Abraham Maslow

Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) was an American psychologist born in Brooklyn, New York, who built a theory of human motivation centered on the idea that people have a natural drive toward health, growth, and what he called self-actualization. He is best known for the hierarchy of needs, first laid out in Motivation and Personality (1954), and for helping to establish humanistic psychology as a recognized branch of the discipline. Rather than studying mentally ill patients, Maslow proposed studying the healthiest people he could find to determine what human beings are actually capable of. His work sits alongside the psychoanalytic and behaviorist traditions without reducing to either, and by the early 1960s it had become the theoretical center of what he called the “Third Force” in American psychology.

Background

Maslow was born in 1908 to Russian Jewish immigrant parents and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He completed his doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin under the primate researcher Harry Harlow, who gave him his first close look at experimental methods in psychology. He later joined the psychology department at Brandeis University, where he spent most of his academic career and where his theoretical writing reached full development. His intellectual debts were wide: he drew on Kurt Goldstein’s concept of organismic self-actualization, on Alfred Adler’s interest in the healthy individual, and on the psychoanalytic tradition he both used and argued with throughout his career.

Humanistic Psychology as Third Force (vs. Freudian + Behaviorist)

By the early 1960s, Maslow recognized that a loose coalition of psychologists — Adlerians, Rankians, Jungians, neo-Freudians, Gestalt therapists, and existential psychologists — had been converging on a common set of objections to both orthodox psychoanalysis and behaviorism.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Maslow labeled this grouping “Third Force psychology,” positioning it not as a rejection of prior work but as an extension that the existing schools could not accomplish on their own.

Existentialism contributed a particular pressure to this convergence. Maslow read existential and phenomenological philosophy as pushing psychology toward an enlarged conception of science capable of including subjective experience and overcoming the Cartesian split between subject and object.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) The cultural condition that made existentialism necessary, in his reading, was the collapse of external value frameworks: with Nietzsche’s God dead and political-economic frameworks unable to settle questions of meaning, the self had become the locus of values by default.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) He endorsed phenomenological description as a valid psychological method, the careful effort to enter another person’s worldview rather than reducing them to behavioral data, and noted that this method was rough on positivistic philosophy of science.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) He argued that no psychology will be complete until it incorporates the future as dynamically active in the present; only the flexibly creative person can face genuine novelty without fear, since past-based defenses and habits are inadequate to what has not yet happened.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) His own ambition was synthesis rather than rupture: to enrich psychology with existentialist insights while pushing toward what Anthony Sutich proposed calling ontopsychology, the psychology of the fully evolved authentic self.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

His relationship to Freud is worth stating precisely. Maslow did not dismiss psychoanalytic findings; he argued that Freud had done one half of the necessary work and that the other half remained to be done. “Freudian psychology supplies us with the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half… It is as if Freud supplied us with the psychopathology of the average.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) The problem, in Maslow’s reading, was not that Freud was wrong about sick people — it was that he had studied sickness almost exclusively, and psychology had taken his findings as a complete account of the human being. Completing that account required a science that took healthy, high-functioning people as its primary data.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Maslow’s foundational premise was that human inner nature “is not intrinsically or primarily or necessarily evil. The base and the evil do not flow from man’s animal nature… but rather from the thwarting or twisting of this inner nature.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Evil behavior appears to be a secondary reaction to frustration of this intrinsic nature.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

This premise had a practical consequence for how Maslow conceptualized moral guidance. Alongside the Freudian superego — internalized external authority, guilt-based — he identified what he called the “intrinsic conscience”: a non-punitive, unconscious or preconscious perception of one’s own nature, destiny, and capacities, whose violations produce shame rather than guilt and whose voice is quieter than the superego’s but more fundamental.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) The clinical implication is significant: symptom absence does not constitute health. Maslow deliberately challenged the conventional distinction between sickness and health at the surface level of symptoms. Sickness might consist precisely in the absence of symptoms when their presence would be the healthy response — growth pains, protest against violation of one’s nature, signals that something essential is being suppressed.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) The person who shows no signs of distress in a depriving environment may not be healthy but merely suppressed.

