Abraham Harold Maslow, b. Brooklyn, N.Y., Apr. 1, 1908, d. June 8, 1970, was a founder of humanistic psychology in the 1960s, along with Carl Rogers, Rollo May, and others. They advanced their movement as a "third force" that provided an alternative to the schools of behaviorism and psychoanalysis.Educated at the City College of New York, Cornell University, and the University of Wisconsin, Maslow taught at Brandeis University from 1948.
Maslow first became known for his description of the "hierarchy of prepotency" in human motivations. Observing that "man is a wanting animal" and that one desire is no sooner satisfied than another takes its place, he noted sense and order in the succession of motives. In the relatively rare individuals in whom all lower needs are satisfied a new motive can be observed, the drive for self-actualization--becoming everything that one is capable of becoming. Interest in higher levels of motivation led Maslow to the study of self-actualized people, who differ from most people in being unusually healthy psychologically; having marked ability to free themselves from stereotypes; and perceiving everyday life realistically and accepting it without defensiveness. Self-actualizing people appear to have, or to have had, "peak experiences" of insight, joy, or intense awareness. In Toward a Psychology of Being (1962), Maslow described the characteristics of such experiences and the effects they have. --by David F. Ricks
