Abraham Maslow

Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist who created the theory of the hierarchy of the needs. He was one of the founders of the humanistic psychology and the transpersonal psychology.

Early Life and Education

Maslow was born in 1908 in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were the Jewish immigrants from Russia and the household was difficult.

He studied at the City College of New York and the University of Wisconsin. He took his doctorate in psychology in 1934.

He taught at the Brooklyn College and the Brandeis University. He was influenced by the work of the anthropologists and the Gestalt psychologists.

The Hierarchy of the Needs

Maslow published the paper A Theory of Human Motivation in 1943. The paper introduced the hierarchy of the needs.

The hierarchy arranges the needs from the physiological to the safety to the belonging to the esteem. The self-actualisation is at the top.

The lower needs must be satisfied before the higher needs can be pursued. The model became one of the most famous in the psychology.

He studied the self-actualising people and described their characteristics. The subjects were the creative and the fulfilled individuals.

The Humanistic Psychology

Maslow helped to found the humanistic psychology in the 1950s. The movement emphasised the importance of the human potential and the growth.

He argued that the psychology should study the healthy and the creative people. The approach was a reaction to the behaviourism and the psychoanalysis.

He developed the concept of the peak experience. The concept describes the moments of the intense happiness and the fulfilment.

He wrote the book Motivation and Personality in 1954. The book set out his theory of the personality.

The Legacy

Maslow served as the president of the American Psychological Association in 1968. He received the honours from the institutions.

He died in 1970 in Menlo Park, California. He was one of the most influential of the psychologists of the twentieth century.

The hierarchy of the needs became one of the most widely known of the psychological models. The concept has been applied to the management and the education.

He is regarded as one of the founders of the humanistic psychology. His work continues to be studied and applied.

The Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow's hierarchy is usually drawn as a pyramid, although he himself never used that diagram. At the base lie the physiological needs — air, food, water, shelter and sleep — which must be met before other motives become pressing. Above them come safety needs for security and stability; then belongingness and love needs for affection, friendship and acceptance; then esteem needs for competence, achievement and recognition; and finally the need for self-actualisation. The ordering expresses Maslow's conviction that higher motives emerge only when lower ones are reasonably satisfied.

Maslow later revised the pyramid, adding cognitive needs for knowledge and understanding, aesthetic needs for order and beauty, and a distinction between deficiency needs (D-needs), which drive behaviour when they are unmet, and being needs (B-needs), which continue to motivate even when satisfied. Self-actualisation belongs to the second category: it is not a deficit to be filled but a growth process that expands as it is pursued. This distinction between coping and growing was a genuine innovation in motivation theory.

Although the strict sequence has not held up in cross-cultural research — studies show that people can pursue belonging or esteem while physical needs remain unmet, and that the ranking varies between collectivist and individualist societies — the framework retains enormous heuristic value. It supplied the vocabulary of peak experiences, self-actualisation and the fully functioning person that pervades counselling, management and popular psychology, and it helped move the discipline's attention from pathology toward health.

Humanistic Psychology and Research

Maslow sought to build a psychology that studied the best examples of humanity rather than its casualties. He coined the term positive psychology decades before it became a movement, and along with Carl Rogers he launched the school known as the third force — a humanistic alternative to behaviourism and psychoanalysis. Its assumptions were that human beings are inherently growth-oriented, that subjective experience is a legitimate subject matter, and that the goal of psychology is to help people develop their potential.

His empirical work focused on self-actualising people. By interviewing and studying historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein, together with living contemporaries, he identified traits he regarded as characteristic of the self-actualiser: superior perception of reality, acceptance of self and others, spontaneity, problem-centred rather than ego-centred focus, autonomy, continued freshness of appreciation, and frequent peak experiences. He published these observations in Motivation and Personality (1954) and Toward a Psychology of Being (1962).

Maslow was candid about the limitations of his sample, which was small, non-random and personally selected. Later researchers nonetheless confirmed several of his observations about the correlates of well-being, and his concept of peak experience influenced the study of flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the investigation of self-transcendent emotion by contemporary positive psychologists. His insistence that psychology should concern itself with health, creativity and meaning is now mainstream.

Management Theory and Legacy

In Eupsychian Management (1965), later retitled Maslow on Management, he applied his motivational theory to industry. He argued that once workers' safety and belonging needs are met, they seek esteem and self-actualisation through their work, and that organisations which allow autonomy and responsibility thereby release greater creativity and commitment. This reasoning, taken up by Douglas McGregor and Peter Drucker, became the intellectual foundation of participative management, job enrichment and the modern emphasis on employee engagement.

Maslow's notion of the synergy between individual and organisation was especially influential. He proposed that when the goals of a person and the goals of an institution genuinely coincide, effort devoted to one automatically serves the other, so that productivity and well-being cease to be in conflict. This idea shaped later writing on organisational culture, servant leadership and the design of workplaces that foster intrinsic motivation rather than merely reward compliance.

Maslow died in 1970, leaving a body of work that reached far beyond academic psychology. His name is invoked whenever a clinician speaks of unmet needs, a teacher of the whole child, or a manager of the human side of enterprise. Critics rightly note that his hierarchy is culturally situated and empirically loose, yet few psychological frameworks are so widely recognised or so often used as a practical map of human aspiration. He is remembered as the founder of humanistic psychology and a founding voice of the positive-psychology tradition.

See also

• Humanistic psychology
• Hierarchy of needs
• Self-actualisation
• Motivation