Maslow, Abraham Harold

Maslow was the oldest of the seven children of the cooper Samuel Maslov and Rosa Shilovskaya, who emigrated from the Kiev province to the USA at the beginning of the 20th century. ^[3] He was born in the Jewish district of Brooklyn. Father worked as a barrel; parents often quarreled. When he was nine years old, the family moved from the Jewish district of the city to another, non-Jewish, and since Maslow had a pronounced Jewish appearance, he learned what anti-Semitism is . Abraham was a lonely, shy and depressed young man. ^[four]

Given my childhood, it remains only to be surprised that I am not mentally ill. I was a little Jewish boy in a non-Jewish environment. Something like the first black man in the school attended only by white. I was lonely and miserable. I grew up in libraries, among books, without friends. ^[five]

Maslow was one of the best students in the school. After graduating in 1926 , on the advice of his father, he entered the City Law College in New York, but did not even finish the first year. For the first time, Maslow met psychology at Cornell University , where E. B. Titchener was a professor of psychology.

In 1928, Maslow was transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison , where Harry Harlow , a renowned primate researcher, became his supervisor. In the same year, Maslow married his cousin Bertha, whom he had been in love with when he was 12 years old ^[5] .

At the University of Wisconsin, he became a bachelor ( 1930 ), a master ( 1931 ), and a doctor of science ( 1934 ) ^[4] . Maslow received a classic behavioral education, and his first scientific work, which promised him a bright future, was devoted to the relationship of sexuality and social behavior among primates ^[4] .

In 1934, he began working at Columbia University as research assistant under Edward Thorndike , a well-known behaviourist and theorist in the field of learning. At first, Maslow was an adherent of the behavioral approach, he was fascinated by the works of John B. Watson , but gradually became interested in other ideas ^[5] .

It was Watson’s beautiful program that brought me to psychology. But her fatal weakness is that it is good only for the laboratory and in the laboratory, you can put it on and take it off as a lab coat ... It does not create ideas about man, the philosophy of life, the concept of human nature. It does not create landmarks for life, values, choices. This is just a way to collect data on behavior, what you can see, touch and hear with your senses. ^[five]

In 1937, Maslow accepted an offer to become a professor at Brooklyn College , where he worked for 14 years. At this time, he was introduced to the pleiad of the most famous European psychologists who had taken refuge in the US from Nazi persecution, including Alfred Adler , Erich Fromm , Karen Horney , Margaret Mead , and the founder of Gestalt psychology Max Wertheimer and anthropologist Ruth Benedict . The last two became not only Maslow's teachers and friends, but also those people who made the idea of ​​researching self-actualizing personalities possible ^[6] .

My self-actualization research was not planned as a study and did not begin as a study. They began as an attempt by a young thinking man to understand his two teachers, extraordinary people whom he loved and admired. It was a kind of worship of the highest intelligence. It was not enough for me just to adore them, I tried to understand why these two people are so different from ordinary people who are full of peace. These two men were Ruth Benedict and Max Wertheimer. ^[five]

But Maslow's first attempts to state his new ideas caused a negative reaction in the American psychological community, dominated by behaviorists. Even colleagues at the faculty eschewed him, leading psychological journals refused to publish scientific work ^[6] . In 1951, Maslow became the first dean of the psychology department of the newly established Brandeis University . He worked there until 1969 . It was during this period that the recognition of his ideas began, and humanistic psychology began to take shape as a separate direction ^[6] .

In the 1960s, Maslow became popular, and in 1967 he was elected president of the American Psychological Association, which caused him to be surprised ^[4] .

I have to admit that I came to the conclusion that the humanistic tendency in psychology is a revolution in the most genuine, original sense of the word, in the sense in which Galileo, Darwin, Einstein and Marx made the revolution, that is, a revolution in thinking and perceptions, in ideas about man and society, in concepts of ethics and values, in reference points for moving forward. ^[five]

A. Maslow died suddenly from an acute myocardial infarction at the age of 62 ^{[7] [8]} .

Sister is an anthropologist and ethnographer Ruth Maslow Lewis (1916–2008), the wife of anthropologist Oscar Lewis ^[3] .

