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  Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
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  this thread is in progress………..(: There will be repetition & things to be deleted/organized. Thanks for your patience. will be back(:
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  Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
  • Father of the Humanistic School (the American version of European Existentialism)
  • humanistic school stressed overall dignity & worth of humans & the capacity for self-worth
  • he saw people as basically good; development involves actualizing self to fulfill potential
  _{from KNOWLEDGE COMPETENCY EXAM-REVIEW PACKET}
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  Self-actualizing people enjoy life in general and practically all its aspects, while most other people enjoy only stray moments of triumph … (Maslow, 1999, p. 37) ***~Maslow, A.H. (1999). Towards a Psychology of Being. (3rd ed.). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.~***

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  Abe Maslow
  Why is he important today?
  Abraham changed the way we look at psychology where it’s related to the understanding of what it means to be human.(Charlie Roark 9-1-11) Before Maslow began his research, psychology was only concerned with the ill, mentally handicapped, and the atypical. He wanted to study people who were mentally healthy and wanted to know what constituted them to be mentally healthy. (Sabre Masters) Maslow helped in moving psychology from spinal reflex theory (Sechenov and Pavlov) and behaviorism (Skinner) by elevating it to be a deeper understanding of what being human actually means. (LS 9/11) _{Contributions to https://ulmclassroommanagement.wikispaces.com/ are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 License}
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Maslow’s explanations and interpretations of the human condition remain fundamentally helpful in understanding and addressing all sorts of social and behavioural questions – forty or fifty years after his death.

You will particularly see great significance of his ideas in relation to modern challenges for work such as in the Psychological Contract and leadership ethics, and even extending to globalization and society.

Maslow is obviously most famous for his Hierarchy of Needs theory (original 1950’s five-level model)Hierarchy of Needs Diagram - , rightly so, because it is a wonderfully simple and elegant model for understanding so many aspects of human motivation, especially in the workplace. The simplicity of the model however tends to limit appreciation of Maslow’s vision and humanity, which still today are remarkably penetrating and sensitive.

textileRef:6065125695d7b0ebacc577:linkStartMarker:“Adapted 7 level
Hierarchy of
Needs diagram
based on
Maslow’s theory”:http://www.businessballs.com/maslowhierarchyofneeds7.pdf
adapted 1970’s seven-level model
***~© design alan chapman 2001-7 – adapted by persons unknown based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs~***
textileRef:6065125695d7b0ebacc577:linkStartMarker:“Adapted 8 level
Hierarchy of Needs
diagram 1990’s eight-level model, based on
Maslow’s theory”:textileRef:6065125695d7b0ebacc577:linkStartMarker:“http://www.businessballs.com/maslowhierarchyofneeds8.pdf
***~© design alan chapman 2001-7 – adapted by persons unknown based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs~***
***~© Abraham Maslow original Hierarchy of Needs concept 1954; Alan Chapman review and other material, design, code 1995-2014.~*** “ ***www.businessballs.com/maslow.htm***”:http://www.businessballs.com/maslow.htm

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  Golden Hammer
  Investopedia explains ‘Golden Hammer’
  Definition of ‘Golden Hammer’

An excessive dependence upon a specific tool to perform all sorts of functions. The golden hammer principle states that given a specific tool to use, all of the world looks like an appropriate place to use that tool. For example, a small child that is given a hammer may regard everything around him or her as a nail.
The golden hammer is also known as Maslow’s Hammer or the Law of the Instrument. It was first voiced by Abraham Kaplan in 1964 and then widely disseminated in Abraham Maslow’s book “The Psychology of Science” in 1966. The idea has also been attributed to Mark Twain, despite the lack of evidence to that effect. In business, it refers to an overdependence on a tried and true strategy or instrument, when another approach may be more suitable. read here
***~© 2014, Investopedia US, A Division of IAC.~***

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    maslow’s modern relevance

 

When you read Maslow’s work, and particularly when you hear him speak about it, the relevance of his thinking to our modern world of work and management is astounding.

