Abraham Maslow: His Life and Theory on Human Development - Essay Example

? Abraham Maslow: His Life and Theory on Human Development April 15, Introduction “I was awfully curious to find out why Ididn't go insane,” commented Abraham Maslow, one of the founders of humanistic psychology (PBS, 1998). His troubling childhood was enough to make him wonder why he did not become psychotic. It could be due to his early life, aside from other factors, nevertheless, that made him so keen in understanding human development. This paper explores Maslow’s early life and entry into psychology. It also describes his theory on human development, especially his intertwined models of motivation and Hierarchy of Needs. Finally, it discusses those who both support and do not support his theory. Early Life Abraham Harold Maslow was born on April 1, 1908, in New York City, the eldest of seven children. His father was Samuel Maslow, a Russian Jewish immigrant who worked as repairman of casks and tubs, while his mother was Rose, his father’s first cousin (Valiunas, 2011, p.93). Abraham was smart, but quite shy. He was afraid of his hard-drinking and rough-handed father, while he despised his mother, whom he illustrated as “schizophrenogenic,” or the kind of mother “who makes crazy people, crazy children” (Valiunas, 2011, p.93). She terrified Abe with assurances of divine wrath for common childhood errors, but her terrorizing did not affect him so much. At an early age, he tested the truthfulness of his mother’s admonitions, and when he realized that he was not paralyzed or struck blind when doing something bad, he confirmed that his mother made empty threats (Valiunas, 2011, p.94). One day, he brought home two stray kittens and when his mother saw him feeding them milk using one of her favorite dishes, she bashed the tiny animals’ brains at the basement wall (Valiunas, 2011, p.94). Abe was surprised why he did not become psychotic under his mother’s “guidance.” Apparently, his uncle, who was his mother’s brother, was a supportive and loving relative and the only one who gave his adolescent life a sense of normality and civility (Valiunas, 2011, p.94). Maslow attended Boys High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It was the school that novelist Irwin Shaw depicted, as a place where boys could learn everything they required to escape Brooklyn (Valiunas, 2011, p.94). In high school, Maslow’s taste for reading advanced, and he widely read books from diverse authors and sources, such as Tom Swift, Horatio Alger, The Nation, and a series of “socialist classics” (Valiunas, 2011, p.94). He enjoyed Socialism and atheism, but he was appalled with the terrors of Stalinism, and this postponed his interest in Socialism (Valiunas, 2011, p.94). He became an atheist all his life, although he was described as a “peculiar” kind of atheist (Valiunas, 2011, p.94). Maslow wanted to study at Cornell, but his average high school grades only allowed him to study at the City College of New York. After a year there, he also studied law at night at Brooklyn Law School, due to pressures from his father who was a frustrated lawyer. Abraham stopped studying law, because it dealt “only with evil men, and with the sins of mankind” (Valiunas, 2011, p.94). His dejected father asked him what he intended to study instead, and Abe answered: “Everything” (Valiunas, 2011, p.94). Maslow’s Entry into the Field of Psychology The breakthrough of behaviorist psychology, through the work of its American founder, John B. Watson, helped Maslow distill his lifelong calling (Valiunas, 2011, p.95). Watson, after years of experimentation, proposed that human beings behave through a stimulus-response behavior and could be conditioned to function with improved moral efficiency (Valiunas, 2011, p.95). Watson inspired Maslow to study human behavior and motivations further. Maslow went to the University of Wisconsin to learn human behavior, but he was disappointed with students and mentors who thought more like businessmen than as learned psychologists (Valiunas, 2011, p.96). Maslow focused on studying monkeys and their food preference instead. His findings revealed that when monkeys had already satiated their hunger, they were willing to forgo their staple food, in order to eat peanuts and chocolates (Valiunas, 2011, p.96). For him, this showed that behaviorists were wrong to say that only survival instinct motivates animal behavior, and if this applied to animals, Maslow argued that such findings were relevant to human behavior as well. In addition, Maslow observed that monkeys mounted others all day long, not even because of sexual desire, but to establish and preserve power. This came from the observation that dominant monkeys, male or female, mounted weaker ones, whether they were sexually aroused or not (Valiunas, 2011, p.96). Maslow contended that his studies proved that the need for power drove human relationships too, not only sex, which supported Alfred Adler who had the same belief, and which contradicted Freud, who espoused that sexual drives as the key driver of human personality (Valiunas, 2011, p.96). In time, Maslow studied in Columbia and learned a great deal from Adler himself. Several