Abraham Maslow

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Abraham Maslow bigraphy, stories - American psychologist

Abraham Maslow : biography

April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970

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."Hoffmann (1988), p. 109.

Legacy

Towards the end of his 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 spring 1961 and continues to publish academic papers.

Near the end of his life, he attended Association for Humanistic Psychology’s founding meeting in 1963 where he declined nomination as its president, arguing that the new organization should develop an intellectual movement without a leader which resulted in useful strategy during the field’s early years.Abraham Maslow: A Brief Reminiscence Journal of Humanistic Psychology (October 2008), 48 (4), pg. 443-444 Tom Greening

Writings

  • (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, (2nd edition, 1968)
  • The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, 1971

Humanistic theories of self-actualization

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.Schacter, Daniel L. "Psychology" Maslow positioned his work as a vital complement to that of Freud:

However, Maslow was highly critical of Freud, since humanistic psychologists did not recognize spirituality as a navigation for our behaviours.The Personal Meaning of Social Values in the Work of Abraham Maslow by John H. Morgan Interpersona : An International Journal on Personal Relationships, ISSN 1981-6472, 06/2012, Volume 6, Issue 1, pp. 75 – 93

To prove that humans are not simply blindly reacting to situations, but trying to accomplish something greater, Maslow studied mentally healthy individuals instead of people with serious psychological issues. He focused on self-actualizing people. Self-actualizing people indicate a coherent personality syndrome and represent optimal psychological health and functioning.Michael Daniels, , "University of Toronto Libraries"

This informed his theory that a person enjoys "peak experiences", high points in life when the individual is in harmony with himself and his surroundings. In Maslow’s view, self-actualized people can have many peak experiences throughout a day while others have those experiences less frequently.Berger (1983), p. 43.

Qualities of self-actualizing people

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.