Maslow was one of the first to study the positive aspects of human behavior. His studies of self-actualizing personalities allowed him to formulate a positive, humanistic view of human nature. If before psychology, especially psychoanalysis , studied people with various mental disabilities and based on this theories of personality were formulated, Maslow took as samples of healthy and self-realized people, as a result, he received new data on human nature ^[4] .

Behaviorism and psychoanalysis , or deficient psychology, as Maslow called them, avoided many cultural, social and individual aspects of human manifestation, such as creativity, love, altruism, and so on. For the existential psychology that Maslow proposed, it was these manifestations of man that were most interesting. ^[4] Maslow's most famous theory is a theory of motivation based on a hierarchy of needs model. According to Maslow, the need for self-actualization is the highest need, which pushes a person to reveal his abilities and talents ^[6] .

There are three stages in the development of this theory. At the first stage, Maslow moves away from a rigidly defined hierarchy of needs and divides all motives into two groups: deficient and existential. The first group is aimed at filling the deficit, such as the need for food or sleep. These are the inevitable needs that ensure human survival. The second group of motives serves development, these are existential motives — an activity that arises not to satisfy needs, but is connected with obtaining pleasure, satisfaction, with the search for a higher goal and its achievement. At the third stage in the theory of Maslow, the concepts of meta-motivation and meta-needs appear, which are connected with the existential values ​​of man, such as truth, good, beauty, and others. This existential layer of the existence of a person can be revealed to a person in the so-called “ peak experience ” (peak-experience), which is an experience of delight, aesthetic pleasure, and strong positive emotions ^[9] .

Developing these ideas, Maslow begins to consider the framework of humanistic psychology limited and in the last years of his life participates in an attempt to create a new, “fourth force” - transpersonal psychology , which, however, received very limited scientific recognition ^[4] .

Maslow's ideas attracted a lot of attention from both supporters and critics. The latter argued that the research samples were too small for such generalizations. Maslow was particularly hard on the subjectivity of the criteria for choosing self-actualizing individuals, as well as for his lack of consideration of social factors and the surrounding context in his theories ^{[6] [9]} .

Maslow's diagram shows the order in which a person “on average” satisfies his needs . This, however, does not exclude another order in particular cases when, for example, the need for recognition for a person is more important than the need for love ^[10] .

Maslow believed that all self-actualized people have common characteristics:

• More effective perception of reality and more comfortable relationship with reality;
• Acceptance (self, other, nature);
• Immediacy; simplicity; naturalness;
• Focus on the problem [as opposed to ego-centeredness];
• Ability to isolate; the need for privacy;
• Autonomy; independence from cultural stamps and surroundings;
• Persisting freshness of perception;
• Mystical and vertex experience;
• Sense of community with others ( him. Gemeinschaftsgefühl )
• Deeper and penetrating relationships;
• Democracy;
• The ability to recognize goals and means, good and bad;
• Philosophical, gentle, benevolent humor;
• Creativity;
• Resistance to domestication; outside of any particular culture. ^[four]

Maslow attributed Abraham Lincoln , Thomas Jefferson , Albert Einstein , Eleanor Roosevelt , Jane Adams , William James , Albert Schweitzer , Aldous Huxley, and Baruch Spinoza to such self-actualized people.

• Maslow's pyramid of needs
• Self-actualization
• Humanistic psychology

• Thought: A Review of Culture and Idea. - 1991. - Vol. 66. - № 260.

• Official Abraham Maslow Publications Site (English)
• Abraham Maslow
• A. Maslow “The Theory of Human Motivation” (quoted in: Maslow A. Motivation and Personality. - SPb .: Eurasia, 1999. - P. 77—105)
• Abraham Maslow and the theory of self-actualization