ABRAHAM

HAROLD
MASLOW
 MASLOW`S BIOGRAPHY
FAMILY

 Abraham Harold (Abe) Maslow was born on April 1, 1908, in Manhattan, New York, and spent his
unhappy childhood in Brooklyn.
 He was the eldest of seven children.
 Maslow was not particularly close to either parent, but he accepted his father.
 He felt anger and intense hostility toward his mother not only during his infancy, but until the day she
died.
 His mother Rose Maslow is known to be very cruel and religious.
 He wrote down his thoughts about her in his diary 1 year after her death.
 SCHOOL

 Maslow attended a high school in Brooklyn, and he became close to his cousin, Will Maslow who was also
an extrovert.
 He gained social skills and participated in a variety of school activities because of this interaction.
(Hoffman, 1988)
 Maslow's cousin Will applied to Cornell University while Maslow applied to the City College of New York.
 Meanwhile, his parents divorced.
 Maslow's father desired his son to become a lawyer, but Maslow dropped out of law school one night
because he considered the law was too concerned with bad people, and that was insufficient. (H. Hall, 1968)
 Maslow succeeded in philosophy. However, he performed poorly in courses he disliked.
 He transferred to Cornell University in New York after three semesters. Both to be closer to his cousin Will
and to avoid his cousin Bertha (Hoffman, 1988)
 He thought that Introduction to PSY lecturer Titchener's psychological
approach is ``cold, bloodless, and having nothing to do with people.``
 He returned to City College of New York after a semester to be closer
to Bertha.
 Maslow and Bertha married, although Maslow's family opposed to the
marriage because they were cousins.
 He completed BA in Philosophy and he was inspired by John B.
Watson's behaviorism.
 Maslow got his PhD in 1934 but he was unable to find an academic
post.
 He enrolled in medical school but like law school, showed an
unemotional and pessimistic perspective of humans, and he dropped out
it too.
 The next year, he returned to New York to work as Thorndike's research
assistant.
 He left Columbia to join the faculty at Brooklyn College.
 Living in New York throughout the 1930s and 1940s gave Maslow the chance to meet many of the European
psychologists who had escaped Nazi Germany.
 He met and studied from Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Max Wertheimer, and Kurt Goldstein.
 Maslow was also friends with Alfred Adler. On Friday nights, Adler gave lectures at his house, and Maslow
were frequent attendees.
 Ruth Benedict, an anthropologist at Columbia University, was another of Maslow's mentors.
 Benedict pushed Maslow to perform anthropological research among the Northern Blackfoot Indians of Alberta,
Canada, in 1938.
 His interaction with these Native Americans taught him those cultural distinctions were superficial.
 This observation helped Maslow the hierarchy of needs was applied to everyone equally in later years.
 Maslow's health started to fail in the mid-1940s.
 He became weak and exhausted after a mysterious disease attacked him in 1946.
 He moved to Pleasanton, California, with Bertha and their two daughters.
 Because of his flexible schedule, he was able to read biographies and history to learn more about self-
actualizing people.
 His health recovered after a year, and he returned to Brooklyn College.
 Maslow took a position as chairperson of the psychology department at Brandeis University in Waltham,
Massachusetts, in 1951.
 He began writing his ideas, feelings, key conversations, and health problems.
 Despite his popularity during the 1960s, Maslow was dissatisfied with his life at Brandeis.
 Maslow had a serious but nonfatal heart attack in December of 1967.
 Then he discovered that his strange illness had been an undiagnosed heart attack more than 20 years
before.
 Maslow accepted to work for the Saga Administrative Corporation.
 He didn't have a specific job there, so he was free to think and write as he pleased.
 He enjoyed his freedom until he fell and died of a major heart attack on June 8, 1970.
 During his lifetime, Maslow won many awards.
 He was well-known not just in the field of psychology, but also among in business management,
marketing, theology, counselling, education, nursing, and other health-related fields.
 People expected him to be a fearless leader and spokesperson, he said in his final journal post (May 7,
1970), a month before his death. He explained himself as follows: "'I'm not a naturally brave person.' My
courage is essentially an overcoming of all kinds of inhibitions, politeness, tenderness, and timidities—and
it always comes at a high price in terms of exhaustion, anxiety, apprehension, and poor sleep."
MASLOW’S VIEW OF MOTIVATION