The term ‘Maslow’s Hammer’ is a simple quick example. Also called ‘The Law of the Instrument’, the expression refers metaphorically to a person having just one ‘tool’ (approach or method available or known/learnt) and so then treating every situation the same. Other writers have made similar observations, but ‘Maslow’s Hammer’ is the most widely referenced comment on the subject. Maslow’s quote is from his 1966 book The Psychology of Science – A Reconnaissance:

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail..” (‘Maslow’s Hammer’ – Abraham Maslow, 1966)

Maslow wrote that healthy people are more able to see and accept the world as it is, rather than as distorted by their needs, values, fears and beliefs.Of course, that is an ideal, and we can have different degrees of perception, and comfort with reality. Like other items Maslow described, things like “perception of reality” is subjective, open to different interpretations, and exists on a spectrum or continuum.
_{By Douglas Eby}

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  Contemporary psychology has mostly studied not-having rather than having, striving rather than fulfillment, frustration rather than gratification, seeking for joy rather than having attained joy, trying to get there rather than being there. ***~Maslow, A.H. (1999). Towards a Psychology of Being. (3rd ed.). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.~***
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Almost all needs, capacities, and talents can be satisfied in a variety of ways. ***~Maslow, A.H. (1999). Towards a Psychology of Being. (3rd ed.). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.~***

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People with the capacity to love have the impulse to love and the need to love in order to feel healthy. Capacity clamors to be used, and cease their clamor only when they are used sufficiently. ***~Maslow, A.H. (1999). Towards a Psychology of Being. (3rd ed.). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.~***

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Growth takes place when the next step forward is subjectively more delightful, more joyous, more intrinsically satisfying than the previous gratification with which we have become familiar and even bored; the only way we can ever know what is right for us is that it feels better subjectively than any alternative. The new experience validates itself rather than by any outside criterion. It is self-justifying, self-validating. (Maslow, 1999, p. 53).***~Maslow, A.H. (1999). Towards a Psychology of Being. (3rd ed.). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.~***

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  Self-actualizing people have a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection for human beings in general. They feel kinship and connection, as if all people were members of a single family. ***~Abraham Maslow~***
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Authentic selfhood can be defined in part as being able to hear the impulse-voices within oneself, i.e., to know what one really wants or doesn’t want, what one is fit for and what one is not fit for. ***~Maslow, A.H. (1999). Towards a Psychology of Being. (3rd ed.). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.~***

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The great lesson from the true mystics, from the Zen monks, and now also from the Humanistic and Transpersonal psychologists, is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life…in one’s own backyard. ***~Abraham Maslow~***

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Expression and communication in the peak–experiences tend often to become poetic, mythical, and rhapsodic, as if this were the natural kind of language to express such states of being. ***~Abraham Maslow~*** ***~Source: Toward a Psychology of Being, 3rd Edition, Pages: 122~***

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We must understand love; we must be able to teach it, to create it, to predict it, or else the world is lost to hostility and to suspicion. ***~Abraham Maslow~***

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Probably the authentic person is himself complete or final in some sense; he certainly experiences subjective finality, completion or perfection at times; and he certainly perceives it in the world. It may turn out that only peakers can achieve full identity; that non-peakers must always remain incomplete, deficient, striving, lacking something, living among means rather than among ends; or if the correlation turns out not to be perfect, I am certain at least that it is positive, between authenticity and peak-experiencing. ***~Abraham Maslow~*** ***~Source: Toward a Psychology of Being, 3rd Edition, Pages: 123~***

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  “I am suggesting that we enlarge the jurisdiction of science so as to include within its realm the problems and the data of personal and experiential psychology. Many scientists have abdicated from these problems, considering them ‘unscientific.” Leaving them to non-scientists, however, supports the separation of the world of science from the world of the ‘humanities’ which is now crippling them both.” _{Abraham Maslow}

