Абрахам Маслоу: Жизнь, Теория и Вклад в Психологию

American psychologist

Abraham Harold Maslow ('/m//æ//z//l//oʊ/; April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970) was an American psychologist who created Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self actualization. Maslow was a psychology professor at Brandeis University, Brooklyn College, New School for Social Research, and Columbia University. He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a "bag of symptoms". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Maslow as the tenth most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Born in 1908 and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Maslow was the oldest of seven children. His parents were first generation Jewish immigrants from Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire (now Kyiv, Ukraine), who fled from Czarist persecution in the early 20th century. They had decided to live in New York City and in a multiethnic, working class neighborhood. His parents were poor and not intellectually focused, but they valued education. He had various encounters with antisemitic gangs who would chase and throw rocks at him. Maslow and other young people with his background were struggling to overcome such acts of racism and ethnic prejudice in the attempt to establish an idealistic world based on widespread education and economic justice. The tension outside his home was also felt within it, as he rarely got along with his mother, and eventually developed a strong revulsion towards her. He is quoted as saying, "What I had reacted to was not only her physical appearance, but also her values and world view, her stinginess, her total selfishness, her lack of love for anyone else in the world—even her own husband and children—her narcissism, her Negro prejudice, her exploitation of everyone, her assumption that anyone was wrong who disagreed with her, her lack of friends, her sloppiness and dirtiness ". He also grew up with few friends other than his cousin Will, and as a result " [He] grew up in libraries and among books." It was here that he developed his love for reading and learning. He went to Boys High School, one of the top high schools in Brooklyn, where his best friend was his cousin Will Maslow. Here, he served as the officer to many academic clubs, and became editor of the Latin Magazine. He also edited Principia, the school's Physics paper, for a year. He developed other strengths as well: As a young boy, Maslow believed physical strength to be the single most defining characteristic of a true male; hence, he exercised often and took up weight lifting in hopes of being transformed into a more muscular, tough looking guy, however, he was unable to achieve this due to his humble looking and chaste figure as well as his studiousness.

Maslow attended the City College of New York after high school. In 1926 he began taking legal studies classes at night in addition to his undergraduate course load. He hated it and almost immediately dropped out. In 1927 he transferred to Cornell, but he left after just one semester due to poor grades and high costs. He later graduated from City College and went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin to study psychology. In 1928, he married his first cousin Bertha, who was still in high school at the time. The pair had met in Brooklyn years earlier. Maslow's psychology training at UW was decidedly experimental behaviorist. At Wisconsin he pursued a line of research which included investigating primate dominance behavior and sexuality. Maslow's early experience with behaviorism would leave him with a strong positivist mindset. Upon the recommendation of Professor Hulsey Cason, Maslow wrote his master's thesis on "learning, retention, and reproduction of verbal material". Maslow regarded the research as embarrassingly trivial, but he completed his thesis the summer of 1931 and was awarded his master's degree in psychology. He was so ashamed of the thesis that he removed it from the psychology library and tore out its catalog listing. However, Professor Cason admired the research enough to urge Maslow to submit it for publication. Maslow's thesis was published as two articles in 1934.

Maslow continued his research at Columbia University on similar themes. There he found another mentor in Alfred Adler, one of Sigmund Freud's early colleagues. From 1937 to 1951, Maslow was on the faculty of Brooklyn College. His family life and his experiences influenced his psychological ideas. After World War II, Maslow began to question the way psychologists had come to their conclusions, and although he did not completely disagree, he had his own ideas on how to understand the human mind. He called his new discipline humanistic psychology. Maslow was already a 33 year old father and had two children when the United States entered World War II in 1941. He was thus ineligible for the military. However, the horrors of war inspired a vision of peace in him leading to his groundbreaking psychological studies of self actualizing. The studies began under the supervision of two mentors, anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, whom he admired both professionally and personally. They accomplished a lot in both realms. Being such "wonderful human beings" as well, they inspired Maslow to take notes about them and their behavior. This would be the basis of his lifelong research and thinking about mental health and human potential. Maslow extended the subject, borrowing ideas from other psychologists and adding new ones, such as the concepts of a hierarchy of needs, metaneeds, metamotivation, self actualizing persons, and peak experiences. He was a professor at Brandeis University from 1951 to 1969. He became a resident fellow of the Laughlin Institute in California. In 1967, Maslow had a serious heart attack and knew his time was limited. He considered himself to be a psychological pioneer. He gave future psychologists a push by bringing to light different paths to ponder. He built the framework that later allowed other psychologists to conduct more comprehensive studies. Maslow believed that leadership should be non intervening. Consistent with this approach, he rejected a nomination in 1963 to be the president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology because he felt that the organization should develop an intellectual movement without a leader.

While jogging, Maslow had a severe heart attack and died on June 8, 1970, at the age of 62 in Menlo Park, California. He is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Maslow defined self actualization as achieving the fullest use of one's talents and interests—the need "to become everything that one is capable of becoming". As implied by its name, self actualization is highly individualistic and reflects Maslow's premise that the self is "sovereign and inviolable" and entitled to "his or her own tastes, opinions, values, etc." Indeed, some have characterized self actualization as "healthy narcissism."

