Abraham Maslow

Abraham Harold Maslow
Born	April 1, 1908 Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
Died	June 8, 1970 (aged 62) Menlo Park, California, U.S.
Cause of death	Heart Attack

Abraham Harold Maslow was a Jewish-American psychologist and founder of idealistic humanistic psychology. Maslow was born in Brooklyn, New York,

on 1 April 1908. He was the eldest of seven children born to Samuel and Rosa Maslow, Jewish immigrants from Kiev who fled anti-Semitic persecution in the Russian Empire. Maslow described his childhood as lonely and sad because he grew up in a non-Jewish neighborhood where he had to endure anti-Semitic harassment, which forced him to spend most of his time in the library.

Maslow shifted the focus at a time when the field was dominated by Freud's psychoanalysis. In an idealist inversion, he frames human development as a progression of needs while ignoring the concrete social relations and material constraints that shape one's desires and possibilities. To understand this better, Marx stated:

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness". - Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

Biography

To please his parents, he enrolled at the City College of New York to study law, but he realised he hated it and dropped out. Instead, he transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he discovered his passion for psychology.

Maslow married his first cousin Bertha Goodman at the age of 20 while studying at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which his parents strongly opposed, but he remained determined because he felt love and stability.

At Wisconsin, he earned his bachelor's degree in 1930, his master's degree in 1931, and his doctorate in 1934. During his time at Wisconsin, he was mentored by Harry Harlow, a famous psychologist known for his research on maternal attachment in primates. Maslow, who was influenced by Harlow, began his early research on primate sexuality and dominance.

After completing his doctorate, Maslow returned to New York to teach at Brooklyn College. Living in New York during the 1930s and 1940s was very beneficial for him, as many European psychologists and academics fled the Nazi invasion of Europe. Thanks to this, he met Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Max Wertheimer.

He was truly fascinated by and deeply admired the psychologist Max Wertheimer. He began taking notes on them and researching what made them special and fulfilled people. This laid the foundation for his concept of self-actualisation.

Maslow became head of the psychology department at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. It was here that he fully developed his theories and concepts of humanistic psychology and the hierarchy of needs, shifting the academic focus from psychoanalysis to humanistic psychology.

In his later years, Maslow suffered from chronic fatigue, stomach problems and heart problems, and he eventually died of a severe heart attack in 1967 while jogging in Menlo Park, California.

Maslow and Bertha had a satisfying marriage until his death. They had two daughters together, Ann Ruth Kaplan and Ellen Jane Maslow, and both girls became psychologists.

Psychology

Maslow's most famous theories are his Hierarchy of Needs and motivation hierarchy. He believed that the most important pursuit in one's life is self-actualisation and claimed that human needs are instinctive in nature and determined by one's potential.

Maslow's pyramid universalises human needs without analysing how to access those needs, which are determined by one's ownership, class, and distribution of social wealth. A poor labourer's 'safety' or 'self-expression' is not a biological and psychological shortage but a product of capitalist relations of unemployment, wage slavery, and working hours. Maslow engages in hiding the property relations in which he naturalises the social inequality of our society.

Maslow believed that all people are constantly motivated by one need or another, and he divided these motivations into two distinct psychological categories.

Deficiency Needs are the first four steps in Maslow's pyramid, which are "Physiological, Safety, Love & Belonging, and Esteem". Psychologically, these function like a thermometer: when you are hungry, you are motivated to satisfy that need, and when you fill your stomach, you lose your motivation.

Being Needs are the higher levels of his pyramid. The difference from Deficiency Needs is that these requirements do not stem from a lack of something, but from the need to grow. As Maslow grew older and sicker, he changed his pyramid by adding three steps: cognitive needs, aesthetic needs, and transcendance.

The new pyramid is structured as follows:

• 8. Transcendance (new): Helping others achieve self-actualisation and connecting oneself to something greater than one's ego (religion, spirituality, and altruism).
• 7. Self-actualisation: Reaching one's own potential and self-fulfilment.
• 6. Aesthetic needs (new): The search for appreciation of beauty, balance, and form in the world.
• 5. Cognitive needs (new): Psychological demands for knowledge, meaning, curiosity, and exploration.
• 4. Self-respect: Respect from others.
• 3. Love and belonging: Friendship, intimacy, and family.
• 2. Security: Stability and freedom from fear.
• 1. Physiological: Food, water, and sleep.

Maslow's most interesting concept is his Jonah Complex, which refers to our fear of our own success and potential. He named it after the biblical Jonah, who tried to flee from his destiny. According to Maslow, we need to abandon our comfort zone in order to overcome the Jonah Complex and achieve self-actualisation and, ultimately, superiority.

Maslow studied students and individuals whom he viewed as operating optimally and being healthy, including Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass. His observations were that these individuals possessed an efficient perspective of reality, meaning they could judge situations and people accurately; autonomy, in the sense that they could rely on their own inner compass rather than conforming to their environment; problem-centring, meaning they were focused on external problems and philosophical questions; Gemeinschaftsgefühl, or social interest, meaning one should have empathy, affection, and compassion for humanity as a whole; and lastly, a non-hostile sense of humour, meaning one does not laugh at jokes that hurt others or mock people as a whole.

Maslow was really interested in the psychology of a heightened sense of consciousness, for example, a sudden, intense moment of joy or wonder, which he believed was natural and accessible to the few mentally and physically healthy among us. Later in life, Maslow described it more as a serene and calm plateau feeling rather than a jolt in everyday experience.

It is important to recognise that Maslow did not use lab experiments or any form of empirical study but rather relied on personal observation and biographical analysis to develop his theories and concepts. Because of this, modern psychologists often criticise his work as unscientific or highly subjective.

Philosophy

Maslow asserts that humans are complex and integrated due to his belief in holistic philosophy, which views humans in the manner of "The Whole is Greater than the Parts." For example, when a person is hungry, it is not only their stomach that is hungry, but their entire body, thoughts, and emotions.

Maslow divided human experiences and motivations into two parts: the D-Realm and the B-Realm. The D-Realm stands for Deficiency; most people exist in this state and are driven by what they lack. They look at other people and think about what those people can do for them.

The B-Realm refers to a state in which, when a person's basic needs are met, they begin to see the world without a perspective of lack or need.

Towards the end of Maslow's life, he began to think that self-actualisation was not the top of the pyramid and that focusing on the "self" was wrong. He added transpersonal psychology, which integrated Eastern philosophy, mysticism, and spirituality.

Maslow created a concept of an ideal theoretical utopia that he called Eupsychia. He dreamed of a society with healthy and self-actualising people. In this society, there would be no crime, and instead, everyone would do their best for everyone else in the community. Work would be meaningful, and education would focus on children discovering their own nature.

By placing human struggles within a framework of personal growth stages, Maslow individualises social inequality, turning a societal and political problem such as exploitation and alienation into a personal one. Maslow uses language such as health, growth, and self-realisation, which serves a reformist and managerial goal to encourage adaptation in capitalist workplaces through "self-improvement" rather than the collective struggle to overthrow the system.