***~Excerpts from Maslow, A. (1962). Towards a Psychology of Being. New York: John Wiley~***

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[6 min 25 sec] Disney version (: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and how it appears in Disney’s Up. [Personally, I enjoyed this (: _AGoodVibe ]

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    clips in link above was taken from this movie Up
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    Hierarchy of Needs in Ratatouille-Another Cute One
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  Quick Disclaimer: By sharing ideas about humanistic psychology… it does not mean those who adhere to some/most of the concepts do not include God or whatever you choose to call Source, Creator etc. There is a lot of good stuff that came from this branch of Psychology. There are almost no purists in most philosophies; ie eclectic beliefs are what most take on today…discounting much of where it couldn’t possibly originated. So many theories meld with others… to be continued from AGoodVibe (:
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  “ ***Is Positive Psychology the Basis of LOA?*** “:http://ezinearticles.com/?Is-Positive-Psychology-the-Basis-of-the-Law-of-Attraction?&id=2531670 ***~Copyright 2009- Psychologist Gerald A. Solfanelli~*** The term “positive psychology” first appeared in the last chapter of Dr. Abraham Maslow’s 1954 book Motivation and Personality, the title of which was, “Toward a Positive Psychology.” In this chapter, Maslow maintains that psychology itself does not have an accurate understanding of human potential, and that the field tends not to raise the proverbial bar high enough with respect to maximum attainment.”

Whereas the contemporary disease model of psychology is often considered overly preoccupied with pathology, positive psychology incorporates its key elements of humanism, by supporting the notion that people are predisposed to seek ongoing growth and higher improvement.

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    [4 min 37 sec] If this is new to you
    Humanism was a major reaction to psychoanalysis and behaviorism. And Abraham Maslow was a leader in this 3rd Force of Psychology. People aren’t just bundles of unconscious processes or simply reacting to stimuli and rewards. We’re, for better and worse, human.
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  More on Maslow
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History of Psychology
History-contemporary foundations

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  Characteristics of Self-Actualizing Persons _{By Peter Shepherd} [I will probably delete most of the following & leave a link for it]
  Central to the lives of self-actualized people is a set of values that Maslow called the Being-Values, or B-Values. These characteristics apply equally to both men and women, of course.

They are realistically oriented and not threatened by the unknown.

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    They have a superior ability to reason and to see the truth.
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    They perceive and understand human nature.
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    They accept themselves, other people, circumstances and the natural world for what they are.
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    They able to learn from anyone and are friendly with anyone, with no regard to stereotypes.
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    They are emotionally intelligent and feel no need for crippling guilt or shame.
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    They tend to be serene, characterized by a lack of worry. They are self starters, are responsible for themselves, and own their behavior. Work becomes play and desires are in excellent accord with reason.
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    They are unflappable and retain dignity amid confusion and personal misfortune, all the while remaining objective.
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    They have a great deal of spontaneity and have no unnecessary inhibitions.
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    The self-actualized person can be alone and not be lonely.
    They are honest and seek justice for all
    They are autonomous and independent. Thoughts and impulses are unhampered by convention. Their ethics are autonomous and they determine their own inner moral standards.
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    They have a fresh rather than stereotyped appreciation of people and appreciate the best aspects in all things. However they resist conformity to the culture. They determine their own behavior and have their own views on people and events.
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    Moment to moment living for them is exciting and often exhilarating as they live their life to the full. Vibrant moments are frequent and peak experiences not unusual. Peak experiences are moments when one sees clearly what before was hidden or obscured.
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    They seek wholeness; they are able to merge opposing views into a third, higher synthesis, as though the two have united; therefore, opposite forces are no longer felt as conflict.
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    Self-actualizing people retain their childlike qualities and yet have a far-seeing wisdom.
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    Their intimate relationships with specially loved people tend to be profound, sincere and long-lasting, rather than superficial.
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    Their sense of humor is philosophical rather than hostile. They can laugh at themselves but never make jokes that hurt others.
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    Self-actualizing people enjoy an inborn uniqueness that carries over into everything they do. Their creativity is original, inventive, uninhibited and – since they see the real and true more easily – valuable.
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    Self-actualizing individuals are motivated to continual growth. They are also aware of their primary goals in life and are devoted to fulfilling them, both for their own benefit and as service to others.
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    Maslow’s writings tell us much about the nature of wisdom. The self-actualizing people that Maslow describes focus on concerns outside of themselves; they like solitude and privacy more than the average person, and they tend to be more detached than usual from the dictates and expectations of their culture. They are inner-directed people. They appreciate the world around them with a sense of awe and wonder. In love relationships they respect the other’s individuality and feel joy at the another’s success. They give more love than most people, and need less. Because they take an independent view, they can see situations and problems more objectively and consequently they tend to be creative and make valuable contributions to society.
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    One reason that a person does not move through the needs to self-actualization is because of the hindrances placed in their way by society. For example, education can act to inhibit a person’s potential (though also of course it can promote personal growth). So can other aspects of the family and culture act to condition and funnel an individual into a role that is not fulfilling. To escape this conditioning, a person has to awaken to their situation, to realize that their life could be different, that there are changes that can be made in the direction of self-actualization.
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    To promote our personal growth, we can learn to be authentic, to be aware of our inner selves and to hear our inner feelings and needs. We can begin to transcend our own cultural conditioning and become world citizens. We can help our children discover their talents and creative skills, to find the appropriate career and complementary partner. We can demonstrate that life is precious, that there is joy to be experienced in life, and that if one is open to seeing the good – and humorous – in all kinds of situations, this makes life worth living.
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    There is one further need that stands at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This is…

