Abraham Maslow (1908-70) was the founding father of the Human Potential Movement (HPM), and therefore a major influence on the New Age Movement. The most celebrated of his many ideas and discoveries remains his ‘theory of human motivation’, popularly called the ‘hierarchy of needs’.
Post-war psychology was dominated by the two (usually opposed) schools of behaviourism and psychoanalysis. Maslow criticized the mechanistic beliefs of behaviourism and the biological reductionism and determinism of psycho-analysis, and helped create humanistic psychology as a ‘third force’. He thus became part of a new movement, a ‘middle way’, which included luminaries Stanislav Grof, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May. This group produced a radical and cohesive matrix of theories which effectively challenged the established order in psychology. It was formally launched in 1961 as the Association for Humanistic Psychology, which is still the core institution.
Maslow wrote several books, and published over thirty main papers on emotional issues, creativity, personality problems, and religious experience. Underpinning his approach was a belief that the main role of psychotherapy should be the integration of the self; to develop this theory he drew on literary and religious sources, as well as existential philosophy. Today, he is also appreciated as a philosopher, bridging psychology, social science and philosophy. A major feature of his later work was his insistence on the importance of values, in opposition to the many social scientists promoting a strictly value-neutral approach. He argued that without values, it was impossible to give an adequate account of human life. To this end, he studied exemplary leaders such as Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, and produced a list of the ‘being values’: wholeness, perfection, completion, justice, aliveness, richness, uniqueness, effortlessness, playfulness, truth, self-sufficiency, simplicity, and goodness. He used these as a yardstick against which to assess the health of an individual or community.
Maslow is best known for his ‘hierarchy of needs’ model. This describes how humans need to first meet their basic needs, before achieving higher ‘being’ values. The model is represented as a pyramid, beginning at the base with physiological and survival needs, then progressing through security, love and belonging, and self-esteem, culminating in ‘self-actualization’. Self-actualization is an empirical principle and ethical idea underpinning a vision of human nature as intrinsically good. The self-actualized person displays most of the positive traits Maslow found in his ideal subjects, and is also more likely to have ‘peak experiences’—a term which encompasses the spectrum of mystical states of consciousness. It is also possible to see the hierarchy as a table of values, since an individual (or group) at a certain level of need will probably have beliefs and values which facilitate their obtaining or realizing these needs.
Maslow’s approach in studying high-achieving people was also intended as a criticism of both Freud and the leading behaviourist B.F.Skinner—Freud, for basing his conclusions on case studies of disturbed people, and Skinner for using rats and birds in laboratory conditions, performing simple tests, and then drawing conclusions about humans. Both ways led, he said, to a pessimistic or reductionist view of human life, as opposed to his own optimistic one. An outspoken atheist, he was also critical of mainstream religions for imposing a uniform set of values, ‘one size fits all’.
A central theme in humanistic psychology is the individualized search for ‘the true self, and this finds resonances in the Indian religions, as well as native American and tribal Shamanism. It also resonates with post-modernism, and Maslow and his school are clearly moving away from communal values towards personal ones.
Although Maslow burnt most of his personal papers, it does seem that later in life he began to have doubts about his advocacy of personal development, and the effect it was having on people. The story is told of how Carl Rogers’ daughter, who was studying for a degree with Maslow, was so determined to become self-actualized that she left her young family. Bertrand Russell proposed that human life is a struggle between individual expression and social obligations. If so, Maslow may have felt that he had moved too far in one direction. Nevertheless, he was one of the most significant figures in the creation of contemporary ethics and values, whose influence can be discerned in fields as diverse as the psychology of religion, education, management training, marketing, and preeminently psychotherapy.