Maslow’s theory of personality has five assumptions:

 People are motivated as a whole person
 People’s behaviors are motivated by conscious and unconscious reasons.
 People are constantly motivated by one need and another
 People have fundamental needs such as food, safety, and friendship.
 People tend to satisfy needs in a hierarchical way.
HIERARHCY OF NEEDS
 The hierarchy has conative needs.
 When you are satisfied by a lower level need, you
cannot reach a higher level need.
 Prepotency of lower level needs
1. PHYSIOLOGICAL NEEDS

 The primary need

 Food, water, oxygen, maintenance of body temperature etc.
 If people are hungry, they cannot think beyond food.

 Physiological Needs are different from other needs in two aspects:

 Completely or overly satisfied.
 Recurring nature
2. SAFETY NEEDS
 Physical security, stability, dependency, protection, and freedom
from threatening forces such as war, terrorism, illness, fear,
anxiety, danger, chaos, and natural disasters; The needs for law,
order, and structure
 Safety needs cannot be satisfied overly like Physiological needs.
 External factors affect the ease of satisfaction.
 Children are more likely satisfy safety needs
3. LOVE AND BELONGINGNESS NEEDS
 The desire for friendship; the wish for a mate and children; the need
to belong to a family, a club, a neighborhood, or a nation.
 Three categories of people:
 Firstly, if people satisfy their love and belongingness needs in early
years, they will be sure that they are accepted by important people.
Also, when they are rejected, they won’t be sad.
 The second group has people who never experienced love and
belongingness. They can’t give love. Maslow believes that these
people devalue the love and belongingness and they adopt the
absence of these needs.
 The third category is people who experience love and belongingness
a little bit. They are strongly motivated to strongly seek love and
belongingness because a small dose of need don’t satisfy them.
4. ESTEEM NEEDS
 Self-respect, confidence, competence, and the knowledge that
others hold them in high esteem

 Two categories of Esteem:

 Reputation : Prestige in the eyes of other people
 Self Esteem : The desire to power for achievement, mastery, and
competence and freedom
5. SELF-ACTUALIZATION
 The highest level of the hierarchy
 Self-fulfillment, the realization of all one’s potential, and a desire
to become creative in the full sense of the word
 Self-actualising people feel like fully human
 Self-actualizing people maintain their self-esteem even if they
face rejection
 Self-actualizing people are independent from lower level needs
 In other levels of needs, motivation decreases with meeting needs.
However, in self-actualization, motivation increases with meeting
needs.
■ Aesthetic needs are not universal, but at least some people in
every culture seem to be motivated by the need for beauty and
aesthetically pleasing experiences.
■ People prefer beauty to ugliness and can even become physically
and mentally ill when forced to live in miserable, disorderly
environments.
■ Most people have a desire to know, to solve mysteries, to
understand, and to wonder.
– Maslow called these desires cognitive needs.
■ Maslow believed that healthy people desire to know more, theorize,
test hypotheses, uncover mysteries, or find out how something
works for the sheer satisfaction of knowing.
NEUROTIC NEEDS

■ The satisfaction of conative, aesthetic, and cognitive needs is essential to one's physical and
psychological health, and their frustration leads to some degree of illness.
■ But neurotic needs only lead to stagnation and pathology.
■ For example, a person who does not meet their security needs may develop a strong desire to
save money or property. The urge to hoard is a neurotic need that leads to pathology, whether it is
satisfied or not.
■ Maslow offered another example of neurotic need.
– A person strongly motivated by power may attain almost unlimited power, but this does not
make the person less neurotic or less demanding of additional power.
■ “Whether a neurotic need is satisfied or frustrated makes little difference to ultimate health”.
 GENERAL DISCUSSION OF NEEDS
■ Maslow estimated that the hypothetical average person satisfies their needs at approximately the
following levels:
– physiological, 85%
– security, 70%
– love and belonging, 50%
– respect, 40%
– and self-actualization, 10%.
 Reversed Order of Needs

■ If we understood the unconscious

motivation underlying the behavior,
we would also understand that the
needs are not reversed.
Unmotivated Behavior

■ Much of what Maslow calls "expressive behavior" is unmotivated.