 

Transpersonal Needs
This is the need for a higher truth; to make contact with the creative force that is beyond the human personality; to make sense of all the suffering and injustices of the survival struggle on earth. This need has been evident in all cultures, expressed by all religions, and is the spiritual path towards enlightenment, towards discovering the truth of All That Is.
It is only by having at least a glimmer of this spirituality that we each are part of, that we can aspire to the highest potential of being human. To be able to genuinely love and to forgive unconditionally, we need to see in all others – even our enemies – the same essential quality that we ourselves are part of. Spirituality is a transpersonal quality, it is beyond the Ego and obsession with the self. It is the maturity of intuition.

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    Peak Experiences
    Abraham Maslow defines a peak experience as having some (but usually not all) of the following characteristics: “an almost overwhelming sense of pleasure, euphoria or joy, a deep sense of wonder or awe, feeling in harmony or at one with the universe, altered precepts of time and/or space, a deep feeling of love, greater awareness of beauty or appreciation, and a sense that it would be difficult or impossible to describe adequately in words.”
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    Maslow coined this term to describe quasi-mystical experiences, not necessarily of a religious nature. Peak experiences are sudden feelings of intense happiness and well-being, and possibly the awareness of new insights that were previously obscured. Accompanying these experiences is a heightened sense of control over the body and emotions, and a wider sense of awareness, as though one was standing upon a mountaintop. The experience fills the individual with wonder and awe. He feels at one with the world and is pleased with it; he or she has seen something of the essence of all things.
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    Maslow described peak experiences as powerful moments with their own intrinsic value and accompanied by a loss of fear, anxiety, doubts, and inhibitions. Peak experiences follow a period of struggle and resistance to self-actualization as a process, due to the effort of learning, achievement of goals or finding the answers to creative problems. Following the insight and integration of accomplishment, peak experiences are characterized as a relief; an inner peace of mind that one has rarely experienced before.
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    Maslow said that all individuals are capable of peak experiences. Those who do not have them somehow depress or deny them. Individuals most likely to have peak experiences are self-actualized, mature, healthy, and self-fulfilled.
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    Peak experiences render therapeutic value as they foster a sense of being lucky or graced; release creative energies; reaffirm the worthiness of life; and change an individual’s view of himself or herself. Not long before his death in 1970, Maslow defined the term “plateau experience” as a sort of continuing peak experience that is more voluntary, noetic, and cognitive. He described it as a witnessing or cognitive blissfulness. Its achievement requires a considerable period of determined effort, he stated.
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    Transformation occurs when existing solutions, assumed truths and past decisions are exposed as unrealistic, and this new insight allows one to view from a more appropriate and empowering perspective.
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    The path of personal transformation is primarily a process of becoming aware of, facing up to and taking responsibility for one’s thoughts, feelings and actions, and then expanding this self-realization by communicating with others, retaining integrity whatever the response, and further enhancing the quality of communication with ever-increasing empathy and understanding. Through understanding others better, we can recognize their essential goodwill, however misguided it might have become, and begin to recognize the spirituality of humankind.
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Abraham H. Maslow, Ph.D

