Abraham Maslow
Basic biographical data: Abraham Maslow was born in 1908, in New York. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. He studied psychology at the University of Wisconsin. In the 1930’s he got in contact with some people from Europe, Adler, Fromm, Horney. In the 1950’s he met Kurt Goldstein. Goldstein’s book: The Organism, helped to develop Maslow’s idea of self-actualization. During the second part of his life he began to stress the need of humanistic psychology. He died in 1970 in the United States.
Maslow developed the hierarchy of (human) needs.
This means that the more basic needs have to be satisfied first, before the other ones can manifest themselves.
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 (becoming too acidic or base will kill you) and to maintain body temperature (98.6 or near to it). Also, there are the needs to be active, to rest, to sleep, to get rid of wastes (CO2, sweat, urine, and faeces), to avoid pain, and to have sex.
2. 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, and protection. You might develop a need for structure, for order, some limits.
3. Belonging needs
When physiological needs and safety needs are, by 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.
4. Self-esteem needs
Maslow noted two versions of esteem needs, a lower one and a higher one. The lower one is the need for the respect of others, the need for status, fame, glory, recognition, attention, reputation, appreciation, and dignity, even dominance. The higher form involves the need for self-respect, including such feelings as confidence, competence, achievement, mastery, independence, and freedom. This one can develop independently from the respect of others. Maslow says that the needs 1-4 are deficit needs. (D-needs). This means, that if you do not get enough of it, you miss the lack of it, but if you get enough of it, happens nothing, you are just all right. Because of this he also called these needs survival needs. You also need love and self-esteem to maintain health. That’s why these are also instinct-like needs.
The other group of needs are the: being-needs, or the need of self-actualisation, or the driving needs
The function of these needs is not that of maintaining a homeostasis equilibrium. Once you feel it, you will feel it always. These needs concern the continuous desire to fulfill human potentials, to “be all that you can be.” They are a matter of becoming the most complete, the fullest, “you”-hence the term, self-actualisation. For the manifestation of the need of self-actualisation the lower needs have to be satisfied, at least to some extent. Maslow suggested that about 2 % of the human society can be called self-actualisers. He researched the biography of different people (historical ones – like Abraham Lincoln and Benedict Spinoza and his contemporaries like Aldous Huxley and Schweitzer) whom he meant to be self-actualisers, to see what characteristics they developed.
He found that these people had the following characteristics:
These people were reality-centered, which means they could differentiate what is fake and dishonest from what is real and genuine.
They were problem-centered, meaning they treated life’s difficulties as 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. 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, nonconformists 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.
Maslow calls the being needs also driving needs. According to him the following things are needed by these people aiming, striving, to be happy:
Truth, rather than dishonesty,
Goodness, rather than evil,
Beauty, not ugliness or vulgarity,
Unity, wholeness, and transcendence of opposites, not arbitrariness or forced choices,
Aliveness, not deadness or the mechanization of life,
Uniqueness, not bland uniformity,
Perfection and necessity, not sloppiness, inconsistency, or accident,
Completion, rather than incompleteness,
Justice and order, not injustice and lawlessness,
Simplicity, not unnecessary complexity,
Richness, not environmental impoverishment,
Effortlessness, not strain,
Playfulness, not grim, humorless, drudgery,
Self-sufficiency, not dependency,
Meaningfulness, rather than senselessness.
Further, they had a sense of humility and respect towards others -- something Maslow also called democratic values -- meaning that they were open to ethnic and individual variety, even treasuring it. They had a quality Maslow called human kinship or Gemeinschaftsgefühl -- social interest, compassion, humanity. And this was accompanied by strong ethics, which were 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. Along 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 Maslow calls, which 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.
In my opinion, the work of Maslow is also very valuable, because by considering and studying human needs , and the so-called higher needs in particular, he – unlike Freud – tried to say something about the healthy state of the human existence. It is common to state that Maslow, among Eric Fromm, Viktor Frankl, Erik Erickson - belongs to the “third force” of psychology. The third force of psychology is the so-called humanistic psychology.
