ABRAHAM MASLOW

BIOGRAPHY

 Born the eldest of seven children of a Jewish couple in

Brooklyn, New York on April 1, 1908
 Had a dissatisfying childhood and poor school
performance due to pressure from his parents
 Initially took up law at the Central College of New York
and Cornell University
 He married his first cousin against their parents’ will at
the age of 20
 He later on transferred to Wisconsin and obtained his BA,
MA, and PhD in Psychology
 Had classroom experiences with great teachers in
psychology including Harlow, Titchner, Ruth Benedict,
Max Wertheimer and, Alfred Adler, Julian Rotter, and
Kurt Goldstein
 Became known for his Holistic-Dynamic Theory of Personality and his Hierarchy
of Needs
 Regarded as the champion of self-actualization and human potential
 Taught at Brandeis University
 President of the APA from 1967-1968
 Published Motivation and Personality in 1970.
 Personal life was filled with pain and ill health. He was shy, unhappy, isolated,
and self-rejecting
 Died of a heart attack in 1970

THE HOLISTIC – DYNAMIC THEORY OF PERSONALITY

 Assumes that the whole person is continually being motivated by one need or
another and that people have the potential to grow toward psychological health,
that is, self actualization. To attain self actualization, people must satisfy lower
level needs such as hunger, safety, love, and esteem. Only after they are
relatively satisfied in each of these needs can they reach self-actualization

FIVE BASIC ASSUMPTIONS OF MOTIVATION

 The whole person is motivated, requiring a holistic approach

 Motivation is usually complex: several sources can contribute to the eventual
appearance of some behavior
  People are continually motivated by one need or another. Satisfying one need
only results in the individual trying to satisfy other needs.
 People are universally motivated by the same basic needs
 Needs can be arranged in a hierarchical fashion

HIERARCHY OF NEEDS

 Certain human needs are more

fundamental than others, and
satisfaction of these "basic" needs
is necessary before "higher" needs
can be addressed.
 Theory of Prepotent Needs
-Lower needs must be satisfied
(and take precedence over) higher
order needs.

PHYSIOLOGICAL NEEDS

 The most basic needs of oxygen, food, water, and maintenance of body
temperature (food, shelter, & clothing)
 Commonly satisfied in first world countries
 The only needs which can be completely or even over satisfied
 Continually recurring

SAFETY NEEDS

 Protection from harm, the need for law and order

 Can never be over satisfied
 When children do not have their safety needs met, they develop basic anxiety and
may become neurotic adults
 In peaceful societies, safety needs are relatively easy to satisfy
 Become highly important during natural disasters, fires, accidents, and other life
threatening situation

NEED FOR LOVE AND BELONGINGNESS

 May manifest in three scenarios:

 A person who has never experienced love and closeness will eventually devalue
love and not be particularly worried over their inability to find it
  A person who has received love and closeness during childhood will be able to
love others, and not be devastated by the occasional rejection

NEED FOR LOVE AND BELONGINGNESS

 A person who has experienced just a little love and affection will be strongly
motivated to meet these needs, and might go about satisfying the need for love
and belongingness in a pathological way
 Maslow states that children need love in order to grow psychologically

ESTEEM NEEDS

 The need for self-respect, confidence, competence, and the respect of others
 Two levels of esteem needs:
o Reputation (in others’ eyes)
o Self-Esteem (in own eyes)

SELF – ACTUALIZATION NEEDS

 The highest level of needs in Maslow’s hierarchy

 According to Maslow, only 2% of the world’s total population are self-actualized
 Involves the inculcation of B-Values (Being Values) in an individual. When he is
forced to live without these values, he develops depression, despair, disgust,
alienation, and a degree of cynicism, or a lack of meaningful philosophy in life
called Metapathology.
 Self-actualizers have metamotivation (motivation based on B-values) which
propels them towards self-actualization.

