 Abraham
Maslow, Ph.D. (1908-1970), was born in Brooklyn, New York, and educated
at the City College of New York and the University of Wisconsin.
Before assuming his post as Chairman of the Department of Psychology at
Brandeis University in 1951, he taught for 14 years at Brooklyn College.
Dr. Maslow also served as President of the American Psychological Association
from 1967-68. An energetic and articulate scholar, Professor Maslow
was the author of more than 20 books, including Eupsychian Management;
Psychology
of Science; Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences;
Motivation
and Personality; Principles of Abnormal Psychology (with B.
Mittelmann); and Toward a Psychology of Being. He also edited
New Knowledge in Human Values and wrote nearly 100 articles.
Maslow attended City College in New
York. While there, he married his cousin Bertha, and found as his
chief mentor Professor Harry Harlow. At Wisconsin he pursued an original
line of research, investigating primate dominance behavior and sexuality.
He went on to further research at Columbia University, continuing similar
studies. He found another mentor in Alfred Adler, one of Freud's
early followers.
From 1937 to 1951, Maslow was on
the faculty of Brooklyn College. In New York he found two more mentors,
anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, whom
he admired both professionally and personally. These two were so
accomplished and such "wonderful human beings" as well, that Maslow began
taking notes about them and their behavior. This would be the basis
of his lifelong research and thinking about mental health and human potential.
He wrote extensively on the subject, borrowing ideas from other psychologists
but adding significantly to them, especially the concepts of a heirarchy
of needs, meta-needs, self-actualizing persons, and peak 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.
Maslow's thinking was surprisingly
original -- most psychology before him had been concerned with the abnormal
and the ill. He wanted to know what constituted positive mental health.
Humanistic psychology gave rise to several different therapies, all guided
by the idea that people possess the inner resources for growth and healing
and that the point of therapy is to help remove obstacles to individuals'
achieving this. The most famous of these was client-centered therapy
developed by Carl Rogers.
Maslow was a professor at Brandeis
University from 1951 to 1969, and then became a resident fellow of the
Laughlin Institute in California. He died of a heart attack in 1970.
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