On this Day: 1st April 1908, Abraham Maslow Born
On this Day, 1st April, 1908, Abraham Maslow was born. Maslow is famously accredited for Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Abraham Harold Maslow was born in Brooklyn, New York, US, the eldest of seven. Maslow’s parents fled Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire as a result of the Czar’s prosecution on the Jewish community (read more on Jewish Persecution in Russia). In spite of Maslow having six siblings, he described his childhood as being lonely and unhappy, having struggled to overcome acts of racism and anti-Semitism such as events like anti-Semitic gangs chasing and throwing rocks at Maslow. One of his only friends was his cousin, Will and the books he immersed himself from the library.
Maslow also despised his home life, having a negative relationship with his mother, himself having said, “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…”.
Maslow had attended one of the top high schools in Brooklyn, Boys High School. Whilst here he served as an officer to many academia clubs and became editor of the Latin Magazine as well as editor of “Principia,” the school’s Physics paper for a year,
After high school, Maslow attended the City College of New York, where he also took night classes on legal studies alongside his undergraduate course. In 1927 he transferred to Cornell after having nearly immediately dropped out of his previous College, although Maslow he dropped out of Cornell after one semester due to low grades and the high cost of tuition. He later went on to finish Law at City College of New York, and after developing an interest in psychology had went to Graduate School at University of Wisconsin. Here he found a mentor in psychologist, Harry Harlow who served as a doctoral advisor. At the University of Wisconsin Maslow earned his bachelors, masters and doctorate degrees in Psychology. Maslow’s masters thesis on “learning, retention, and reproduction of verbal material” was published in 1934, three years after completion after Professor Cason (the individual who recommended Maslow to research the subject for his thesis) had convinced Maslow that it was nothing to be embarrassed off (Maslow’s belief).
Whilst studying in 1928 Maslow married his first cousin Bertha, who was still in high school at the time, having met years earlier in Brooklyn.
Maslow progressed to Columbia University on similar themes of his thesis on his research. At Columbia, Maslow found himself mentored by Alfred Adler, an earlier colleague of Sigmund Freud.
In 1937 Maslow had became a member of faculty at Brooklyn College, where he worked for fourteen years. After world war two, Maslow has began questioning the way psychologists came to their conclusions on understanding the human mind, and whilst not completely disagreeing did initialize his own ideas, which he called humanistic psychology.
Throughout the second world war, by the time the US entered in 1941 Maslow was already a father of two at thirty three years old so was ineligible for the military. In spite of this, it did not mean that Maslow was not inspired by the horrors of war in a “vision of peace,” which lead to his groundbreaking psychological studies of self-actualizing under the initial supervision of two mentors, a Ruth Benedict and Max Wertheimer. This would become his basis for his focus on mental health and human potential and through borrowing ideas from other psychologists developed theories such as the concepts of hierarchy of needs, metamovitaion, peak experiences, metaneeds et cetra.
In 1951, Maslow was a professor at Brandeis University for eighteen years to 1969. Between this time he also became a fellow resident of the Laughlin Institute in California. In 1963 he rejected a nomination to become the President of the Association for Humanistic Psychology as he felt the organisation should develop as an intellectual movement without need of a leader.
On June 8th1970, just three years after having previously suffered a heart attack, Maslow whilst jogging had a severe heart attack leading to his death. Maslow was aged 62 in Menlo Park, California and is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.
Maslow is recognised as being a pioneer in psychology and paved the future of future psychologists, forming the framework in comprehensive studies. His most
Keep an eye out on Lets Talk…Psychology for Maslow’s Theories! (at this time not produced)