Expressive and Coping Behavior
■ Maslow distinguished between expressive behavior and coping behavior.
■ Expressive behavior is often an end in itself and serves no other purpose than to exist.
■ On the other hand, coping behavior is often conscious, demanding, learned, and
determined by the external environment.
■ Coping behavior serves a purpose or goal and is always motivated by a need for deficiency.
Deprivation of Needs

■ Deprivation of self-actualization needs leads to pathology, or rather metapathology.

■ Maslow defined metapathology as the absence of values, lack of fulfillment, and loss of
meaning in life.
Instinctoid Nature of Needs

■ Maslow assumes that some human needs are innately determined, although they can be
changed through learning. He called these needs instinctive needs.

1. level of pathology upon frustration

2. instinctive needs are persistent and their satisfaction leads to psychological health
3. instinctive needs are species specific
4. instinctive needs can be shaped, inhibited, or modified by environmental influences

■ Because many instinctive needs are weaker than cultural forces, Maslow insisted that society
"must protect the weak, subtle, and delicate instinctual needs.
Comparison of Higher and Lower Needs

■ Maslow insisted that love, respect, and self-

actualization are as biological as thirst, sex, and
hunger.
■ the higher level needs are then on the phylogenetic or
evolutionary scale
■ higher-level needs produce more happiness and more
peak experiences, but satisfaction of lower-level needs
can produce some degree of pleasure
■ A person who has reached the level of self-
actualization will not have the motivation to return to
a lower stage of development.
Search for Self-Actualization
• After he received his PhD,
Maslow realized that his
teachers Ruth Benedict and Max
Wertheimer were so different
from average people. His quest
for the highest level of human
development has begun at that
point. To Maslow, his two
teachers represented that which
he called self-actualization.
• He tried to search for the people who have similar qualities as his
teachers. But his attempts often end with disappointment or he
realized that those kind of people whom Maslow would call “self-
actualized” were not sharing their privacy.

• Then, he decided read the autobiographies of famous people such

as national heroes, artist, and scholars. In that process, he started
to ask “Why are we not all self-actualizing?” instead of asking
“What makes Max Wertheimer and Ruth Benedict self-
actualizing?”.
Criteria For Self-Actualization
1. Self-actualizing people are free from psychopathology. They are neither
neurotic nor psychotic.
2. Self-actualizing people had progressed through the hierarchy of needs.
Therefore, they lived above the subsistence level of existence and had no ever
present threat to their safety. Also, they experienced love and had a well-rooted
sense of self-worth.
3. Maslow’s third criterion for self-actualization was the embracing of the B
values. His self-actualizing people felt comfortable with and even demanded
truth, beauty, justice, simplicity, humor, and each of the other B-values.
4. The final criterion for reaching self-actualization was “full use and exploitation
of talents, capacities, potentialities, etc.”. In other words, his self-actualizing
individuals fulfilled their needs to grow, to develop, and to increasingly become
what they were capable of becoming.
Values of Self-Actualizers / B Values
• Self-actualizing people are motivated by the
“eternal verities” what Maslow called B
values.
• These “Being” values are indicators of
psychological health and are opposed to
deficiency needs, which motivate non-self-
actualizers.
• Maslow termed B-values “metaneeds” to
indicate that they are the ultimate level of
needs. He distinguished between ordinary need
motivation and the motives of self-actualizing
people, which he called “metamotivation”.
Values of Self-Actualizers / B Values
• Metamotivation was Maslow’s answer to the former question of why some
people have their lower needs satisfied, are capable of giving and receiving
love, possess a great amount of confidence and self-esteem but fail to reach to
the level of self-actualization. These values distinguish self-actualizing people
from those whose psychological growth stop after they reach esteem needs.
• Maslow hypothesized that when people’s metaneeds are not met, they
experience an existential illness. All people have a holistic tendency to move
toward completeness or totality; and when this movement is prevented, they
suffer from feelings of inadequacy and unfulfillment. Absence of the B-
values leads to pathology just like lack of food results in malnutrition.
Deprivation of any of the B-values results in metapathology, the lack of a
meaningful philosophy of life.
Characteristics of Self-Actualized People
Maslow listed 15 tentative qualities that self-actualizing people own to
some degree.
1. More Efficient Perception of Reality:
• Self-actualizing people can more easily detect fakeness in others. They
are not fooled by the surface and can see both positive and negative
traits in others that are not readily apparent to most people.
• They perceive ultimate values more clearly than other people do and are
less prejudiced. They perceive the world realistically, as the world it is.
Also, self-actualizing people are less afraid of the unknown. They have
a greater tolerance of ambiguity and doubt.
2. Acceptance of Self, Others, and Nature:
• Self-actualizing people can accept themselves as the way they are.
They lack defensiveness and fakeness. They don’t deny their desire
for basic needs or their flaws.
• Similarly, they accept other people as they are. They can tolerate
weaknesses in others and are not threatened by others’ strengths.
They accept nature, including human nature, as it is and do not
expect perfection either in themselves or in others.
3. Spontaneity, Simplicity, and Naturalness

