Maslow, Abraham H | Introduction
Introduction
1908–1970
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST, AUTHOR
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, PhD, 1934
Abraham Maslow is one of the founding fathers of humanistic psychology, an approach to understanding behavior that developed in the middle part of the twentieth century. The humanistic approach is sometimes referred to as the "third force" in psychology, because it developed after both the psychoanalytic and behaviorist approaches were well established.
Maslow was an academic who spent most of his professional career teaching, conducting research, and developing his theories of behavior. Although he wrote an important text on abnormal psychology and provided informal counseling to some of his students, he never thought of himself as a psychotherapist, unlike many of the other contributors to the field of personality. He was much more focused on understanding healthy behavior than he was on treating mental disorders.
Maslow's theory centers on the role of motivation in personality. He was interested in explaining why people do the things that they do—the causes of their behavior. Drawing on research and theory from experimental psychology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and other fields, Maslow's theory integrates a number of ideas into a comprehensive explanation of the forces that motivate people. Although he used animal behavior to understand some of the more basic motivational forces, Maslow was primarily interested in human behavior, and particularly in the behavior of healthy, high-functioning people.
One of the key elements of Maslow's theory is the hierarchy of basic needs. Maslow recognized that there were a number of different motivating forces, or needs, that influenced human behavior, and he created the hierarchy of needs to understand how these different forces worked in relation to one another. For instance, if at some time a person were influenced by both a need for food and a need for safety and security, which of these two needs would have the greatest influence on the person's behavior? Maslow wanted to explain how a person would respond in such a situation, and also to understand how people came to be influenced by more complex, "higher" needs.
Another important element of Maslow's theory is the concept of self-actualization. This term, which he borrowed from neuropsychologist Kurt Goldstein, describes the tendency of humans to fulfill their potential, to become what they can become. Maslow felt that the need for self-actualization would emerge only after other needs had been reasonably satisfied, and he was particularly interested in people who were acting in response to this need. Maslow felt that it was important to understand this motivation, because he saw it as the key to making a better society.
In his later years, Maslow devoted much of his energy to finding ways to apply the principles of human potential in a variety of fields. Maslow's theory is not a comprehensive personality theory; it says little about the process of development or about the origins of mental disorders. Despite these limitations, Maslow's theory, with its emphasis on healthy functioning, has had an important influence on counseling and other helping professions, on education, and in the business arena.