Carolyn and I have appreciated the work of psychologist Abraham Maslow, who helped to establish the fields of Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology. He is most well-known for his theory of the hierocracy of needs, and for developing the concepts of “peak experience” and “self-actualization.”

Abraham Harold Maslow was born in 1908 in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were first-generation Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine, who fled persecution in the early 1900s. Maslow’s parents were poor, and he was the oldest of seven children. He grew up in a multiethnic, working-class neighborhood, without much intellectual stimulation, although his parents valued education.

As a child, Maslow encountered numerous antisemitic gangs in his neighborhood who would tease him. They sometimes chased him and threw rocks at him. Maslow struggled to overcome these painful acts of racism and ethnic prejudice, but they made a deep impression on him.

There was also tension in Maslow’s early childhood home, as both his parents were described as “cold” and “insensitive.” He had trouble getting along with his mother, his father was a heavy drinker, and he grew up with few friends. Maslow spent much of his time alone in libraries, where he developed a love of reading books and learning. Maslow attended Boys High School, one of the top schools in Brooklyn, where he excelled. He was an officer in numerous academic clubs and he became the editor of the school’s Latin magazine.

In 1926, after finishing high school, Maslow attended the City College of New York. He began taking legal studies classes at night, in addition to his undergraduate courses but then stopped doing this. He then spent a year at Cornell University, before returning to and graduating from City College. Maslow then attended the University of Wisconsin’s graduate school, where he studied psychology. In 1928, Maslow married his first cousin, Bertha Goodman, and they had two sons together.

When Maslow entered the academic world of psychology, many psychologists were focusing their careers on finding ways to treat psychopathology or diseases of the mind. However, Maslow, and a small group of other psychologists, became interested in how healthy people excelled in creativity and other positive mental attributes. Maslow stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a “bag of symptoms.”

From 1937 to 1951, Maslow served on the faculty of Brooklyn College. During this time, he began to question how psychologists had come to their conclusions, and he had his ideas on how to understand the human mind, which he developed as part of the new discipline of humanistic psychology, which he helped to establish.

Humanistic psychology is a psychological perspective that arose in response to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism, when Maslow declared that there was a “third force” or “humanistic approach” in psychology. Some of the key elements of humanistic psychology are to “understand people as a whole greater than the sum of their parts,” to “acknowledge the relevance and significance of the full life history of an individual,” to “acknowledge the importance of intentionality in human existence,” and to “recognize the importance of an end goal of life for a healthy person.” Humanistic psychology also acknowledges spiritual aspiration as an integral part of the psyche.

The horrors of World War II inspired a vision of peace in Maslow, that led to his psychological studies of “self-actualization,” and this became the basis of his lifelong research and thinking about mental health and human potential. Maslow defined “self-actualization” as “achieving the fullest use of one’s talents and interests,” the need “to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”

In 1943, in a classic paper titled, A Theory of Human Motivation, published in the journal “Psychological Review,” Maslow developed his Hierarchy of Needs, a revolutionary theory of psychological health that is based on the idea that innate human needs have to be fulfilled in a certain sequential priority, that culminates in self-actualization through “peak experiences,” or “high points in life when people feel in harmony with themselves and their surroundings.”

Maslow placed these different needs on a pyramid, with seven ascending levels, ranging from “basic biological needs,” to “feelings of safety,” to “Love and belonging,” and “self-esteem,” up through to higher levels of “intellectual stimulation,” “aesthetic appreciation,” and eventually, at the top of the pyramid, “self-actualization.”

From 1951 to 1969, Maslow was a psychology professor at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Massachusetts. In 1962, Maslow published a collection of papers that focused on the positive qualities in people, which he developed into his classic 1968 book Toward a Psychology of Being. In 1963, Maslow was nominated to be the president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, but he rejected the nomination because he felt that the organization should develop an intellectual movement without a leader.

During the latter part of the 1960s, along with Stanislav Grof, Michael Murphy, Viktor Frankl, and others, Maslow founded the school of transpersonal psychology, an area of psychology that seeks to go beyond humanistic psychology and integrate the spiritual and transcendent aspects of the human experience within the framework of modern psychology.

Maslow identified various mystical, ecstatic, or spiritual states as higher peak experiences that went beyond self-actualization into what he called “transcendence.” Maslow called these experiences “a fourth force in psychology,” which were named as aspects of transpersonal psychology. Transpersonal psychology was concerned with the “empirical, scientific study of, and responsible implementation of… mystical, ecstatic, and spiritual states.”

In 1969, Maslow, Grof, and others were among the initiators behind the publication of the premier issue of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, and Maslow became one of the first teachers at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. Maslow also taught at the New School for Social Research and Columbia University, in New York City.

Maslow died in 1970 at the age of 62, from a heart attack while jogging, in Menlo Park, California. He is buried at the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A Review of General Psychology survey published in 2002 ranked Maslow as the tenth most cited psychologist of the 20th Century, and his work continues to exert an influence today.

Some of the quotes that Abraham Maslow is known for include:

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.

To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.

The great lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s backyard.

Creativity is a characteristic given to all human beings at birth.

If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.

In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety.

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.

The key question isn’t “What fosters creativity?” But why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might not be why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate?

Self-actualized people…live more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world.

by David Jay Brown