57 Facts About Abraham Maslow

Abraham Harold Maslow 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.

Abraham Maslow stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a "bag of symptoms".

Abraham Maslow's parents were first-generation Jewish immigrants from Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire, who fled from Czarist persecution in the early 20th century.

Abraham Maslow's parents were poor and not intellectually focused, but they valued education.

Abraham Maslow had various encounters with anti-Semitic gangs who would chase and throw rocks at him.

Abraham Maslow went to Boys High School, one of the top high schools in Brooklyn, where his best friend was his cousin Will Maslow.

Abraham Maslow edited Principia, the school's Physics paper, for a year.

Abraham Maslow attended the City College of New York after high school.

Abraham Maslow later graduated from City College and went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin to study psychology.

Abraham 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.

Abraham Maslow 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 Abraham Maslow to submit it for publication.

Abraham Maslow continued his research at Columbia University on similar themes.

From 1937 to 1951, Abraham Maslow was on the faculty of Brooklyn College.

Abraham Maslow was already a 33-year-old father and had two children when the United States entered World War II in 1941.

Abraham 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.

Abraham Maslow was a professor at Brandeis University from 1951 to 1969.

Abraham Maslow became a resident fellow of the Laughlin Institute in California.

In 1967, Abraham Maslow had a serious heart attack and knew his time was limited.

Abraham Maslow gave future psychologists a push by bringing to light different paths to ponder.

Abraham Maslow built the framework that later allowed other psychologists to conduct more comprehensive studies.

Abraham Maslow urged people to acknowledge their basic needs before addressing higher needs and ultimately self-actualization.

Abraham Maslow wanted to know what constituted positive mental health.

Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy is applicable to other topics, such as finance, economics, or even in history or criminology.

Abraham Maslow positioned his work as a vital complement to that of Freud:.

However, Abraham Maslow was highly critical of Freud, since humanistic psychologists did not recognize spirituality as a navigation for our behaviors.

Abraham Maslow believed that psychedelic drugs like LSD and Psilocybin can produce peak experiences in the right people under the right circumstances.

Beyond the routine of needs fulfillment, Abraham Maslow envisioned moments of extraordinary experience, known as Peak experiences, which are profound moments of love, understanding, happiness, or rapture, during which a person feels more whole, alive, self-sufficient and yet a part of the world, more aware of truth, justice, harmony, goodness, and so on.

In later writings, Abraham Maslow moved to a more inclusive model that allowed for, in addition to intense peak experiences, longer-lasting periods of serene Being-cognition that he termed plateau experiences.

Abraham Maslow borrowed this term from the Indian scientist and yoga practitioner, U A Asrani, with whom he corresponded.

Abraham Maslow stated that the shift from the peak to the plateau experience is related to the natural aging process, in which an individual has a shift in life values about what is actually important in one's life and what is not important.

In spite of the personal significance with the plateau experience, Abraham Maslow was not able to conduct a comprehensive study of this phenomenon due to health problems that developed toward the end of his life.

Late in life, Abraham Maslow came to conclude that self-actualization was not an automatic outcome of satisfying the other human needs.

Abraham Maslow wrote that there are certain conditions that must be fulfilled in order for the basic needs to be satisfied.

Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy is used in higher education for advising students and student retention as well as a key concept in student development.

Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy has been subject to internet memes over the past few years, specifically looking at the modern integration of technology in our lives and humorously suggesting that Wi-Fi was among the most basic of human needs.

Abraham Maslow realized that the self-actualizing individuals he studied had similar personality traits.

Abraham Maslow selected individuals based on his subjective view of them as self-actualized people.

Abraham Maslow noticed that self-actualized individuals had a better insight of reality, deeply accepted themselves, others and the world, and had faced many problems and were known to be impulsive people.

Abraham Maslow based his theory partially on his own assumptions about human potential and partially on his case studies of historical figures whom he believed to be self-actualized, including Albert Einstein and Henry David Thoreau.

Consequently, Abraham Maslow argued, the way in which essential needs are fulfilled is just as important as the needs themselves.

Abraham 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.

Abraham Maslow used Einstein's writings and accomplishments to exemplify the characteristics of the self-actualized person.

Abraham Maslow had concluded that humanistic psychology was incapable of explaining all aspects of human experience.

Abraham Maslow identified various mystical, ecstatic, or spiritual states known as "peak experiences" as experiences beyond self-actualization.

Abraham Maslow called these experiences "a fourth force in psychology", which he named transpersonal psychology.

In 1962 Abraham Maslow published a collection of papers on this theme, which developed into his 1968 book Toward a Psychology of Being.

Human beings, he came to believe, need something bigger than themselves that they are connected to in a naturalistic sense, but not in a religious sense: Abraham Maslow himself was an atheist and found it difficult to accept religious experience as valid unless placed in a positivistic framework.

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.

Since 1999 Abraham Maslow's work enjoyed a revival of interest and influence among leaders of the positive psychology movement such as Martin Seligman.

In 1966, Abraham 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'.

Abraham Maslow is 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.

Abraham Maslow's ideas have been criticized for their lack of scientific rigor.

Abraham Maslow was criticized as too soft scientifically by American empiricists.

Abraham Maslow was criticized for noting too many exceptions to his theory.

Abraham Maslow attended the Association for Humanistic Psychology's founding meeting in 1963 where he declined nomination as its president, arguing that the new organization should develop an intellectual movement without a leader which resulted in useful strategy during the field's early years.

In 1967, Abraham Maslow was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.