Abraham Maslow

Abraham Maslow

1908-1970

Abraham Harold Maslow was born April 1, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York. He was the first of seven children barn to his parents, who themselves were uneblucated Jewish immigrants from Russia. His parents, hoping for the best for academic success. Not surprisingly he became very lonely as a boy and found his refuge in books.

To satisfy his parents, he first studied law at the city college of New York (CCNY).After three semesters, he transferred to Cornell, and then back to CCNY. He married Bertha Goodman, his first cousin, against his parents wishes, Abe and Bertha went on to have two daughters.

He and Bertha moved to Wisconsin so that he could attend the university of Wisconsin. Here, he become interested in psychology, and his school work began to improve dramatically. He spent time there working with Marry Karlow, who is famous for his experiments with body rhesus monkeys and attachment behavior.

He received his BA in 1930, his MA in 1931, and his Ph.D in 1934 all in Psychology, all from the university of Wisconsin. A year after graduation, he returned to New York to work with E.L. Tharndike at Columbia, where Maslow became interested in research on human sexuality.

He began teaching full time at Brooklyn college. During this period of his life, he came into contact with the many European intellectuals that were immigrating to the US and Brooklyn in particular, at that time people like Adler, Fromm, Horney, as well as several Gestalt and Freudian Psychologists.

Maslow served as the chair of the psychology department at Brandeis from 1951 to 1969, while there he met kurt Goldstein, who had originated the idea of self actualization in his famous book, The organism 91934). It was also here that he began his crusade for a humanistic psychology something ultimately much more important to him than his own theorizing.

He spend his final years in semi retirement in California, until, on June 8, 1970. He died of a heart attack after years of ill health.

Theory

          One of the many interesting things Maslow noticed while he worked with monkeys early in his career, was that some needs take precedence over others. For example, if you are hungry and thirsty, you will tend to try to take care of the thirst first. After all, you can do without food for weeks, but you can only do without water for a couple of days thirst is a “stronger” need than hunger. Likewise, if you are very thirsty. But someone has put a choke hold on you and you can’t breath, which is more important ? the need to breathe, of course on the other hand, sex is less powerful than any of these. Let’s face it, you won’t die if you don’t get it ! Maslow took this idea and created his now famous.

          Hierarchy of needs beyond the details of air, water, food and sex, he laid out five broader buyers, the physiological needs. The needs for safety and security, the needs for love and belonging, the needs for esteem and the  need to actualize the self in that order.

1. The Physiological needs:

          These include the needs we have for oxygen, water, protein, salt, sugar, calcium and other minerals and vitamins. They also include the need to maintain a pH balance (getting too acidic or base will kill you) and temperature (98.6 or near to it). Also, there’s the needs to be active, to rest, to sleep, to get rid of wastes (CO₂, Sweat, Urine, and feces), to avoid pain and to have sex. Quite  a collection !

Maslow believed and research supports him, that these are in fact individual needs and that a lack of say vitamin C, will lead to a very specific hunger for things which have in the past provided that vitamin C e.g. orange juice, I guess the cravings that some pregnant women have, and the way in which babies eat the most foul tasting baby food, support the idea anecdotally.

2. The safety and security needs :

          When the physiological needs are largely taken care of this second layer of needs comes into play .you will become increasingly interested in finding safe circumstances, stability, protection you might develop a need for structure for order some limits.

          Looking at it negatively, you become concerned, not  with needs like hunger and thirst, but with your fears and anxieties. In the ordinary American adult, this set of needs manifest themselves in the form of our urges to have a home in a safe neighbourhood, a little job security and a nest egg, a good retirement plan and a bit of insurance, and so on.

3. The love and belonging needs:

          Whom physiological needs and safety needs are, y and large, taken care of, a third layer starts to show up. You begin to feel the need for friends, a sweetheart, children, affectionate relationships in general, even a sense of community looked at negatively, you become increasing susceptible to loneliness and social anxieties. In our day-to-day life, we exhibit these needs in our desires to marry, have a family, be a part of a community, a member of a church, a brother in the fraternity, a part of a gang or a bowling club. It is also a part of what we look for in a career.