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  People Are Basically Good
  Humanistic Psychology gets its name from its belief in the basic goodness and respect of humankind. Its roots are based in existential psychology or the understanding and acceptance of one’s own existence and responsibility. Two American psychologists, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers paved the way for this new approach to understanding personality and improving the overall satisfaction of individuals.

When conflict between war and peace arose in the early to mid 1960s, so to did the need to understand human nature. Humanistic theory gave us an understandable way to look at man’s need for war for the sake of peace. It is a simplistic theory that has become one of the most popular topics in self-help style books and man’s struggle for meaning has been and will always be a major part of literature and entertainment.

The basic ideas behind humanistic psychology are simple, some may say overly simple. Humanists hold the following beliefs:

The present is the most important aspect of the person and therefore humanists focus on the here and now rather than looking at the past or trying to predict the future.
Humanistic theory is reality based and to be psychologically healthy people must take responsibility for themselves, whether the person’s actions are positive or negative.
The individual, merely by being human, posses an inherent worth. Actions may not be positive but this does not negate the value of the person.The goal of life should always be to achieve personal growth and understanding. ***~Copyright © 1999-2003, AllPsych and Heffner Media Group, Inc., All Rights Reserved.~***

AllPsych.com
Abraham Maslow-psych.today

Maslow was fascinated by people he called ‘self-actualizers’. Looking back at history, he studied individuals such as Abraham Lincoln, Jane Adams, Albert Einstein and Albert Schweitzer.

He also studied living people who were fulfilling their potential. Maslow found that such people were true to themselves. They saw reality clearly and loved using their creativity to solve problems. They had strong ethics combined with a sense of humility and respect. Paradoxically, they could be ruthless to achieve a desired goal.

Writing on his web site about Maslow, Dr. George Boeree explained:
“These people tended to have more peak experiences than the average person. A peak experience is one that takes you out of yourself, that makes you feel very tiny, or very large, to some extent one with life or nature or God. It gives you a feeling of being a part of the infinite and the eternal.
“These experiences tend to leave their mark on a person, change them for the better, and many people actively seek them out. They are also called mystical experiences and are an important part of many religious and philosophical traditions.” TheStrengthsFoundation.org

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  “Our psychology journals and conferences are primarily suitable for the communication and discussion of the rational, the abstract, the logical, the public, the impersonal, the nomothetic, the repeatable, the objective, the unemotional. They thereby assume the very things that we ‘personal psychologists’ are trying to change. In other words, they beg the question. One result is that as therapists or as self-observers we are still forced by academic custom to talk about our own experiences or those of patients in about the same way as we might talk about bacteria, or about the moon, or about white rats, assuming the the subject-object cleavage, assuming that we are detached, distant and uninvolved, assuming that we (and the objects of perception) are unmoved and unchanged by the act of observation, assuming that we can split of the ‘I’ from the ‘Thou,’ assuming that all observation, thinking, expression and communication must be cool and never warm, assuming that cognition can only be contaminated or distorted by emotion.
  In a word, we keep trying to use the canons and folkways of impersonal science for our personal science, but I am convinced that this won’t work. It is also quite clear to me now that the scientific revolution that some of us are cooking up (as we construct a philosophy of science large enough to include experiential knowledge) must extend itself to the folkways of intellectual communication as well.”