Maslow used the term metamotivation to describe self actualized people who are driven by innate forces beyond their basic needs, so that they may explore and reach their full human potential. Maslow's theory of motivation gave insight on individuals having the ability to be motivated by a calling, mission or life purpose. It is noted that metamotivation may also be connected to what Maslow called B (being) creativity, which is a creativity that comes from being motivated by a higher stage of growth. Another type of creativity that was described by Maslow is known as D (deficiency) creativity, which suggests that creativity results from an individual's need to fill a gap that is left by an unsatisfied primary need or the need for assurance and acceptance.

Maslow based his study on the writings of other psychologists, Albert Einstein, and people he knew who [he felt] clearly met the standard of self actualization. Maslow used Einstein's writings and accomplishments to exemplify the characteristics of the self actualized person. Ruth Benedict and Max Wertheimer work was also very influential to Maslow's models of self actualization. In this case, from a quantitative sciences perspective there are numerous problems with this particular approach, which has caused much criticism. First, it could be argued that biographical analysis as a method is extremely subjective as it is based entirely on the opinion of the researcher. Personal opinion is always prone to bias, which reduces the validity of any data obtained. Therefore, Maslow's operational definition of Self actualization must not be uncritically accepted as quantitative fact.

During the 1960s Maslow founded with Stanislav Grof, Viktor Frankl, James Fadiman, Anthony Sutich, Miles Vich and Michael Murphy, the school of transpersonal psychology. Maslow had concluded that humanistic psychology was incapable of explaining all aspects of human experience. He identified various mystical, ecstatic, or spiritual states known as "peak experiences" as experiences beyond self actualization. Maslow called these experiences "a fourth force in psychology", which he named transpersonal psychology. Transpersonal psychology was concerned with the "empirical, scientific study of, and responsible implementation of the finding relevant to, becoming, mystical, ecstatic, and spiritual states" (Olson & Hergenhahn, 2011). which developed into his 1968 book Toward a Psychology of Being. In this book Maslow stresses the importance of transpersonal psychology to human beings, writing: "without the transpersonal, we get sick, violent, and nihilistic, or else hopeless and apathetic" (Olson & Hergenhahn, 2011). and found it difficult to accept religious experience as valid unless placed in a positivistic framework. In fact, Maslow's position on God and religion was quite complex. While he rejected organized religion and its beliefs, he wrote extensively on the human being's need for the sacred and spoke of God in more philosophical terms, as beauty, truth and goodness, or as a force or a principle. Awareness of transpersonal psychology became widespread within psychology, and the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology was founded in 1969, a year after Abraham Maslow became the president of the American Psychological Association. In the United States, transpersonal psychology encouraged recognition for non western psychologies, philosophies, and religions, and promoted understanding of "higher states of consciousness", for instance through intense meditation. Transpersonal psychology has been applied in many areas, including transpersonal business studies.

Maslow called his work positive psychology. Since 1968 his work has influenced the development of positive psychotherapy, a transcultural, humanistic based psychodynamic psychotherapy method used in mental health and psychosomatic treatment founded by Nossrat Peseschkian. Since 1999 Maslow's work enjoyed a revival of interest and influence among leaders of the positive psychology movement such as Martin Seligman. This movement focuses only on a higher human nature. Positive psychology spends its research looking at the positive side of things and how they go right rather than the pessimistic side.

In 1966, Maslow published a pioneering work in the psychology of science, The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance, the first book ever actually titled 'psychology of science'. In this book Maslow proposed a model of 'characterologically relative' science, which he characterized as an ardent opposition to the historically, philosophically, sociologically and psychologically naıve positivistic reluctance to see science relative to time, place, and local culture. Maslow acknowledged that the book was greatly inspired by Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), and it offers a psychological reading of Kuhn's famous distinction between "normal" and "revolutionary" science in the context of his own distinction between "safety" and "growth" science, put forward as part of a larger program for the psychology of science, outlined already in his 1954 magnum opus Motivation and Personality. Not only that Maslow offered a psychological reading of Kuhn's categories of "normal" and "revolutionary" science as an aftermath of Kuhn's Structure, but he also offered a strikingly similar dichotomous structure of science 16 years before the first edition of Structure, in his nowadays little known 1946 paper "Means Centering Versus Problem Centering in Science" published in the journal Philosophy of Science.

Abraham Maslow is also known for Maslow's hammer, popularly phrased as "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" from his book The Psychology of Science, published in 1966.

Social psychologist David Myers has pointed out Maslow's selection bias, rooted in the choice to study individuals who lived out his own values. If he had studied other historical heroes, such as Napoleon, Alexander the Great, and John D. Rockefeller, his descriptions of self actualization might have been significantly different. The journal printed its first issue in early 1961 and continues to publish academic papers.