4. The esteem needs:

          Next we begin to look for a little self esteem Maslow noted two versions of esteem needs. A lower one and a higher one. The lower are it the need for the respect of others the need for states, fame glasy, recognition, attention, reputation, appreciation, dignity, even dominance. The higher farm involves the need for self respect, including such feelings as confidence, competence,  achievement mastery, independence, and freedom. Note that this is the “higher” form because, unlike the respect of others, once you have self-respect, it’s a log harder to lose !

          The negative version of these needs is low self esteem and inferiority complexes. Maslow felt that Adler was really onto something when he proposed that these  were at the toots of many. If not most, of our psychological problems. In modern countries, most of us have what we need in regard to our physiological and safety needs we, more often than not, have quite a bit of love and belonging too. It’s a little respect that often seems so very hard to get !

An of the preceding four levels he calls deficit needs or D- needs. If you don’t have enough of something i.e. you  have a deficit you feel the need. But if you get all you need, you feel nothing at all ! in other words, they cease to be motivating. As the old blues song goes, “you don’t miss your water till your well runs dry!”.

He also talks about these levels in terms of homeostasis. Homeostasis is the principle by whi9ch your furnace thermostat operates; when it gets too cold, it switches the heat on; when it gets too hot. It switches the heat off. In the same way, your body, when it lacks a certain substance, develops a hunger for it; when it gets enough of it, then the hunger stops. Maslow simply extends the homeostatic principle to needs such as safety, belonging and esteem that we don’t ordinarily think of in these terms.

Maslow sees all these needs as essentially survival needs. Even love and esteem are needed for the maintenance of health. He says we all have these needs built in to us genetically, like instincts, in fact, he calls them instinct like needs.

In terms of overall development, we more through these levels a bit like stages. As newborns, our focus  if not our entire set of needs is on the physiological, soon, we begin to recognize that we need to be safe. Soon after that, we crave attention and affection. A bit later we look for self esteem, mind you this is in the first couple of years !

Under stressful conditions, or when survival is threatened, we can “regress” to a lower  need level. When you great career falk flat, you might seek out a little attention. When your family ups and leaves you, it seems that love is again all you ever wanted. When you face chapter eleven after a long and happy life, you suddenly can’t think of anything except money.

These things can occur on a society-wide basis as well. When society suddenly flounders, people start clamoring for a strong  leader to take over and make things  right, when the bombs start falling, they look for safety. When the food stops coming into the stores, their needs become even more basic.

Maslow suggested that we can ask people for their “philosophy of the future” what would their ideal life or world be like and get significant information as to what needs they do or do not have covered.

If you have significant problems along your development a period of extreme insecurity or hunger as a child, or the loss of a family member through death or devorce, or significant neglect or abuse you may “fixate” on that set of needs for the rest of your life.

This is Maslow’s understanding of neurosis, perhaps you went through a war as a kid. Now you have everything your heart  needs yet you still find yourself obsessing over having enough money and keeping the panory well stocked or perhaps your parent divorced when you were young now you have a wonderful spouse yet you get insanely jealous or worry constantly that they are going to leave you because you are not “good enough” for them you get the picture.

Self actualization 

          The last level is a bit different Maslow has used a variety of terms to refer to this level; he has called it growth  motivation (in contrast to deficit motivation), being needs (or B-needs, in contrast to D-needs), and self – actualization.

          These are needs that o not involved balance or homeostasis. Once engaged, they continue to be felt. In fact, they are likely to become stronger as we “feed” them ! They involve the continuous desire to fulfill potentials, to “be all that you can be”. They are a matter of becoming the most complete, the fullest, “you” hence the term, self actualization.

          Now, in keeping with his they up to this point, if you want to be truly self actualizing, you need to have your lower needs taken care of, at least to a considerable extent. This makes sense; if you are hungry, you are scrambling to get food; if you are unsafe, you have to be continuously on guard; if you are isolated and unloved, you have to satisfy that need, if you have a low sense of self esteem, you have to be defensive or compensate,. When lower needs are unmet, you can’t fully devote yourself to fulfilling your potentials.

          It isn’t surprising, then, the world being as difficult as it is, that only a small percentage of the world’s population is truly, predominantly, self actualizing Maslow at one point suggested only about two percent !.

          The question becomes, of course, what exactly does Maslow mean by self actualization. To answer that, we need to look at the kind of people he called self actualizes. Fortunately, he did this for us,  using a qualitative method called biographical analysis.