We must make explicit what we all accept implicitly, that our kind of work is often felt deeply and comes out of deep personal grounds, that we sometimes fuse with the objects of study rather than splitting from them, that we are usually profoundly involved, and that we must be if our work is not to be fake. We must also accept honestly and express candidly the profound truth that most of our ‘objective’ work is simultaneously subjective, that our outer world is frequently isomorphic with our inner world, that the ‘external’ problems we deal with ‘scientifically’ are often also our own internal problems, and that our solutions to these problems are also, in principle, self-therapies in the broadest sense.” ***~Maslow, A.H. (1999). Towards a Psychology of Being. (3rd ed.). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.~***

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Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
• Father of the Humanistic School (the American version of European Existentialism)
• humanistic school stressed overall dignity & worth of humans & the capacity for self-worth
• he saw people as basically good; development involves actualizing self to fulfill potential
_{from KNOWLEDGE COMPETENCY EXAM-REVIEW PACKET}

Maslow is obviously most famous for his Hierarchy of Needs theory (original 1950’s five-level model)Hierarchy of Needs Diagram - , rightly so, because it is a wonderfully simple and elegant model for understanding so many aspects of human motivation, especially in the workplace. The simplicity of the model however tends to limit appreciation of Maslow’s vision and humanity, which still today are remarkably penetrating and sensitive. business balls.com

 (Maslow, 1999, p. 53)._{Maslow, A.H. (1999). Towards a Psychology of Being. (3rd ed.). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.}

• Self-actualizing people enjoy life in general and practically all its aspects, while most other people enjoy only stray moments of triumph … (Maslow, 1999, p. 37) Maslow, A.H. (1999). Towards a Psychology of Being. (3rd ed.). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.

 

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  Abraham Maslow Quotes
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  “Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.”
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  “When people appear to be something other than good and decent, it is only because they are reacting to stress, pain, or the deprivation of basic human needs such as security, love, and Self-esteem.”
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“Getting used to our blessings is one of the most important non-evil generators of human evil, tragedy and suffering.”

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“It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.”

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“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

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“Self-actualizing people have a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection for human beings in general. They feel kinship and connection, as if all people were members of a single family.”

• ~

“Self-actualizing persons’ contact with reality is simply more direct. And along with this unfiltered, unmediated directness of their contact with reality comes also a vastly heightened ability to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy, however stale those experiences may have become for others.”

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  “Something of the sort has already been described for the self-actualizing person. Everything now comes of its own accord, pouring out, without will, effortlessly, purposelessly. He acts now totally and without deficiency, not homeostatically or need-reductively, not to avoid pain or displeasure or death, not for the sake of a goal further on in the future, not for any end other than itself. His behavior and experience becomes per se, and self-validating, end-behavior and end-experience, rather than means-behavior or means-experience.”
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  “I may say that (Being) love, in a profound but testable sense, creates the partner. it gives him a self-image, it gives him self-acceptance, a feeling of love-worthiness, all of which permit him to grow. It is a real question whether the full development of the human being is possible without it.”
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  “The person in Peak-experiences feels himself, more than other times, to be the responsible, active, creating center of his activities and of his perceptions. He feels more like a prime-mover, more self-determined (rather than caused, determined, helpless, dependent, passive, weak, bossed). He feels himself to be his own boss, fully responsible, fully volitional, with more “free-will” than at other times, master of his fate, an agent.”
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“Expression and communication in the peak–experiences tend often to become poetic, mythical, and rhapsodic, as if this were the natural kind of language to express such states of being.”

