Abraham maslow
Abraham Maslow (Brooklyn, New York, April 1, 1908 – Menlo Park, California, June 8, 1970) was an American psychologist known as one of the founders and leading exponents of the humanistic psychology, a psychological current that postulates the existence of a basic human tendency towards mental health, which would manifest itself as a series of self-actualization and self-actualization search processes.
His position is often classified in psychology as a "third force", theoretically and technically located between the paradigms of behaviorism and psychoanalysis. His latest works also define him as a pioneer of humanistic psychology.
Maslow's best-known theoretical development, the pyramid of needs, is a model that proposes a hierarchy of human needs, in which the satisfaction of the most basic or subordinate needs gives rise to the successive generation of more basic needs. high or superordinate. However, according to Maslow, only those unsatisfied needs generate an alteration in behavior, since a supplied need does not generate by itself any effect. Another fundamental principle of his theory is the one that suggests that the only needs that are born with the individual are those of the base, that is, the physiological needs, and the others arise from these needs once they have already been supplied..
Biography
Born in Brooklyn, Abraham Maslow was the eldest of seven children whose parents were Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. He was slow and orderly, and she remembered his childhood as lonely and rather unhappy. In his own words: “I was a little Jewish boy in a non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a bit like being the first black in an all-white school. He was lonely and unhappy. I grew up in libraries and among books. Maslow was going to study law, but eventually went to the University of Wisconsin Graduate School to study psychology. In December 1928, before finishing his studies, he married his older cousin Bertha Goodman, and during this time he met his main mentor, Professor Harry Harlow. He began an original line of research, studying the sexual and dominance behavior of primates. BA in 1930, he earned his MA in 1931 and his Ph.D. in 1934, all in psychology and from the University of Wisconsin. 1943 was the year that the psychological theory called today Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, a theory of human motivation, was proposed. A year after his graduation, he returned to New York to work with Edward Thorndike at Columbia University, where he became interested in research on human sexuality. There he found another mentor in Alfred Adler, one of Sigmund Freud's early colleagues.
Between 1937 and 1951, Maslow was on the faculty of Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, where he took an academic teaching position and began teaching full-time. In New York he came into contact with many European immigrants who came to the United States, especially Brooklyn; people like Alfred Adler, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, as well as various Gestalt and Freudian psychologists. Specifically, he met two other mentors, the anthropologist Ruth Benedict and the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, whom he admired both professionally and personally. They were so accomplished in their respective fields, and such "wonderful human beings" to him, that he began to take notes about them and their behavior. This would be the basis of his lifelong research and thinking on mental health and human potential. In 1951 Maslow moved to Boston and became head of the psychology department at Brandeis University, where he stayed for ten years and had the opportunity to meet Kurt Goldstein (who introduced him to the concept of self-actualization) and began his own theoretical journey.. It was also here that he began his crusade in favor of humanistic psychology (a current that later came to have greater scope than the theory of needs).
The central thesis of the pyramid of needs, which has been applied in various fields even beyond psychology, expresses that human beings have needs structured in different strata, in such a way that secondary or superior needs arise as the most basic are satisfied. The application of Maslow's theories in occupational psychology sought to strengthen the esteem of workers, help them grow, self-actualize and innovate in the company. He wrote extensively on the subject, borrowing ideas from other psychologists and adding his own input significantly, emphasizing, in addition to the concepts of hierarchy of needs and self-actualization, those of metaneeds, metamotivation, and sublime experiences. Maslow became the leader of the humanistic school of psychology that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, which he referred to as the "third force"—beyond Freudian theory and behaviorism. In 1967, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year. In the last years of his life and now semi-retired from teaching, Maslow dedicated himself to a great unfinished theoretical project: developing a philosophy and ethics that would agree with the hypotheses of humanistic psychology. On June 8, 1970 he died in California from a myocardial infarction.
Humanistic theories of self-actualization
Abraham Maslow greatly influenced society's worldview. He provided a new face to the study of human behavior. He called his new discipline "Humanistic Psychology."
Her family life and experiences influenced her psychological thinking. After World War II, Maslow began to question how psychologists came to conclusions from him, and although he didn't totally disagree, he had his own ideas about how to understand the human mind.
Humanistic psychologists postulate that all people have an intense desire to fully realize their potential, to reach a level of "self-actualization." To prove that human beings don't just blindly react to situations, but try to accomplish a larger task, Maslow studied healthy individuals mentally rather than people with serious psychological problems. This provided information for his theory that people experience "peak experiences," sublime moments in life when the individual is in harmony with himself and his environment. From Maslow's perspective, self-actualizing people may have many peak experiences during the day, while others have these experiences less frequently. He believed that psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin can produce peak experiences in the right people at the right times. suitable circumstances.