          He began by picking out a group of people, some historical figures, some people he knew, whom he felt clearly met the standard of self actualization included in this august group were Abraham Lincoln. Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jame Adams, William James, Albert Schweitzer Benedict Spinoza and Alduous Huxley, Plus 12 innamed people who were alive at the time Maslow di his research. He then looked at their biographies, writings, the acts and wards of those he knew peroally, and so on. From these sources, he developed a list of qualities that seemed characteristic of these people, as opposed  to the great mass of us.

These people were reality centered, which means they could differentiate what is fake and dishonest from what is real and genuine. They were problems demanding solutions, not as personal troubles to be railed at or surrendered to and they had a different perception of means and ends. They felt that the ends don’t necessarily justify the means, that the means could be ends themselves, and that the means the journey…. Was often more important than the ends.

The self actualizers also had a different way of relating to others. First, they enjoyed solitude, and were comfortable being alone. and they enjoyed deeper personal relations with a few close friends and family members, rather than more shallow relationships with many people.

They enjoyed autonomy, a relative independence from physical and social needs and they resisted enculturation, that is, they were  not susceptible to social pressure to be “well adjusted” or to “fit in” they were, in fact non conformists in the best sense.

They had an unhostile sense of humor preferring to joke at their own expense, or at the human condition, and never directing their  humor at others. They had a quality he called acceptance of self and others, by which he meant that these people would be more likely to take you as you are than try to change you into what they thought you should be. This same acceptance applied to their attitudes towards themselves. If some quality of theirs wasn’t harmful, they let it be, even enjoying it as a personal quick. On the other hand, they here often strongly motivate to change negative qualities in themselves that could be  changed along with this comes spontaneity and simplicity. They preferred being themselves rather than being pretentious or artificial. In fact, for all their non conformity, he found that they tended to be conventional on the surface, just where less self actualizing nonconformists tend to be the most dramatic.

Further, they had a sense of humility and respect towards others something Maslow also called democratic values meaning that they were open to etimic and individual variety, even treasuring it. They had a quality Maslow called human kinship or Gemeinsch aftsgefiihl social interest, compassion, humanity. And this was accompanied by a strong ethics, which was spiritual but seldom conventionally religious in nature.

And these people had a certain freshness of appreciation. An ability to see things, even ordinary things, with wonder. Among with this comes their ability to be creative, inventive, and original. And, finally, these people tended to have more peak experiences than the average person. A peak experience is one that takes you out of yourself, that makes you feel very tiny, or very large, to some extent one with life or nature or God.  It gives you a feeling of being a part of the infinite and the eternal. These experiences tend to leave their mark  on a person, change them for the better, and many people actively seek them out. They are also called mystical experiences, and are an important part of many religious and philosophical traditions. Maslow doesn’t think that self actualizes are perfect, of course, these were several flames or imperfections he discovered along the way as well. First, they often suffered considerable anxiety and  guilt but realistic anxiety and guilt, rather than misplaced or neurotic versions. Some of them were absentminded and overly kind. And finally, some of them had unexpected moments of ruthlessness, surgical coldness, and loss of humor.

Two other points he makes about these self actualizes. Their values were “natural” and seemed to flow effortlessly from their personalities. And they appeared to transcend many of the dichotomies others accept as being undeniable, such as the differences between the spiritual and the physical, the selfish and the unselfish, and the  masculine and the feminine.

Conclusion:

          Maslow has been a very inspirational figure in personality theories. In the 1960’s in particular, people were tired of the reductinistic, mechanistic messages of the behaviorists and physiological psychologists. They were looking for meaning and purpose in their lives, even a higher, more mystical meaning Maslow was one of the pioneers in that movement to bring the human being back into psychology an the person back into personality.

          At approximately the same time, another movement was gelting underway. One inspired by some of the very things that turned Maslow off computers and information processing as well as very rationalistic theorized such as piagets cognitive development theory and Noam Chomsky’s linguistics. This of course, be came the congnitive movement in psychology. As the heyday of humanism appeared to lead to little more than drug abuse. Astrology and self indulgence, congnitivism provided the scientific ground students of Psychology were yearning far. 

          But the message should not be lost. Psychology is, first and foremost, about people, real people, in real lives and not about computer models, statistical analysis, rat behavior, test scores and laboratories.

References:

          Copyright 1998, 2006 by Dr. C. Goerge Boere Boldwin A.F. Personal structure of personality.