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  “One’s only rival is one’s own potentialities. One’s only failure is failing to live up to one’s own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.”
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  “The fact is that people are good, Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.”
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  “All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.”
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  “The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.”
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  “The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.”
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  “We may define therapy as a search for value.”
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  “We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.”
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  quotes from awaken.com

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  Adam Blatner’s site Abe Maslow
  It was this expansion of clinical psychology beyond the setting of treatment of “sickness” (however broadly you might define it) to considering it a form of experiential education which defined the “human potential movement”, of which Abe Maslow was considered a major pioneer. Maslow was a psychologist trained in psychoanalysis —-most clinical psychologists were—-who was most active around 1950-70. He has been called the “Grandfather of Humanistic Psychology” and has written extensively about many things. He pointed out that healthy is more than just the absence of sickness—-a point I’ve spoken on in a past series of lectures I called “flourishing.” (In this sense, Maslow is a precursor to a later wave in the evolution of psychology called “positive psychology”—-about which we’ll talk a bit in the 4th webpage, developments after 1990.) Maslow also wrote about “self-actualization,” the hierarchy of needs, growth-oriented versus deficiency needs, and “peak experience”—-in this latter sense, anticipating the emergence of transpersonal psychology (about which we’ll speak later.) He was persuasive and became the president of the American Psychological Association.

Maslow’s vision of the possible human struck a chord in me, one which I continue to enjoy: Psychology can be re-framed as an important vehicle for personal growth, life-long education, indeed, a necessary component for adaptation to a rapidly changing world. Maslow’s work—-and indeed, the others too in this section—-helped pave the way for the “human potential movement,” to be discussed further on.
Adam Blatner-great site
Adam Blatner’s bio

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  Abraham Maslow
  Maslow’s books are easy to read and full of interesting ideas. The best known are Toward a Psychology of Being (1968), Motivation and Personality (first edition, 1954, and second edition, 1970), and The Further Reaches of Human Nature (1971). Finally, there are many articles by Maslow, especially in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, which he cofounded

_{Copyright 1998, 2006 by C. George Boeree}

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Motivation Theories

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Maslows Hammer _{Psychology Today© Copyright 1991-2014 Sussex Publishers, LLC}

In psychology, they call it Maslow’s Hammer.

Abraham Maslow was a psychologist who loved human beings. He wanted his branch of science to put as much effort into thinking about what made people happy as it put into contemplating the sources of mental sickness and categorizing the flora and fauna of the disturbed mind. In the 1960s, he wrote a book about the dangers of reductionism in psychology.

Maslow knew that researchers tended to dig and dig until they got down to the nitty gritty and eventually explained the nature of a thing at the smallest level possible. It made him queasy to think of people in that way. Holistic mental health, personal growth, self actualization—that was Maslow. He knew the human mind was a complex thing, and that scientists often sought an understanding of complex things by documenting their atomic and chemical cogs and gears. That approach worked well when studying galaxies or metabolism or fault lines. When it came to the human mind, he felt there was a need for science to spend time on the big picture—the weather patterns of human behavior that emerge from the butterfly wings flapping at the level of synapses and axons.

It was unclear at the time how one might study the nature of things like curiosity, altruism, compassion, and humor in an empirical, measurable way. Some believed those things might be better left to metaphysics and left out of hard science. Maslow saw that as a handicap. He compared it to an automatic car wash, which is a minor marvel that can only be considered marvelous in one context—washing cars. In the same paragraph he wrote, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

Fast forward to San Francisco on Saturday, where I heard neuroscientist David Eaglemen point out to an audience member that even though we are learning more and more about what is “under the hood” of human consciousness, it might not tell us what we most want to know about ourselves. Buddhist monks can train themselves to control blood flow into specific limbs and alter their own heartbeat with meditation, but “they are just dipping their toes into the ocean of the unconscious,” said Eagleman, who added that even if you could become so self-aware you could deep dive into the unconscious mind, the thoughts and emotions down there might look like machine language. You wouldn’t be able to understand it. As he explained, it would be like monitoring a transistor in a computer to better understand why a YouTube video was funny.

I heard Eagleman say this at Being Human 2012, a conference I think would have put Maslow at ease about quantifying consciousness. As promoted, the meeting was an attempt to grab hold of the slippery fish that is the modern science of the mind and smash the reductionists into the abstract thinkers, the neuroscientists into the philosophers, the psychologists against the poets and see what spun away.