Hierarchy of Needs and Deficiency vs. Growth Motivation

The organizing axis of Maslow’s psychology is the distinction between deficiency motivation and growth motivation. Deficiency motivation — what he called D-motivation — arises from unmet needs: for safety, belonging, esteem. A person operating from deficiency perceives the world as a source of supply or threat, selecting information for its usefulness rather than perceiving it fully.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Growth motivation, by contrast, characterizes a person whose basic needs are substantially met and who is therefore free to be moved by curiosity, beauty, or truth rather than necessity.

Neurosis, in this framework, is not primarily a product of repressed instincts — the Freudian model — but of ungratified basic needs. “We can speak of neurosis as a deficiency disease — just as we can speak of pellagra or scurvy as deficiency diseases… Neurosis is the end product of ungratified basic needs.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) This medical analogy is pointed: it reframes psychological distress as a question of what the person is missing, and implies that therapy must supply something, not merely remove something.

The relationship between the two motivational modes is not simply sequential. Maslow argued that meeting basic needs does not extinguish motivation but transforms it: “Gratification of basic needs releases the person for higher needs and for self-actualization.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) This is the engine of the hierarchy — gratification does not produce passivity but opens access to a qualitatively different kind of wanting. Maslow identified twelve observable differences between deficiency-motivated and growth-motivated persons, including greater independence from the environment, greater capacity to enjoy repetition, and greater richness of emotional response.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

This framework also changes how he describes love. Deficiency love — D-love — is a hunger: it aims at filling a lack and subsides when that lack is filled. Being-love — B-love — is disinterested appreciation of another person for who they are, not for what they provide. “B-love (love for the Being of another person, unneeding love, unselfish love) is different from D-love (deficiency-love, love that is selfish, love that is a hunger). They are qualitatively different and can be clearly differentiated.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Self-actualization involves a genuine shift in the structure of relationship, not merely a reduction in obvious neediness.

Safety, Growth, and the Helpful Let-Be

Maslow framed development as a perpetual dialectic between two sets of forces inside every person: one clinging to safety and defense, hanging on to the past and afraid of independence; the other impelling toward wholeness of self and full functioning of capacities, with confidence in the external world.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Pathology arises when safety chronically overrides growth, but both forces are universal and both are real.

This let him reformulate the engine of growth without relying on drive-reduction. Growth occurs when the next step forward is subjectively more delightful than the last; the new experience is its own criterion of rightness rather than something validated by external standard.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Healthy development becomes a never-ending series of free-choice situations in which the person picks between safety and growth at each fork. Growth is chosen when its delights and the anxieties of safety together outweigh the anxieties of growth and the delights of safety.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) The therapist or educator’s job is to adjust this balance, making growth more attractive and regression less so, rather than imposing growth from outside.

Maslow named this stance “helpful let-be,” a revision of Taoist non-interference that recognizes the growing person needs help.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) It respects the fear of growth, the slow pace of change, and the genuine functions of defense, while also recognizing the inherent direction of healthy development. He used the position to criticize both extremes: classical Freudians for pathologizing everything and seeing only sickness, and growth-school optimists for sliding past the realities of weakness, defense, and failure to grow.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) A complete psychology holds defense and growth together.

The Need to Know and the Fear of Knowing

Maslow read Freud’s discovery of motivated not-knowing as Freud’s most lasting contribution: psychological illness rests in large part on fear of knowledge of oneself, and inner and outer fears tend to mirror each other.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) He extended the idea in a direction Freud had not fully developed. We evade knowledge that could shame us, but we also evade knowledge of our own greatness; alongside the Freudian defenses against inferiority sits what Maslow called the fear of hubris, the resistance to acknowledging our own talents, finest impulses, and highest potentialities.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

This let him apply the D/B distinction to epistemology itself. Knowledge can serve anxiety-reduction or growth, and the two motivations produce qualitatively different intellectual products. A safety-philosophy or safety-religion or safety-science is more apt to be blind than its growth counterpart, because anxious knowing is shaped by the threats it is mapping rather than by the world being investigated.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Fear of knowing, in turn, is often fear of the action that knowledge would require. The Germans living near Dachau were safer not knowing what was happening: knowing would have forced them either to act or to feel the cost of cowardice.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Pseudo-stupidity is a defense against responsibility, not a passive state.

The need to know therefore stands in dialectical relation with the fear of knowing. Free knowing requires courage, and the social and psychological factors that increase fear directly cut the impulse to know. Factors that permit boldness free it.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Sickness maintains itself through strategic not-knowing; therapy must address why the person does not want to know, not merely supply missing information.

