Abraham Maslow

Abraham Harold Maslow (April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970) was an American psychologist who created Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization.

Maslow was a psychology professor at Brandeis University, Brooklyn College, New School for Social Research, and Columbia University.

He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a "bag of symptoms".

Born in 1908 and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Maslow was the oldest of seven children.

His parents were first-generation Jewish immigrants from Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire (now Kyiv, Ukraine), who fled from Czarist persecution in the early 20th century.

They had decided to live in New York City and in a multiethnic, working-class neighborhood.

His parents were poor and not intellectually focused, but they valued education.

He had various encounters with antisemitic gangs who would chase and throw rocks at him.

Maslow and other young people with his background were struggling to overcome such acts of racism and ethnic prejudice in the attempt to establish an idealistic world based on widespread education and economic justice.

The tension outside his home was also felt within it, as he rarely got along with his mother, and eventually developed a strong revulsion towards her.

He is quoted as saying, "What I had reacted to was not only her physical appearance, but also her values and world view, her stinginess, her total selfishness, her lack of love for anyone else in the world—even her own husband and children—her narcissism, her Negro prejudice, her exploitation of everyone, her assumption that anyone was wrong who disagreed with her, her lack of friends, her sloppiness and dirtiness...".

He also grew up with few friends other than his cousin Will, and as a result "...[He] grew up in libraries and among books."

It was here that he developed his love for reading and learning.

He went to Boys High School, one of the top high schools in Brooklyn, where his best friend was his cousin Will Maslow.

Here, he served as the officer to many academic clubs, and became editor of the Latin Magazine.

He also edited Principia, the school's Physics paper, for a year.

He developed other strengths as well: "As a young boy, Maslow believed physical strength to be the single most defining characteristic of a true male; hence, he exercised often and took up weight lifting in hopes of being transformed into a more muscular, tough-looking guy, however, he was unable to achieve this due to his humble-looking and chaste figure as well as his studiousness."

Maslow attended the City College of New York after high school.

In 1926 he began taking legal studies classes at night in addition to his undergraduate course load.

He hated it and almost immediately dropped out.

In 1927 he transferred to Cornell, but he left after just one semester due to poor grades and high costs.

He later graduated from City College and went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin to study psychology.

In 1928, he married his first cousin Bertha, who was still in high school at the time.

The pair had met in Brooklyn years earlier.

Maslow's psychology training at UW was decidedly experimental-behaviorist.

At Wisconsin he pursued a line of research which included investigating primate dominance behavior and sexuality.

Maslow's early experience with behaviorism would leave him with a strong positivist mindset.

Upon the recommendation of Professor Hulsey Cason, Maslow wrote his master's thesis on "learning, retention, and reproduction of verbal material".

Maslow regarded the research as embarrassingly trivial, but he completed his thesis the summer of 1931 and was awarded his master's degree in psychology.

He was so ashamed of the thesis that he removed it from the psychology library and tore out its catalog listing.

However, Professor Cason admired the research enough to urge Maslow to submit it for publication.

Maslow's thesis was published as two articles in 1934.

Maslow continued his research at Columbia University on similar themes.

There he found another mentor in Alfred Adler, one of Sigmund Freud's early colleagues.

From 1937 to 1951, Maslow was on the faculty of Brooklyn College.

His family life and his experiences influenced his psychological ideas.

After World War II, Maslow began to question the way psychologists had come to their conclusions, and although he did not completely disagree, he had his own ideas on how to understand the human mind.

He called his new discipline humanistic psychology.

Maslow was already a 33-year-old father and had two children when the United States entered World War II in 1941.

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Maslow as the tenth most cited psychologist of the 20th century.