• Self-actualizing people are spontaneous, simple, and natural. They are

unconventional but not compulsively so; they are highly ethical but
may appear unethical or nonconforming.
• They live simple lives, in the sense that, they don’t need to polish
themselves and their lives to deceive other. They do not afraid to
express their emotions and feelings.
4. Problem-Centering:
• A fourth characteristic of self-actualizing people is their interest in
problems outside themselves. Non-self-actualizing people are self-
centered and tend to see all the world’s problems in relation to
themselves, whereas self-actualizing people are task-oriented and
concerned with problems outside themselves. This interest allows
self-actualizers to develop a mission in life, a purpose for living that
spreads beyond self-appraisal.
• These people can differentiate between the important and petty
issues. They have a solid ethical and philosophical basis for taking
references while dealing with these problems. They extend their
frame of reference far beyond self.
5. The Need for Privacy:
• Self-actualizing people have a quality of detachment that allows them
to be alone without being lonely. Because they have already satisfied
their love and belongingness needs, they have no desperate need to
be surrounded by other people. They can find enjoyment in solitude
and privacy.
• They have a global concern for the well-being of others but they are
not always in an attempt to impress others or trying to gain love and
acceptance. Also, they are self-movers. They find motivation to do
things in their own ethical basis not in societal conventions.
6. Autonomy:

• No one is born autonomous, and no one is completely independent

from other people. Self-actualization can be achieved only through
satisfactory relations with others so is autonomy.
• However, self-actualized people have the confidence that they are
worth being loved without extra conditions. This contributes to their
feelings of self-worth. Once that confidence is attained, a person no
longer depends on others’ appraisal for self-esteem.
 Characteristics of Self Actualisting
People
Continued Freshness of Appreciation

• Maslow (1970) : “self-actualizing people have the wonderful capacity to appreciate again
and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even
ecstasy” (p. 163).

• They “retain their constant sense of good fortune and

gratitude for it” (Maslow, 1970, p. 164).
 Characteristics of Self Actualisting
People
The Peak Experience
Maslow (1971) : “Most people, or almost all people, have peak experiences, or ecstasies” (p. 175).

• Experiences that were mystical in nature and that

somehow gave them a feeling of transcendence.

What is it like to have a peak experience?

Mildly sensed, others moderately felt,

and some are quite intensely experienced.

