Abraham Maslow’s Life
Abraham Maslow was born in New York in 1908. He was the son of poor Russian-Jewish parents, who, like many others at the time, immigrated from Eastern Europe to flee persecution and secure a better future for their family (Hoffman, 2008).
Throughout various interviews, Maslow described himself as neurotic, shy, lonely, and self-reflective throughout his teens and twenties. This was, in part, because of the racism and ethnic prejudice he experienced owing to his Jewish appearance. He himself, however, was non-religious.
Maslow also did not enjoy being in the family home, so he spent much of his time at the library, where he developed his academic gifts (DeCarvalho, 1991). Consequently, Maslow later attributed his interest in self-actualization and the optimization of the human experience to his timid nature and the isolation it caused (Frick, 2000).
Education and Career
After attending public school in a working-class neighborhood in New York, Maslow attended the University of Wisconsin to study psychology. Initially, he was interested in philosophy, but he soon grew frustrated with its inapplicability to real-world situations and switched his focus to psychology (Frick, 2000).
Maslow was originally engaged in the field of behaviorism, which argues that human behavior can be explained and altered using forms of conditioning. In line with the laboratory-based methods at the time, Maslow conducted research with dogs and apes, and some of his earliest works looked at the emotion of disgust in dogs and the learning processes of primates (DeCarvalho, 1991).
While Maslow ultimately pivoted from behaviorism, he was observed to have remained staunchly loyal to the principles of positivism throughout all stages of his education and career, which are at the foundation of this branch of psychology (Hoffman, 2008).
According to this philosophy, only that which is scientifically verifiable or can be shown using logical or mathematical proof is considered valid.
As such, Maslow was a firm believer in the power of empirical data and measurability for forwarding human knowledge. He was known to have resisted the interest in mysticism that dominated in the 1960s, preferring instead to study businesses and entrepreneurship (Hoffman, 2008).
Maslow eventually studied gestalt psychology at the New School for Social Research in New York. He later joined the faculty of Brooklyn College and rose to become head of the psychology department at Brandeis University in Waltham, where he remained until 1969 (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2021).
During his career, Maslow co-founded the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 1961, and the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology in 1969 (Richards, 2017). Today, both journals are highly cited, well-respected outlets in their fields, serving as a tribute to Maslow’s legacy in the field of psychology.
The Impact of World War II
With the onset of World War II, Maslow’s intellectual focus is reported to have changed, and this was when his work began to shift the landscape of the psychology field. At the time, Maslow was thirty-three years old and the father of two children.
In his writings, he lamented that the U.S. forces did not understand the German opposition and felt that the field of psychology could help facilitate understanding and restore peace to the world (Hoffman, 1999).
Therefore, given the horrors of the war, Maslow conducted his research with a renewed sense of urgency. This led to his famous works on the concept of self-actualization and the introduction of his seminal hierarchy of needs in the mid-1940s (Hoffman, 2008).
What our readers think
He was not russian-Jewish. His parents were from Ukraine. Kyiv, to be exact.
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