Peak Experiences and B-Cognition

In B-cognition, the object is perceived as a whole, as a complete unit, detached from relations, from possible usefulness, from expediency, and from purpose. It is seen as if it were all there was in the universe, as if it were all of Being, synonymous with the universe.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) The perceiver is self-forgetful and ego-transcending.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Peak experiences are moments when B-cognition is fully active. They are self-validating — they do not need justification from outside themselves — and they are characterized by a sense of completeness that temporarily suspends ordinary wanting.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) During a peak experience, the person perceives what Maslow called Being-values, or B-values: a cluster of qualities including wholeness, perfection, completion, justice, aliveness, richness, simplicity, beauty, goodness, uniqueness, effortlessness, playfulness, truth, and self-sufficiency — perceived not as projections of the observer’s wishes but as genuinely present in the thing being experienced.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

These experiences have lasting effects. After a peak experience, “people feel luckier, more grateful, more appreciative of life. There can be removal of symptoms, freeing of inhibitions, increased spontaneity.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Maslow’s insight here is that peak experiences are not merely aesthetically interesting — they are clinically significant events with measurable consequences.

Maslow situated peak experiences within a broader framework of closure and completion. All peak-experiences may be understood as “completions-of-the-act” in David Levy’s sense, or as Gestalt closure — states of total discharge, catharsis, climax, and consummation in which the organism’s tension resolves into a condition of momentary sufficiency.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) In those states, the universe is perceived as complete and finished, and ordinary wanting temporarily ceases — not through numbness but through the temporary satisfaction of being fully present.

In peak-experiences, the identity-dimension is evident: the person feels more integrated, unified, and harmoniously organized, with less internal friction.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) A consistent paradox runs through this account: the greatest attainment of identity is simultaneously its transcendence; becoming most purely oneself enables fusion with the world.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Identity, therefore, is both an end-goal and a transitional step; the path to ego-transcendence runs through achieving a strong real self, not through asceticism.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

This observation solved a methodological problem. Researchers did not need to identify and study the rare person who had permanently achieved self-actualization. Any person in a peak experience temporarily exhibits the same characteristics. “Peak-experiences are in some ways functionally equivalent to good health… The person in a peak-experience temporarily has the characteristics of the self-actualizing person… This enables us to study psychological health in any person rather than only in the rare individual who has achieved it.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

At the higher levels of human maturation, classical Western dichotomies are not balanced or compromised; they are fused, transcended, or resolved. Self-actualizing people are simultaneously selfish and unselfish, Dionysian and Apollonian, individual and social, rational and irrational, fused with others and detached from them. What Maslow had thought were straight-line continua with polar extremes turned out to behave more like circles or spirals in which the polar extremes meet in fused unity.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Limits of B-Cognition

Maslow was careful to note that exclusive B-cognition is itself dangerous. Its chief liability is that it makes action impossible or at least indecisive: B-cognition is without judgment, comparison, or condemnation; it suspends decision because decision is readiness to act, and B-cognition is passive contemplation.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) If one only contemplates the cancer or the bacteria with awe, one does nothing. Self-actualization therefore requires both modes; conflict, practical decisiveness, struggle, and regret are necessary epiphenomena of self-actualization, not failures of it.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Health, on this view, is not the absence of problems but a shift in their kind. Self-actualization moves the person from neurotic, infantile, or fantasy problems to the real existential problems of human life, those for which there is no perfect solution.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) B-cognition can also blur values and produce too great a tolerance, since every person seen exclusively from the viewpoint of his own Being looks perfect in his own kind. Unconditional acceptance is appropriate for the therapist, lover, parent, or friend, but not for the judge, policeman, or administrator.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) The most fully-human people, Maslow’s retrospective impression went, live ordinary lives a good deal of the time: shopping, eating, going to the dentist, deliberating between black shoes and brown, getting annoyed at bores. Peak experiences and B-cognition remain exceptional in absolute frequency even for self-actualizers.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Integration with daily life, not removal from it, is the goal.

