ABRAHAM MASLOW

was born April 1, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York.
He was the first of seven children born to his parents, who themselves were uneducated Jewish immigrants from Russia.
To satisfy his parents, he first studied law at the City College of New York
He married Bertha Goodman, his first cousin, against his parents' wishes.
moved to Wisconsin so that he could attend the University of Wisconsin.
There, he worked with Harry Harlow
He received Ph.D. in 1934
A year after graduation, he returned to New York to work with E. L. Thorndike at Columbia, where Maslow became interested in research on human sexuality.
He began teaching full time at Brooklyn College. There, he met Adler, Fromm, Horney, as well as several Gestalt and Freudian psychologists.
In 1951, Maslow served as the chair of the psychology department at Brandeis where he met Kurt Goldstein

The Humanistic Movement: The Third Force

In 1957 and 1958, Maslow with Clark Moustakas, held two meetings in Detroit for those interested in founding a professional association dedicated to a more meaningful, more humanistic vision.
They discussed several themes - such as self, self-actualization, health, creativity, intrinsic nature, being, becoming, individuality, and meaning - which they believed likely to become central concerns of such an approach to psychology.
In 1961, the American Association for Humanistic Psychology was formed.

In 1964, at old Saybrook, Connecticut, the first invitational conference was held

Attendees included
Gordon Allport, Abraham Maslow,
Rollo May,
Gardner Murphy,
Henry Murray and
Carl Rogers, among others

Maslow’s Theory of Motivation

The push toward actualization of inherent potentialities and the push to satisfy needs ensuring physical and physiological survival.
The actualizing tendency leads to life enhancement whereas the survival tendency merely ensures maintenance of life
According to Maslow, our basic needs, capacities, and tendencies are good, not evil, and healthy development means actualizing these tendencies.
It is denial or frustration of this essential nature that leads people to develop psychopathology.

Maslow noticed that some needs take precedence over others.

Maslow took this idea and created his now famous hierarchy of needs.
He laid out five broader layers: 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.

The physiological needs.

Maslow believed that a lack of a physiological need will lead to a very specific hunger for things which have, in the past, provided that essential need.

The safety and security needs. safety needs

When the physiological needs are largely taken care of, we 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.
requirements for an orderly, stable, and predictable world. Normal functioning adults have generally satisfied this need. It can be seen in neurotics and children. They need order to their lives. Too much freedom is scary to them.

The love and belonging needs.

the seeking affectionate and intimate relationships with other people, needing to be accepted into certain reference groups. This type of love is more than just sex. It must be a healthy giving relationship where the individual is loved and accepted.
You begin to feel the need for affectionate relationships
This includes membership in social organizations and affects career decisions

The 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, dignity, even dominance.
The higher form involves the need for self-respect, including such feelings as confidence, competence, achievement, mastery, independence, and freedom.

All 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.

He also talks about these levels in terms of homeostasis.

Homeostasis is the principle by which your furnace thermostat operates: When it gets too cold, it switches the heat on; When it gets too hot, it switches the heat off.
Like a thermostat 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 instinctoid -- instinct-like -- needs.

In terms of overall development, we move 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.
Under stressful conditions, or when survival is threatened, we can "regress" to a lower need level.
These things can occur on a society-wide basis as well

Consequence of Failure to Fulfill D-Needs

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 divorce, 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.

Self-actualization

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 do not involve 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.
If self-actualization is to occur, lower needs must have been taken care of, at least to a considerable extent.
Maslow at one point suggested only about two percent of the population reached the self-actualization stage because their lower needs have not been met

Personality Periphery: the self-actualizing personality

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 group were people like Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, William James, Benedict Spinoza, and others.
He looked at the biographies, writings, the acts and words of those he conceptualized self-actualization. From these sources, he developed a list of qualities that seemed characteristic of these people, as opposed to the great mass of us.

Characteristics of self-actualizing persons

fulfill themselves and do the best that they are capable of doing. They possess the following characteristics:
awareness - aware of inner rightness of themselves, of nature, and of the peak experiences of life.
freshness of appreciation - appreciate again and again the basics of life.
peak experience - intensification of any experience to the degree that there is a loss of transcendence of self. Experiences that are often termed religious or mystic. During a peak experience a person feels not only an expansion of self but meaningfulness and unity of life.
honesty - know their feelings and trust them. They can trust a wide range of feelings--love, anger, humor--present in interpersonal relationships.
philosophical sense of humor - the ability to laugh at the ridiculousness of the human situation. Not at other's expense, just a joke on all humanity.
social interest - deep feeling of kinship with humanity. It is similar to Alder's term, which means community feeling or one's identification with humanity.
interpersonal relations - sought by self-actualizers. They have a close circle of friends who are selectively chosen for their being as opposed to superficial love. They react to the behavior rather than the other person (Rogers unconditional positive regard).
democratic character structure - free of prejudice, tolerant, and accepting of all people regardless of their background.
freedom - allows them to withdraw from the chaos that surrounds them. Free to be creative and spontaneous.
detachment - displayed in high degrees. It allows higher degrees of concentration.
need for privacy - enjoyment of solitude.
autonomous and independent - motivated by growth rather than deficiency. Choose freely and govern themselves and assume responsibility for their actions.
creativity - without exception, self actualizers display creativity in what they do.
spontaneous - free to be whatever they are at any given moment.
problem centered - committed to tasks that must be accomplished: does not blame others. Not caught in the petty or trivial aspects of life.
resistance to enculturation - they are in harmony with culture but remain separate from it. They are independent in thought and behavior.

Maslow doesn't think that self-actualizers are perfect, of course.

There were several flaws 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.

Metaneeds and metapathologies

The need for self-actualization subsumes 17 metaneeds, or being-values which involve knowing, understanding, and aesthetic concerns among others.
Metaneeds involve the positive rather than the negative use of cognitive capacities; they involve seeking happiness and fulfillment rather then avoiding pain. The metaneeds are equally potent; any one may be substituted for another.
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.

When a self-actualizer doesn't get these needs fulfilled, they respond with metapathologies -- a list of problems as long as the list of metaneeds

the self-actualizer develops depression, despair, disgust,alienation, and a degree of cynicism.
Maslow hoped that his efforts at describing the self-actualizing person would eventually lead to a "periodic table" of the kinds of qualities, problems, pathologies, and even solutions characteristic of higher levels of human potential.