B – VALUES

 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

COGNITIVE NEEDS

 The desire to know, to solve mysteries, to be curious

 Must be constantly satisfied before any other needs can be satisfied. Individuals
need knowledge in order to satisfy their conative needs, and their cognitive needs
motivates them to find answers which will satisfy their other needs

AESTHETIC NEEDS

 Not thought to be universal, but reflective of

the idea that some people are motivated by
the need for beauty and order

NEUROTIC NEEDS

 Nonproductive needs which perpetuate an

unhealthy style of life. Neurotic needs are
seen as compensatory reactions to a failure to fulfill one or more basic needs, such
as fixation

PERCENTAGE OF SATISFACTION IN GENERAL POPULATION

 85% of Physiological Needs met

 70% of Safety Needs met
 50% of Love and Belongingness Needs met
 40% of Esteem Needs met
 10% of Self-Actualized

THE SELF – ACTUALIZED PERSON

 Would satisfy 100% of the first four conative needs, and a majority of self-
actualization needs
 Show "expressive" behavior, rather than Coping Behavior
 o Coping Behavior is behavior specifically aimed at need satisfaction.
Coping behavior is motivated by need deficiencies
o Expressive Behavior is more indicative of "free will" and encompasses
how someone walks, talks, gestures, and smiles. Expressive behavior is
motivated by internal forces, rather than external stimuli
 Self-actualizers have metamotivation (motivation based on B-values) which
propels them towards self-actualization

BASIC CRITERION OF THE SELF-ACTUALIZED INDIVIDUAL

 Free from psychopathology

 Had progressed through the hierarchy of needs
 Embrace B-values
 Fulfilled their needs to grow, to develop, and to increasingly become what they
are capable of becoming

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SELF – ACTUALIZED PERSON

 More efficient perception of reality

 Acceptance of self, others, and nature
 Spontaneity, simplicity, and naturalness
 Problem centering
 Need for privacy
 Autonomy
 Continued freshness of appreciation
 The Peak Experience
 Gemeinschaftgefuhl (a community feeling or oneness with all of humanity)
 Profound interpersonal relations
 The democratic character structure
 Discrimination between means and ends
 Philosophical sense of humor
 Creativeness
 Resistance to enculturation
 Self-Actualizers are more likely to experience B-Love: love for the essence or
being of the other. This type of love is qualitatively distinct from D-Love,
(deficiency love) in which a person loves because he is driven to satisfy his needs
for love and belongingness.

MEASURING SELF – ACTUALIZATION

 The Personal Orientation Inventory

 Short Index of Self-Actualization
SELF-ACTUALIZED PERSONALITIES

 Abraham Lincoln
 Thomas Jefferson
 Albert Einstein
 Eleanor Roosevelt

DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

 Maslow realized human beings are capable of terrible things.

 He believed that psychopathologies, neurosis, and psychotic behavior arises from
need deficiencies
 The pathology may take the form of a neurotic need
 Maslow states that everyone is born with a will toward health, and a tendency to
grow towards self-actualization

MASLOW AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

 Since Maslow believes most people never move past the stage of satisfying needs
of love and belongingness, he felt that the therapist must develop an open, warm
relationship with the client.
 Acceptance within a clinical relationship will hopefully lead to more healthy
relationships outside of therapy.
 For Maslow, the aim of therapy is to decrease the reliance on others and
encourage the systemic urge toward psychological growth and self-actualization.

CRITICISM

 Many researchers feel that Maslow’s work, while important, relied too heavily on
case studies, and not enough experimental work was done on the construct of self-
actualization
 Maslow’s recognition of self-actualized individuals was almost exclusively
limited to Highly Educated White Males.
 Critics charge that implicit sexism, racism, and classism stem from Maslow’s
work and therefore do not represent a valid way of understanding basic human
personality

REFLECTIONS / INSIGHTS

 Basic needs are the foundation of all the other needs.

 Each need is a pre-requisite of the other
 Man has a goal to achieve full potential in order to benefit other people, as well as
his own self