Self-Actualization: Method and Concept

Maslow’s method for understanding psychological health was to start with its exemplars. Averaging across a general population produces a picture of the average person — not the healthy one. “To discover full humanness, start with the best human beings you can find, and define their characteristics… This is the only way to find out what human beings can be, i.e., the ceiling rather than the floor of human nature.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) He applied this logic both to individuals and to choices: healthy persons are better choosers not just for themselves but as models for the species. “Only the choices of healthy human beings will tell us what is good for the human species.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Maslow supported this argument with evidence from animal diet studies, in which organisms given free choice among adequate alternatives reliably selected diets beneficial to their health. “Hundreds of experiments have been made that demonstrate a universal inborn ability in all sorts of animals to select a beneficial diet if enough alternatives are presented from among which they are permitted free choice.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) The implication is that organisms have something like an organismic wisdom that guides them toward what they need when environmental interference is minimized.

Self-actualization itself Maslow defined operationally as fully experiencing a moment — “fully, vividly, selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption… At that moment of experiencing, the person is wholly and fully human. This is a moment of self-actualization.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) This episodic definition democratizes the concept: self-actualization is not a permanent trait of exceptional individuals but a state accessible, if temporarily, to anyone. The permanent or chronic form of self-actualization describes a person who lives regularly and substantially from growth motivation rather than deficiency motivation.

Values and Human Nature

Maslow argued that a scientific ethics and natural value system can be grounded empirically in knowledge of human nature rather than external authority.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) He observed that the more we learn about man’s natural tendencies, the easier it will be to tell him how to be good.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

The biological basis of this claim is the instinctoid thesis: human inner nature is “biologically based,” real and directionful, but weak enough to be overridden by culture, learning, and habit.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) This is Maslow’s position between strong instinct theory (which made human nature compulsive and deterministic) and blank-slate environmentalism (which denied that human nature had any directional content at all). Inner nature exists, can be thwarted, and when thwarted produces suffering.

Maslow acknowledged that instinct theory carried a contested edge, particularly regarding aggression: the instinctoid framework is real but the question of whether aggression belongs among the basic needs rather than among defensive reactions to frustration remained unresolved in his account.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) The ethical implications of this biology were substantial. A principal deficiency of past and present ethical theories, Maslow argued, was insufficient knowledge of psychopathology and psychotherapy — the large literature of dynamic psychology that could supply the missing mechanism by which humans fail to meet their own ideals.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

The integration of Becoming and Being — ongoing development and moments of completeness — was itself resolved through peak experiences. Each basic-need gratification can serve as a peak-experience: an absolute delight, perfect in itself, validating life in that moment regardless of what comes before or after.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) This means the developmental hierarchy is not merely sequential but punctuated by moments of Being that reward Becoming and sustain the motivation to continue growing.

Maslow argued that the absence of meaningful values is itself pathogenic.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) “Valuelessness is psychopathogenic; humans need a framework of values like they need sunlight or calcium, and lack of it produces anomie, cynicism, and somatic illness.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) This positioned the search for meaning not as a luxury but as a clinical necessity.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Neurosis, in the most precise statement of Maslow’s view, is not the breakthrough of suppressed animal drives — the Freudian formulation — but the evasion of specifically human growth.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) In Maslow’s own words:

A neurosis is not part of the inner core but rather a defense against or an evasion of it, as well as a distorted expression of it (under the aegis of fear). It is ordinarily a compromise between the effort to seek basic need gratifications in a covert or disguised or self-defeating way, and the fear of these needs, gratifications and motivated behaviors. To express neurotic needs, emotions, attitudes, definitions, actions, etc., means not to express the inner core or real self fully.

The clinical task, accordingly, is not primarily to remove repression but to support growth — to provide what the person has been missing and to reduce the fear that drives evasion.

Capacities, Maslow argued, generate their own needs. The person with developed capacities in any domain — intellectual, physical, relational — will feel driven to exercise those capacities, and the failure to do so will produce a specific form of suffering. “Capacities are needs, and therefore are intrinsic values as well… The muscular person likes to use his muscles, indeed has to use them in order to self-actualize.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Higher needs — those that emerge after basic deficiency needs are met — are more distinctively human than lower ones, and their deprivation constitutes a specifically human form of suffering that Maslow called metapathology: a sickness of the soul rather than the body.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) This grounds a genuinely pluralistic theory of value: there is no single profile of the self-actualized person because people differ in their constitutions and therefore in what their actualization requires.