In their mild form, these peak experiences probably

occur in everyone, although they are seldom noticed.
E.g. Long-distance runners , viewing a sunset or some other grandeur of nature
 Characteristics of Self Actualisting
People
The Peak Experience
• First, peak experiences are part of human makeup.
• Second, people having a peak experience see the whole universe as unified or all in one piece,
and they see clearly their place in that universe.

Maslow (1964) says, “The peak

experience is seen only as beautiful,
good, desirable, worthwhile, etc., and is
never experienced as evil or undesirable”
(p. 63).
 Characteristics of Self Actualisting
People
Gemeinschaftsgefühl
Maslow: “often saddened,
Adler’s term for social interest, exasperated, and even enraged
community feeling, or a sense of by the shortcomings of the
oneness with all humanity: average person” (p. 166),
GEMEINSCHAFTSGEFUHL
• Caring attitude toward other people
• They retain a feeling of affection for
human beings in general.
 Characteristics of Self
Actualisting People
Profound Interpersonal Relations

•Interpersonal relations that involves deep

and profound feelings

•Close friendships are limited to only a few.

•Self-actualizers are often misunderstood and

sometimes despised by others.
 Characteristics of Self Actualisting
People
Discrimination Between Means and Ends
• Having a clear sense of right and wrong conduct, little conflict about basic values.
• They enjoy doing something for its own sake and not just because it is a means
to some other end.

“They can often enjoy for its own sake the getting to some
place as well as the arriving. It is occasionally possible for
them to make out of the most trivial and routine activity an
intrinsically enjoyable game”
 Characteristics of Self Actualisting
People
Philosophical Sense of Humor

• Having a philosophical, nonhostile sense of

humor

• They amuse, inform, point out ambiguities,

provoke a smile rather than a guffaw.

Humour is
• Intrinsic to the situation
• Spontaneous
• Situation-dependent
 Characteristics of Self Actualisting
People
Creativeness

• Creativiy and self-actualization may be one and the same.

• Maslow (1968a) vividly pointed out that creativity can come from almost
anywhere.
 Characteristics of Self Actualisting
People
Resistance to Enculturation

• They follow their own standards of conduct and not blindly obeying the rules of others
• Not waste energy fighting against insignificant customs and regulations of society
• Because they accept conventional style and dress, they are not too different in appearance
from anyone else.
• However, on important matters, they can become strongly aroused to seek social change
and to resist society’s attempts to enculturate them.

Maslow (1970) hypothesized, they are “less enculturated, less

flattened out, less molded” (p. 174).
 Characteristics of Self Actualisting
People
Love, Sex, and Self-Actualization

Before people can become self-actualizing, they must satisfy their love and
belongingness needs
• They are no longer motivated by the kind of
deficiency love (D-love)
• They are capable of B-love, that is, love for the essence or
“Being” of the other
• They simply love and are loved.

• Self-actualizers are also not dominated by sex. They can more easily
tolerate the absence of sex (as well as other basic needs), because they
have no deficiency need for it.
 Philosophy of Science

• Maslow argued for a different philosophy of

science, a humanistic, holistic approach that is
not value free and that has scientists who care
about the people and topics they investigate.

• He idolized and greatly admired Max

Wertheimer and Ruth Benedict, his two original
models for self-actualization.
 Philosophy of Science
• Psychological science should place more emphasis on the study of the individual
less on the study of large groups.
• People should be allowed to tell about themselves in a holistic fashion.

• Desacralization: the type of science that lacks emotion, joy, wonder, awe, and
rapture (Hoffman, 1988).

• Scientists must be willing to resacralize science or to instill it with human values,

emotion, and ritual.
 Philosophy of Science
• Psychologists must not only study human personality; they must do so with
enjoyment, excitement, wonder, and affection.

• Psychologists must be healthy people, able to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty

and having skills enough to ask the right questions.

• Maslow employed research methods consistent with his philosophy of science.

