Abraham Maslow

Their life

The psychologist who stopped studying what breaks people and started studying what completes them — the hierarchy of needs, peak experiences, and self-actualization made growth, not pathology, psychology's business.

Known for

• Hierarchy of needs
• Self-actualization
• Peak experiences
• Humanistic psychology's 'third force'
• Studying psychological health, not just illness
• Theory Z and self-transcendence

The road they walked

Abraham Maslow was born in 1908 in Brooklyn, the eldest son of Jewish immigrants from Kiev, and by his own account it was not a happy start: a shy, bookish boy who felt estranged from his parents and his neighborhood alike, he found refuge in libraries rather than playgrounds. He drifted first toward law to please his father, then found his real subject at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned his PhD studying primate dominance and affection under Harry Harlow — training that gave him a rigorous, data-first grounding in a discipline he would later push past its own limits.

The psychology Maslow inherited was split between two camps that rarely spoke of health at all: behaviorism, which studied organisms as bundles of stimulus and response, and psychoanalysis, which mined the mind for the roots of neurosis. Maslow worked in both traditions before a personal encounter changed his direction — his admiration for two people he knew, the anthropologist Ruth Benedict and the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, whom he found so unusually whole and effective that he began, almost as a private project, to study what made them different. That informal inquiry into flourishing rather than illness became the seed of everything he's remembered for.

In 1943 he published 'A Theory of Human Motivation,' laying out the hierarchy of needs — physiological survival, safety, belonging, esteem, and, at the summit, self-actualization — and followed it with 'Motivation and Personality' (1954) and 'Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences' (1964), which gave language to the transcendent moments he believed marked a fully realized life. As chair of psychology at Brandeis University through the 1950s and 60s, and later as president of the American Psychological Association, he became the leading voice of what he called psychology's 'third force' — humanistic psychology, standing apart from behaviorism and Freud and insisting that growth, not just pathology, deserved scientific attention. His ideas migrated well beyond the clinic, reshaping education, management theory, and the human potential movement centered at California's Esalen Institute.

How their story ended

Maslow died on June 8, 1970, in Menlo Park, California, felled by a heart attack after years of declining cardiac health that had already forced him to slow his punishing work pace. He was 62, and had recently left Brandeis for a research fellowship meant to give him time to write; his final notebooks show him still pressing outward, sketching a stage beyond self-actualization he called self-transcendence, a chapter left unfinished at his death.

In their words

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Tables where Abraham sits

The Mind’s Table

For understanding yourself and why you do what you do.

From the Journal