other great minds became Maslow’s mentors and friends, particularly Erich Fromm, Kurt Koflfka, Karen Horney, Max Wertheimer, and Kurt Goldstein. Goldstein coined the term “self-actualization,” where he recycled an Aristotelian notion of teleology, which had been mainly questioned by modern science and chiefly in psychology by stimulus-response theory (Valiunas, 2011, p.97). Goldstein asserted that every organism intrinsically sought to accomplish its purpose in life and this included the biological purpose too. Social psychologist Wertheimer, as well as the revolutionary anthropologist Ruth Benedict, gave Maslow the living models of self-actualizing humanity (Valiunas, 2011, p.97). For Maslow, these people were the finest people he had ever known, not just intellectually, but also morally. He surmised that they had the self-actualizing personality, who, as leaders, could create a better world (Valiunas, 2011, p.97). He became ardently interested in how self-actualizing people develop, in order to guide people in achieving their self-actualizing purposes in life also (Valiunas, 2011, p.97). His 1943 paper “Theory of Human Motivation,” which was based on his 1945 book, Motivation and Personality, has radically changed the field of psychology, where he argued that people are generally motivated to satisfy their hierarchy of needs. Abraham Maslow: His Theory on Human Development Maslow hypothesized that the individual is an integrated and natural whole being (Zalenski & Raspa, 2006, p.1121). He maintained that the fundamental needs of human beings are the same, though they have different and numerous conscious desires. His psychology relies on the premise that a shared humanity intersects race, gender, geography, ethnic, and religious boundaries. This premise could be explained through the Western thought of essentialism, which can be traced back to pre-Socratic philosophy (Zalenski & Raspa, 2006, p.1121). Maslow argued that human beings have a higher nature that can be interpreted and beckoned in daily life. Once their basic needs are fulfilled, human beings are ready to pursue self-actualizing needs (Zalenski & Raspa, 2006, p.1121). He said: "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. He must be true to his own nature. This need we may call self-actualization” (Valiunas, 2011, p.97). See Figure 1 for Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow provided a hierarchy of needs that had five broad layers shaped in a pyramid: the physiological needs, safety and security needs, the needs for love and belonging, self-esteem needs, and the need for self-actualization, respectively. For the physiological needs, people need oxygen, water, protein, salt, sugar, calcium, and other minerals and vitamins to live (Boeree, 2006). This layer also consists of the need to preserve the right pH balance and temperature, as well as the need for sleep, rest, activity, avoiding pain, and having sex, among other physiological needs (Boeree, 2006). Safety and security needs compose the next level. When the physiological needs are achieved, people look for safety and security, such as wanting structure and order in their lives (Boeree, 2006). Without satisfying these needs, fear and anxiety for uncertainties develop. At this level, people need job security, a safe neighborhood, and some insurance (Boeree, 2006). After these needs, the next needs are love and belongingness. People, after fulfilling their physiological and safety needs, feel the need for family, friends, lovers, as well as a sense of community (Boeree, 2006). Without attaining these needs fully, they are prone to loneliness and social anxieties. Then, people who feel that they have attained their needs for love afterwards desire to develop self-esteem. Maslow stressed that there were two kinds of esteem needs, a lower and higher esteem. The lower one needs respect from others, status, glory, attention, recognition, appreciation, and sometimes, dominance (Boeree, 2006). The higher forms entail the need for self-respect, such as feelings of confidence, competence, achievement, autonomy, and freedom. These are higher forms of esteem, because they are harder to lose compared to external sources for lower esteem needs (Boeree, 2006). When these esteem needs are unmet, low self-esteem and inferiority complexes can develop. Maslow also called these four levels of needs as D-needs or deficit needs. Without enough of these, people feel a deficit inside themselves and their lives (Boeree, 2006). The fifth and last level of the pyramid is particularly different from the preceding four. Maslow used the term “Being Needs” to differentiate them from “Deficit Needs” (Greene & Burke, 2007, p.119). He also used the word “growth needs” for the fifth level, where self-actualization needs can be found. Maslow (1971) believed that self-actualizing entailed experiencing life more completely and more vibrantly with full attentiveness and total learning (Sumerlin & Bundrick, 1996, p.254). A self-actualizing person is autonomous and can learn from anybody in spite of differences in class, education, religion, race, or political values (Sumerlin & Bundrick, 1996, p.254). These people are also ruled by