He attempted to verify his hunches using idiographic and

subjective methods. He often left to others the technical work
of gathering evidence.
Personal Orientation Inventory (POI)
• Attempt to measure the values and behaviors of self-actualizing
people which consists of 150 forced-choice items. MEASUARING
SELF-
• Examinees were asked to “fake good” or “make a favorable
impression” in filling out the inventory. When participants
followed these instructions, they generally scored lower.
• Statements that might be true for self-actualizers are not
necessarily socially desirable and do not always conform to
ACTUALIZATION
cultural standards.
• Problem of POI: Takes 30 to 45 minutes and forced-choice
option.
Short Index of Self-
Actualization:
15 Items from POI. 6
Point Linkert Scale.
Brief Index of Self-
Actualization:
40 items placed on a
6-point Likert scale
JONAH COMPLEX
Everyone is born with a will toward
health, a tendency to grow toward self-
actualization, but few people reach it.

Found in nearly everyone, represents a

fear of success, a fear of being one’s
best, and a feeling of awesomeness in
the presence of beauty and perfection.

The human body is simply not strong

enough to endure the ecstasy of
fulfillment for any length of time

When they compare themselves with

those who have accomplished greatness,
they are appalled by their own
arrogance.
PSYCHOTHERAPY
Embrace the Being values,
that is, to value truth, justice,
goodness, simplicity, and so
forth.
Free from their dependency
on others
Physiological and safety
needs are prepotent, people
operating on these levels will
not ordinarily be motivated
to seek psychotherapy
Most people who seek
therapy have these two
lower level needs relatively
well satisfied but have some
difficulty achieving love and
belongingness needs.
Healthy interpersonal
relationship between client
and therapist is therefore the
best psychological medicine.
R E L AT E D
RESEARCH

Positive Psychology
Combines an emphasis on hope,
optimism, and well-being with scientific
research and assessment.
One area of positive psychology where
Maslow’s ideas have been particularly
influential is in the role of positive
experiences in people’s lives.
Positive experiences that involve a sense
of awe, wonder, and reverence as peak
experiences
Recently, researchers have investigated
the potential benefits that come from
reexperiencing, through writing or
thinking, such positive experiences.
Burton and King (2004) found that
those who wrote about positive
experiences, compared to those in a
control condition who wrote about
nonemotional topics such as a
description of their bedroom,
visited the doctor fewer times for
illness during the 3 months after
writing.
Simply think about these
experiences for 15 minutes a
day for 3 consecutive days
reported greater well-being 1
month later than those who
wrote about such experiences
for the same time period.

These studies demonstrate the

importance of reflecting and
reliving the most positive or
“peak” experiences in our lives.
 PERSONAL
DEVELOPMENT
GROWTH AND
GOALS

Implicit in Maslow’s
concept of self-
actualization is the
assumption that
people acquire greater
levels of psychological
health as they become
older.
Jack Bauer and Dan McAdams
(2004a) assumed the existence
of two kinds of approaches to
growth and development—
extrinsic and intrinsic.

Extrinsic growth focuses on

fame, money, physical
appearance, status, and power.

Intrinsic goals focus on

satisfaction, happiness, personal
growth, and healthy
interpersonal relationships.
Predicted a positive
relationship between age and
personality development and
psychological wellbeing.

Older adults had higher life

satisfaction than younger
adults. This was in part
explained by older adults’
being more likely to have
intrinsic goals and concerns.
Intrinsic growth goals would see
how getting older results in greater
ego and personality development
and well-being. Similarly, for those
with extrinsic growth goals, getting
older would not lead to greater
personality development and
psychological health

People high in exploratory growth

goals were especially high in ego-
development, and those high in
intrinsic growth goals were
especially high in well-being.
CASE STUDY*INSIDE OUT
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjOFYKKIGwo
 QUESTION 1
 IN THIS SCENE, WHICH STEPS OF
HIERARCHY OF NEEDS DO YOU SEE?
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85z4N_sHXJw
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIGF-Fkxbk0
 QUESTION 2

HOW CAN BE EMOTIONS RELATED TO

HIERARCHY OF NEEDS?
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2CJ46XkwxA
 QUESTION 3
 WHAT DID RILEY DO TO REACH SELF
ESTEEM?