ABRAHAM MASLOW

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail

Abraham Maslow was a famous America psychologist who developed the notion of a hierarchy of human needs. Maslow is also credited as creating humanistic psychology and is well known for his published works Motivation and Personality and Toward a Psychology of Being.

Abraham Maslow was born on April 1, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York. As the first child to Russian-born Jewish immigrants, Maslow was pushed into succeeding in school since his parents had grown up with little education. Maslow studied hard and eventually enrolled in the City College of New York where he stayed for three semesters. After transfers back and forth to Cornell, Maslow finally moved out of New York and finished his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Prior to graduating, Maslow took his first cousin, Bertha Maslow, as a wife.

After achieving his degrees, Maslow returned to New York to work at Columbia University with E.L. Thorndike. Shortly thereafter he began teaching at Brooklyn College where he met Alfred Alder and Erich Fromm, the leading European psychologists of that time. With his connections and accrued knowledge, Maslow became the chairman of the psychology department at Brandeis University in 1951. It was during this time that Maslow befriended Kurt Goldstein who gave Maslow his first look at the idea of self-actualization, an idea Maslow would later use to create a hierarchy of human needs.

"Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs" is considered a cornerstone in the study of self-actualization. According to Maslow, humans follow a distinct pattern of needs in their life. When one need is met, the next one in the hierarchy is used as motivation. These needs, listed in ascending order, are: physiological, safety, social, esteem, and self-actualization. Once a lower need is met, a higher one is sought. Needs listed lower on the hierarchy are more powerful and more basic while higher ones are thought to be unique only to humans.

Maslow fell into ill health later in life and in 1970 he died of a heart attack. He was 62 and living in California.