laws of inner character, instead of the rules of society and that they develop deeper and more intense interpersonal relations than other adults (Sumerlin & Bundrick, 1996, p.254). Greene and Burke (2007) argued that self-actualization, aside from achieving one’s purpose, also meant going from the self to others in a process called “selfless-actualization” (p.119). It concerns feeling for others and being outside of oneself, which not only attains the apex of one’s intrinsic virtues, but also the zenith of creativity (Greene & Burke, 2007, p.119). Thus, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs goes from the “self” to “others,” from self-interests to social welfare and transformation. Figure 1: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Source: Google Images Literature on Maslow’s Theory on Human Development Several earlier psychologists and anthropologists supported Maslow’s theory on human development. Goldstein asserted that every organism essentially sought to accomplish its purpose in life. Social psychologist Wertheimer and the revolutionary anthropologist Ruth Benedict provided Maslow the living models of self-actualizing people, people who were intellectually supreme and evoked a sunny disposition that magnetized everyone around them (Valiunas, 2011, p.97). Adler also supported that people are, at some point of their lives, in need of power (Valiunas, 2011, p.97), both in good and bad terms, where good means power enough to influence loved ones, and bad, when power is used to oppress others. Despite the support and examples of these great psychologists, Maslow faced several criticisms too. One of the criticisms of Maslow’s theory is that even when he used “normal” people as his sampling, unlike Freud, he focused mainly on white males. Cullen and Gotell (2002) appreciated Maslow’s interest in the distinctive psychology of women, because of their gendered experiences. However, they stated that Maslow’s Hierarchy model depended on the assumption that women were naturally submissive and men were generally power-driven human beings. In addition, since Maslow focused on one country alone, his findings cannot be applied across cultures. Furthermore, Maslow’s theory is questioned for its hierarchical nature. Many people, despite being poor, or having unmet needs for security and stability, such as in the concentration camps of the Holocaust, continued to preserve their dignity and exhibit self-actualizing behaviors and attitudes (Boeree, 2006). Moreover, Maslow also had a very narrow definition for self-actualization that only 2% of the population can meet, according to him (Boeree, 2006). Is it also not possible, that very young children, who are not yet encumbered by adult needs and anxieties, also reach self-actualization (Boeree, 2006)? Hence, questions on validity and generalization power of the theory were presented. Conclusion Maslow’s Theory of Human Development asserts that human beings intrinsically want things and are motivated to yearn for what they lack in their lives. Moreover, once one’s particular level of needs is satisfied, they no longer motivate people. They are motivated to pursue higher needs instead. The highest level of human needs is self-actualization. Self-actualizing people fulfill their destinies. They also go beyond the self and are contributing to improve society. Supporters of Maslow’s theory argue that his beliefs have basis on natural human needs and intrinsic motivations. Detractors, however, insist that Maslow cannot create one theory from interviews with a limited sampling in one country alone. They asserted that many people also achieve self-actualization despite limited resources and conditions that cannot fully satisfy their “Deficit Needs.” Maslow’s theory of motivation and Hierarchy of Needs, nevertheless, express some of the fundamental drivers of human behavior, as well as the outstanding potential of people, if only they would respond to their inner calling, and help themselves self-actualize. With a concept of self-actualization, Maslow called people to also go beyond the self and help society become a better place to live in. References Boeree, C.G. (2006). Abraham Maslow (1908-1970). Retrieved from http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/maslow.html Cullen, D. & Gotell, L. (2002). From orgasms to organizations: Maslow, women’s sexuality and the gendered foundations of the needs hierarchy. Gender, Work & Organization, 9 (5), 537-555. Greene, L. & Burke, G. (2007). Beyond self-actualization. Journal of Health & Human Services Administration, 30 (2), 116-128. PBS (1998). Abraham Maslow (1908 – 1970). Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhmasl.html Sumerlin, J.R. & Bundrick, C.M. (1996). Brief index of self-actualization: A measure of Maslow's model. Journal of Social Behavior & Personality, 11 (2), 253-271. Valiunas, A. (2011). Abraham Maslow and the all-American self. New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society, 33, 93-110. Zalenski, R.J. & Raspa, R. (2006). Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: A framework for achieving human potential in hospice. Journal of Palliative Medicine, 9 (5), 1120-1127. Read More