But he also proposed to develop the “fourth force” of psychology, which should mainly concentrate on the transcendental experiences.
In the following you will find a short quotation from the second chapter (Dichotomized Science and Dichotomized Religion) of Maslow’s book: “Religions,Values and Peak-experiences”:
“My thesis is, in general, that new developments in psychology are forcing a profound change in our philosophy of science, a change so extensive that we may be able to accept the basic religious questions as a proper part of the jurisdiction of science, once science is broadened and redefined. It is because both science and religion have been too narrowly conceived, and have been too exclusively dichotomized and separated from each other, that they have been seen to be two mutually exclusive worlds. To put it briefly, this separation permitted nineteenth-century science to become too exclusively mechanistic, too positivistic, too reductionistic, too desperately attempting to be value-free. It mistakenly conceived of itself as having nothing to say about ends or ultimate values or spiritual values. This is the same as saying that these ends are entirely outside the range of natural human knowledge, that they can never be known in a confirmable, validated way, in a way that could satisfy intelligent men, as facts satisfy them.
Such an attitude dooms science to be nothing more than technology, amoral and non-ethical (…). Such a science can be no more than a collection of instrumentalities, methods, techniques, nothing but a tool to be used by any man, good or evil, and for any ends, good or evil (59). This dichotomising of knowledge and values has also pathologized the organized religions by cutting them off from facts, from knowledge, from science, even to the point of often making them the enemies of scientific knowledge. In effect, it tempts them to say that they have nothing more to learn.
But something is happening now to both science and religion, at least to their more intelligent and sophisticated representatives. These changes make possible a very different attitude by the less narrow scientist toward the religious questions, at least to the naturalistic, humanistic, religious questions. It might be said that this is simply one more instance of what has happened so often in the past, i.e., of snatching away another territory from the jurisdiction of organized religion.
Just as each science was once a part of the body of organized religion but then broke away to become independent, so also it can be said that the same thing may now be happening to the problems of values, ethics, spirituality, morals. They are being taken away from the exclusive jurisdiction of the institutionalized churches and are becoming the “property,” so to speak, of a new type of humanistic scientist who is vigorously denying the old claim of the established religions to be the sole arbiters of all questions of faith and morals.
This relation between religion and science could be stated in such a dichotomous, competitive way, but I think I can show that it need not be, and that the person who is deeply religious—in a particular sense that 1 shall discuss—must rather feel strengthened and encouraged by the prospect that his value questions may he more firmly answered than ever before. Sooner or later, we shall have to redefine both religion and science. (…) The word “sacred” is another instance of the pathologizing by isolation and by splitting-off. If the sacred becomes the exclusive jurisdiction of a priesthood, and if its supposed validity rests only upon supernatural foundations, then, in effect, it is taken out of the world of nature and of human nature. It is dichotomised sharply from the profane or secular and begins to have nothing to do with them, or even becomes their contradictory. It becomes associated with particular rites and ceremonies, with a particular day of the week, with a particular building, with a particular language, even with a particular musical instrument or certain foods. It does not infuse all of life but becomes compartmentalized. (…) And this brings us to the other half of the dichotomy, dichotomised science. Whatever we may say about split-off religion is very similar or complementary to what we may say of split-off science. For instance, in the division of the ideal and the actual, dichotomised science claims that it deals only with the actual and the existent and that it has nothing to do with the ideal, that is to say, with the ends, the goals, the purposes of life, i.e., with end-values.”
The relevant works of Abraham Maslow:
Religions, values and peak-experiences New York: Penguin Books, 1964, 1976, Harmondsworth, Eng:Penguin, 1964, 1976, 1978, 1986
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature New York: Viking Press, Latest edition, 1985, Harmondworth, Eng:Penguin Books, 1973
Motivation and Personality, 3rd Ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1987
Future Visions, The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow (Ed. by Edward Hoffman) CA: Sage Publications 1996
Toward a Psychology of Being, 3rd Ed. New York: Wiley, 1998