Abraham Harold Maslow

• Abraham Maslow Biography Timeline

Abraham Harold Maslow (April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970) was an American psychologist who was best known for creating Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization.

Maslow was a psychology professor at Brandeis University, Brooklyn College, New School for Social Research and Columbia University. He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a "bag of symptoms."

Maslow's Hammer, of the Law of the Instrument, he phrased as "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". The concept known as the law of the instrument, otherwise known as the law of the hammer, Maslow's hammer, or the golden hammer, is a cognitive bias that involves an over-reliance on a familiar tool. As Abraham Maslow said in 1966, "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." The law of instrument says that we judge what’s in front of us with the tool we have. The law proposes that we treat the same object differently depending on if we hold a scale or a ruler in our hands. Similarly, when a group of people experience an event, there are numerous, unique perceptions made. Each imprinted into their minds. Each slightly altered when recalled later. “We distort things … because we are trained neither to voice both sides of an issue nor to listen with both ears … It is rooted in the fact that we look at the world through analytical lenses. We see everything as this or that, plus or minus, on or off, black or white — and we fragment reality into an endless series of [dichotomies]. In a phrase, we think the world apart.” The law of the instrument principle states that when we acquire or are given a specific tool/skill (such as computer programming), we tend to be influenced by its function and utility – leading us to see opportunities to use that tool/skill everywhere. Although this can expand our worldview in innovative ways, it can become a cognitive bias if we only approach problems using that one tool/skill. In short, the law of the instrument influences us to use one tool for all purpose and can be summed up with Maslow’s phrase, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Maslow was the oldest of seven children and was classed as "mentally unstable" by a psychologist. His parents were first generation Jewish immigrants from Russia who fled from Czarist persecution in the early 20th century. . . . Continued

Legacy

Later in life, Maslow was concerned with questions such as,

Why don't more people self-actualize if their basic needs are met?
How can we humanistically understand the problem of evil?"

In the spring of 1961, Maslow and Tony Sutich founded the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, with Miles Vich as editor until 1971. The journal printed its first issue in early 1961 and continues to publish academic papers.

In 1967, Maslow was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.

Humanistic theories of self-actualization[edit]

Humanistic psychologists believe that every person has a strong desire to realize his or her full potential, to reach a level of "self-actualization". The main point of that new movement, that reached its peak in 1960s, was to emphasize the positive potential of human beings. Maslow positioned his work as a vital complement to that of Freud:

It is as if Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.

He realized that all the individuals he studied had similar personality traits. All were "reality centered," able to differentiate what was fraudulent from what was genuine. They were also "problem centered," meaning that those treated life's difficulties as problems that demanded solutions. These individuals also were comfortable being alone and had healthy personal relationships. They had only a few close friends and family rather than a large number of shallow relationships.

Self-actualizing people tend to focus on problems outside themselves; have a clear sense of what is true and what is false; are spontaneous and creative; and are not bound too strictly by social conventions.

Maslow noticed that self-actualized individuals had a better insight of reality, deeply accepted themselves, others and the world, and also had faced many problems and were known to be impulsive people. These self-actualized individuals were very independent and private when it came to their environment and culture, especially their very own individual development on "potentialities and inner resources".

According to Maslow, self-actualizing people share the following qualities:

• • Truth: honest, reality, beauty, pure, clean and unadulterated completeness
• • Goodness: rightness, desirability, uprightness, benevolence, honesty
• • Beauty: rightness, form, aliveness, simplicity, richness, wholeness, perfection, completion,
• • Wholeness: unity, integration, tendency to oneness, interconnectedness, simplicity, organization, structure, order, not dissociated, synergy
• • Dichotomy-transcendence: acceptance, resolution, integration, polarities, opposites, contradictions
• • Aliveness: process, not-deadness, spontaneity, self-regulation, full-functioning
• • Unique: idiosyncrasy, individuality, non comparability, novelty
• • Perfection: nothing superfluous, nothing lacking, everything in its right place, just-rightness, suitability, justice
• • Necessity: inevitability: it must be just that way, not changed in any slightest way
• • Completion: ending, justice, fulfillment
• • Justice: fairness, suitability, disinterestedness, non partiality,
• • Order: lawfulness, rightness, perfectly arranged
• • Simplicity: nakedness, abstract, essential skeletal, bluntness
• • Richness: differentiation, complexity, intricacy, totality
• • Effortlessness: ease; lack of strain, striving, or difficulty
• • Playfulness: fun, joy, amusement
• • Self-sufficiency: autonomy, independence, self-determining.