Psychologically healthy people, on this view, do not experience the classic oppositions of Western thought — selfishness versus altruism, reason versus emotion, work versus play — as genuine dilemmas. “Many apparent dichotomies that our culture has made us accept as real… are resolved in the healthy person… Health means the transcendence, not the suppression or compromise, of these splits.”(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Integration, not balance or trade-off, is the hallmark of health.

Maslow grounded these claims empirically, by observing what healthy people actually choose. The “higher values, the eternal virtues” turn out, when surveyed in this way, to be roughly what relatively healthy persons spontaneously prefer when they feel strong and have real choice: truth over falsehood, good over evil, beauty over ugliness, integration over dissociation, joy over sorrow, aliveness over deadness, uniqueness over stereotype.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Healthy people also value, alongside these growth choices, what Maslow called coasting values: peace and quiet, sleep, surrender, dependency, protection from reality, the slip from Shakespeare to detective stories, and so on. The two coexist dialectically; the more mature the person, the more growth values dominate, but coasting values remain necessary even at maturity.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

The hierarchical principle restated in value terms: man’s higher nature rests on a satisfied lower nature, not on its renunciation. The best way to develop the higher capacities is to gratify the lower needs first, and a tolerable environment is part of that base.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) On this footing Maslow proposed something more ambitious than a description of preferences. A descriptive, naturalistic science of human values is in principle possible; the strict opposition between “what is” and “what ought to be” is partly false, because what healthy organisms tend toward is what is good for them.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Therapy, accordingly, can be reframed as a search for intrinsic values. The depth therapist helps the patient discover what most-intrinsic values they are obscurely pursuing or yearning for; the search for identity is, in essence, the search for one’s own authentic values.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Health as Transcendence of Environment

Maslow was sharply critical of definitions that reduce psychological health to adjustment, environmental competence, or task-performance. The danger he saw was a sophisticated resurgence of older conformist ideals: defining the healthy person by job-analysis, by social fit, by what the environment requires, rather than by autonomy and intrinsic law.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) His own healthy subjects were superficially accepting of conventions but privately casual and detached about them, with calm good-humored rejection of cultural stupidities and a willingness to fight when fighting was necessary. He called this autonomy: rule by the laws of one’s own character rather than by the rules of society.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Autonomy did not mean perpetual mastery. The more eager the helper is to make a diagnosis or to cure, the less helpful they become, and B-cognition’s receptive stance is part of health rather than a failure of competence: in some situations, to give in is to overcome.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Maslow also reversed the standard valuation of the unconscious. After Freud, the unconscious had been treated as the seat of pathology. But the depths are also the source of creativity, art, love, humor, play, and certain kinds of truth. In healthy persons the unconscious is a usable resource, not a threat to be contained, and primary-process cognition can be valued rather than pathologized.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

The implication was disciplinary. Psychology has its own jurisdiction, distinct from biology and sociology: there is a portion of the psyche that is not a reflection of the outer world or a molding to it. A psychological psychology, one that takes the autonomous psyche as its proper object, is therefore conceivable, even necessary.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Against Rubricizing

A recurring move in Toward a Psychology of Being is the defense of the unique individual against classification. Maslow identified what he called rubricizing, quick easy cataloguing that places the person in a system rather than encountering them, as a cheap form of cognizing, really a form of not-cognizing, that stresses similarities over differences and the category over the person.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Healthy patients react against being so processed, and Maslow read that reaction as evidence of health, not pathology: a legitimate self-defense of personal identity against being deprived of individuality.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

The clinical application was direct. Novice therapists eager to cure quickly, or “textbook boys” who had memorized a conceptual system and conceived therapy as passing out concepts, were the rubricizers patients had to protect themselves against. To call the resulting self-protective reaction “resistance” in the classical Freudian sense was a misuse of the concept.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) The patient must be approached as a single, unique person rather than as a member of a class; understanding a person is not the same as classifying them, and only understanding qualifies as the prerequisite of therapy.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Resistance to rubricizing is therefore both an epistemological correction and an ethical defense, since bad therapy violates the patient’s selfhood through abstract interpretation, premature explanation, and meaningless conceptualizations that imply lack of respect.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