You got the sense at Being Human that “a new phase in anthropology,” is upon us, as suggested by philosopher Thomas Metzinger during one of the dialogues. Earlier, he gave a talk about avatars and how scientists are able to transfer a person’s sense of self into a rubber glove, among other things. He later said he believed the insights of neurologists, primatologists, psychologists, biologists, and the rest of science are coalescing into what Metzinger called “a new image of man.” The synthesis of these, he asserted, will eventually be common knowledge. A thousand scientific shoulders are pushing law and ethics, entertainment and opinion forward into the new normal.

I think this is true, but that might be because of something Maslow’s Hammer is sometimes likened to, a form of confirmation bias called déformation professionnelle. It’s a play on words, French words, that describes how you often see the world through the narrow lens of your profession. If you are a biologist, bodies are gene-replicating devices. If you are a physicist, the brain is made of atoms formed in a star. If you are an astronomer, the Earth is a pale blue dot. If you write a blog that became a book called You Are Not So Smart, you get invited to conferences about the human experience and see it as a sign that your book is a pebble in a rockslide. You see a mass epiphany, people everywhere seeing the human experience in terms of illusions, delusions, foibles, vestigial evolutionary strategies and other hand-me-downs. Books like How We Decide, Phantoms in the Brain, Incognito, and others are the boulders in that same rockslide tumbling after Malcolm Gladwell’s bestsellers that tumbled after the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky that rest at the bottom of a mountain with Thinking Fast and Slow arriving at the top of that heap moments ago. If you think something like that, then the audience of Being Human confirmed in you that there exists a human potential movement version 2.0, finally turning to data for answers after simultaneously abandoning the squishy thinking of new age pretensions and the pre-science assumptions of religion.

In his book, The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance, Maslow wrote, “Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical,” and he described a sense he had that psychology, in his time, was the most hated and feared of the sciences because it threatened the ego of the human species. It was, as he put it, like when Copernicus moved man from the center of the cosmos to one corner. Later, that position would be further moved from the corner to, as Carl Sagan put it, “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Similarly, in his time the reductionists were taking away the special properties of the human mind—the self and love and compassion and empathy—and turning those things into basic chemistry.

Maslow created the hierarchy of needs, the most well-known group hug in all of science. So, I think it makes sense that he would be afraid of reduction because it usually leads to determinism. At the lowest levels, everything becomes math, and once you know the math, you can just plug in the formulas and watch the systems play out.

Maslow’s Hammer predicted the scientific method would reduce our minds to something quantifiable, and what meaning could be derived from that, what understanding of ourselves? V.S. Ramachandran said on Saturday that the conversation taking place on stage was, before the Big Bang, already present in a simpler form inside a single point in space. It was perhaps the most reductionist statement one could ever make about the human experience, yet no one gasped, no one fainted in the aisle. We used to all be one thing, and now we are another. Beautiful.
Anne Harrington pointed out on Saturday that at most universities the humanities and psychology are studied in the same buildings on one side of campus. The hard sciences, the ones with all the math, are studied on the other side. Maslow feared what might happen when the reductionists eventually blended with the social scientists. Harrington said the time for those sorts of thoughts had passed. If Being Human was truly evidence of a new movement in anthropology reaching critical mass, and that assumption is not just a case of my own mind experiencing déformation professionnelle, then Maslow’s fears were unfounded. The neuroscientists met the philosophers and laughed at each other’s jokes. The poet read aloud, and the expert on cultural cognition was moved. _{Psychology Today© Copyright 1991-2014 Sussex Publishers, LLC}

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Videos

_{TED Video} Positive Psychology

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Encountering Maslow

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  Maslow and Self Actualization
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  Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs | Pyramid of Needs Hierarchy | Maslow Motivation Theory Go beyond Dr, Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs! The new Pyramid of Needs offers insight into Motivation at Work, Human Needs and Psychological Well-Being.
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  Awaken.com
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  Notes

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created today…July 2,2014

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