forgets their thirst when they have no oxygen).

We celebrate Maslow today for his surprisingly original thinking, and for changing the way that modern-day physiologists understand the world. Without his creative mind and critical circumspection, humanistic psychology would certainly not have become what it is today. You rock, Abraham!

For some inspiring quotes please refer to Robert L. Peters’s news+ blog.

Filed under: Published on external blogs, Science by Robert Nijssen | Social tagging: Abraham Maslow > Gestalt psychology > hierarchy of needs > humanism > psychology