Creativity in the Healthy Person

Maslow’s account of creativity follows directly from his conception of health. Self-actualizing creativity is not a specialized artistic talent but a fundamental human characteristic, a potentiality given to most people at birth and most often lost or buried during enculturation. A first-rate soup can be more creative than a second-rate painting; cooking, parenthood, and homemaking can be creative while poetry need not be.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) What unites creative acts in this broader sense is a special kind of perceptiveness, the openness Carl Rogers called “openness to experience,” that sees the fresh, the raw, the concrete, rather than encountering reality through layers of category and stereotype.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

The mechanics of this creativity sit on the boundary between primary and secondary cognitive processes. Primary creativeness flows easily from the integrated person whose depths are accessible and unfeared; integrated creativity, the kind that produces great work in art, philosophy, or science, requires the fusion of primary spontaneity with secondary discipline.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) Creativity, in this account, is an epiphenomenon of psychological wholeness rather than a separate dimension to be cultivated. The civil war between depths and defenses, characteristic of the average person, has been resolved in self-actualizers, so more of themselves is available for use rather than spent on protection.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) What blocks creativity is not the absence of capacity but the presence of fear: fear of one’s own impulses, thoughts, and depths. Maslow’s subjects were less afraid of their own insides, more self-accepting, and therefore more able to perceive bravely and act spontaneously.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) The route to creativity passes through reducing fear, not through training technique.

Philosophy of Science

Maslow’s appendix on scientific publication makes explicit a methodological commitment that runs throughout the book. The journals, books, and conferences of mainstream psychology are organized for the rational, abstract, logical, public, impersonal, nomothetic, repeatable, and unemotional: the very things that humanistic and phenomenological psychologies are trying to expand beyond. The forms therefore beg the question, forcing therapists and self-observers to discuss their own and others’ experience in the same register one might use for bacteria or white rats, assuming the subject-object cleavage that humanistic psychology contests.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962)

He pushed the diagnosis further. Impersonal science, he argued, can sometimes be a flight from inner disorder, a defense against fear of loss of control, even a distaste for emotion or a disgust with humanness.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) What looks like neutral methodology may be psychological defense. The constructive proposal was practical: scientific journals should accept more idiographic papers, both biographical and autobiographical, including therapized people’s own reports on what they learned, self-analyses such as Marion Milner’s On Not Being Able To Paint, and verbatim reports of interpersonal contacts.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) The Dollard precedent, a scholar declaring his own prejudices before fieldwork, would become standard practice in qualitative methodology a generation later.

Legacy

Maslow was explicit that he was proposing a research program rather than delivering completed findings.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) He framed Toward a Psychology of Being as the opening sketch of a third-force psychology that took both behaviorism and orthodox psychoanalysis as partial accounts to be incorporated and exceeded:

I think it is now possible to begin to delineate this view of human nature as a total, single, comprehensive system of psychology even though much of it has arisen as a reaction against the limitations (as philosophies of human nature) of the two most comprehensive psychologies now available — behaviorism (or associationism) and classical, Freudian psychoanalysis… I should warn you that at many points I am way out ahead of the data. Some of these propositions are more based on private conviction than on publicly demonstrated facts. However, they are all in principle confirmable or disconfirmable.

This invitation to testing and revision is consistent across the text.

The Third Force coalition he helped to name included, by the early 1960s, Adlerians, Rankians, Jungians, neo-Freudians, post-Freudians, Goldstein’s organismic psychology, Gestalt therapy, Lewinian field theory, general semanticists, and existential psychologists.(Maslow, Abraham H., 1962) The breadth of this coalition also contained the seeds of the diffusion that followed: “humanistic psychology” became a label broad enough to cover very different commitments, and Maslow’s more careful formulations were sometimes flattened in popular reception. His influence on Carl Rogers was substantial and acknowledged, and through Rogers his ideas entered counseling psychology, person-centered therapy, and educational reform throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.

Maslow died in 1970, before the positive psychology movement — which would later claim him as a precursor — took organized form. His lasting contribution was methodological as much as theoretical: the insistence that psychology could not give an adequate account of human beings by studying only what goes wrong in them, and that the science of human flourishing required taking its highest exemplars as its primary data.

See Also

• Self-Actualization
• Humanistic Psychology
• Peak Experience
• Carl Rogers
• Kurt Goldstein
• Sigmund Freud
• Alfred Adler
• Third Force Psychology

Sources

All claims cite evidence cards from:

• Maslow, A. H. (1962). Toward a Psychology of Being. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand. [Source ID: maslow-towardpsychologyofbeing-1962]