Hierarchy of needs
Maslow devised a visual aid to explain his theory, which he called a "hierarchy of needs," consisting of a pyramid containing human, psychological, and physical needs. Climbing step by step through the pyramid, one reaches self-realization. At the bottom of the pyramid are the "basic needs" or "physiological needs," which include food (eating and drinking), breathing, elimination (urination, defecation, sweating, etc.), rest, and sleep. and, in general, the involuntary and instinctive maintenance of the bodily functions that make life possible. The next level is that of "security and protection needs": security, order and stability. These first two steps are important for the person's survival. Once individuals have satisfied their nutrition, shelter and vital security, they try to satisfy other needs. The third level is the "need for love and belonging," made up of psychological needs; when human beings have taken care of themselves physically, they are ready to share themselves with others. The fourth level is reached when individuals feel comfortable with what they have achieved; This is the level of “esteem need”, which includes success and status, fundamentally in one's own perception (self-esteem), but also in the perception that others transmit to one (hetero-esteem). The top of the pyramid is the "need for self-actualization", and it is overcome when a state of harmony and understanding is reached.
Maslow based his study on the various ideas of other psychologists, on Albert Einstein, and on people he knew who clearly met the self-actualization standard. He used Einstein's writings and achievements to exemplify the characteristics of the self-actualized person. He found that all the individuals he studied had similar personality traits. They were all "reality-focused," able to tell the difference between what was fraudulent and what was genuine. They were also "problem-focused" in the sense that they treated life's difficulties as problems that needed solving. These individuals were also comfortable being alone and had healthy personal relationships. They had only a few close family and friends, rather than a large number of superficial relationships. A historical figure who was helpful to Maslow on his path to understanding self-actualization was Lao-tzu, the "father of Taoism". A tenet of Taoism is that people do not derive personal meaning or pleasure from seeking material possessions.
When Maslow introduced these ideas, some were not ready to understand them; others called him unscientific. Sometimes regarded as at odds with Freud and his psychoanalytic theory, Maslow actually positioned his work as a vital complement to Freud's. In his book Toward a Psychology of Being (1968), he stated: "It is as if Freud gave us the sick half of psychology and now we must complete it with the healthy half." Maslow finds two facets of human nature, the healthy and the sick, so he considers that there should be two faces in psychology.
Consequently, Maslow argued, the way in which essential needs are satisfied is as important as the needs themselves. Together, these two elements define the human experience. To the extent that a person satisfies his drive for social cooperation, he establishes meaningful relationships with other people and expands his world. In other words, he makes meaningful connections to an external reality—an essential component of self-actualization. Instead, to the extent that vital needs find egoism and satisfaction of the desire for competition/competition, the person acquires hostile emotions and limits relations with external reality —his awareness of him remains internally limited.
Ruth Benedict and Max Wertheimer were models of self-actualization for Maslow. From them he generalized that, among other characteristics, self-actualizing people tend to focus their problems outside of themselves; they have a clear sense of what is true and what is false; they are spontaneous and creative; and they are not too attached to social conventions.
Beyond the routine of satisfying needs, Maslow envisioned extraordinary experiences, called "peak experiences," which are moments of deep love, understanding, happiness, or rapture, during which the person feels more complete, alive, self-sufficient, and even as the world's own continuation, more aware of truth, justice, harmony, goodness, and those kinds of feelings. Self-actualized people have many such experiences.
Maslow used the term "metamotivation" to describe self-actualizing people who act on innate forces beyond their basic needs so that they can explore and reach their full human potential.
It is vitally important to mention that Sostrom finished Maslow's works; due to his death he could not conclude them.
Works
The Complete Works of Abraham Maslow
- The creative personality (1971)
- A theory on human motivation (1943)
- Motivation and personality (1954)
- The Self-realized Man: Towards a Psychology of Being (1962)
- Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences (1964)
- The Management According to Maslow: A Humanist Vision for Today's Company (1965)
- The creative personality (1971)
- The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance (1966)
- New Knowledge in Human Values (1959)
- The potential breadth of human nature (1971)
Legacy
Later, Maslow was concerned with questions such as: "Why aren't more people self-actualizing if their basic needs are met? How can we humanistically understand the problem of evil?"
In the spring of 1961, Maslow and Tony Sutich founded the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, with Miles Vich as editor until 1971. The journal printed its first issue in early 1961 and continues to publish articles academics.
Maslow attended the founding meeting of the Association for Humanistic Psychology in 1963, where he declined appointment as its president, arguing that the new organization should develop an intellectual movement without a leader, which resulted in a useful strategy during the first years of the field.
In 1967, Maslow was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.