Hierarchy of needs

• • The hierarchy of human needs model suggests that human needs will only be fulfilled one level at a time.
• • According to Maslow's theory, when a human being ascends the levels of the hierarchy having fulfilled the needs in the hierarchy, one may eventually achieve self-actualization. Late in life, Maslow came to conclude that self-actualization was not an automatic outcome of satisfying the other human needs.

Human needs as identified by Maslow:

• • At the bottom of the hierarchy are the "Basic needs or Physiological needs" of a human being: food, water, sleep and sex.
• • The next level is "Safety Needs: Security, Order, and Stability". These two steps are important to the physical survival of the person. Once individuals have basic nutrition, shelter and safety, they attempt to accomplish more.
• • The third level of need is "Love and Belonging", which are psychological needs; when individuals have taken care of themselves physically, they are ready to share themselves with others, such as with family and friends.
• • The fourth level is achieved when individuals feel comfortable with what they have accomplished. This is the "Esteem" level, the need to be competent and recognized, such as through status and level of success.
• • Then there is the "Cognitive" level, where individuals intellectually stimulate themselves and explore.
• • After that is the "Aesthetic" level, which is the need for harmony, order and beauty.
• • At the top of the pyramid, "Need for Self-actualization" occurs when individuals reach a state of harmony and understanding because they are engaged in achieving their full potential. Once a person has reached the self-actualization state they focus on themselves and try to build their own image. They may look at this in terms of feelings such as self-confidence or by accomplishing a set goal.

Writings

• • A Theory of Human Motivation (originally published in Psychological Review, 1943, Vol. 50 #4, pp. 370–396).
• • Motivation and Personality (1st edition: 1954, 2nd edition: 1970, 3rd edition 1987)
• • Religions, Values and Peak-experiences, Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1964.
• • Eupsychian Management, 1965; republished as Maslow on Management, 1998
• • The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance, New York: Harper & Row, 1966; Chapel Hill: Maurice Bassett, 2002.
• • Toward a Psychology of Being, (1st edition, 1962; 2nd edition, 1968)
• • The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, 1971

Quotes by Abraham Maslow

• 1. “When people appear to be something other than good and decent, it is only because they are reacting to stress, pain, or the deprivation of basic human needs such as security, love, and Self-esteem.”
• 2. “Getting used to our blessings is one of the most important nonevil generators of human evil, tragedy and suffering.”
• 3. “It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.”
• 4. “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
• 5. “Self-actualizing people have a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection for human beings in general. They feel kinship and connection, as if all people were members of a single family.”
• 6. “Self-actualizing persons’ contact with reality is simply more direct. And along with this unfiltered, unmediated directness of their contact with reality comes also a vastly heightened ability to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy, however stale those experiences may have become for others.”
• 7. “Something of the sort has already been described for the self-actualizing person. Everything now comes of its own accord, pouring out, without will, effortlessly, purposelessly. He acts now totally and without deficiency, not homeostatically or need-reductively, not to avoid pain or displeasure or death, not for the sake of a goal further on in the future, not for any end other than itself. His behavior and experience becomes per se, and self-validating, end-behavior and end-experience, rather than means-behavior or means-experience.”
• 8. “Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.”
• 9. “I may say that (Being) love, in a profound but testable sense, creates the partner. it gives him a self-image, it gives him self-acceptance, a feeling of love-worthiness, all of which permit him to grow. It is a real question whether the full development of the human being is possible without it.”
• 10. “The person in Peak-experiences feels himself, more than other times, to be the responsible, active, creating center of his activities and of his perceptions. He feels more like a prime-mover, more self-determined (rather than caused, determined, helpless, dependent, passive, weak, bossed). He feels himself to be his own boss, fully responsible, fully volitional, with more “free-will” than at other times, master of his fate, an agent.”
• 11. “Expression and communication in the peak–experiences tend often to become poetic, mythical, and rhapsodic, as if this were the natural kind of language to express such states of being.”
• 12. “If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.”
• 13. “One’s only rival is one’s own potentialities. One’s only failure is failing to live up to one’s own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.”
• 14. “The fact is that people are good, Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.”
• 15. “If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I’d still swim. And I’d despise the one who gave up.”
• 16. “But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.”
• 17. “What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.”
• 18. “Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self actualization and the love for the highest values.”
• 19. “All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.”
• 20. “The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.”
• 21. “All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.”
• 22. “The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.”
• 23. “I was awfully curious to find out why I didn’t go insane.”
• 24. “A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.”
• 25. “We may define therapy as a search for value.”
• 26. “Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.”
• 27. “We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.”