Hey, Guys, Sino Po Ba Si Abraham Maslow? Ano Ang Kontribusyon Niya Sa Psychology?

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Abraham Maslow

Abraham Maslow was one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century.

Among his many contributions to psychology were his advancements to the field of humanistic psychology and his development of the hierarchy of needs.

Maslow’s career in psychology greatly predated the modern positive psychology movement, yet the field as we know it would likely look very different were it not for him.

Abraham Maslow’s Life

Abraham Maslow was born in New York in 1908. He was the son of poor Russian-Jewish parents, who, like many others at the time, immigrated from Eastern Europe to flee persecution and secure a better future for their family (Hoffman, 2008).

Throughout various interviews, Maslow described himself as neurotic, shy, lonely, and self-reflective throughout his teens and twenties. This was, in part, because of the racism and ethnic prejudice he experienced owing to his Jewish appearance. He himself, however, was non-religious.

Maslow also did not enjoy being in the family home, so he spent much of his time at the library, where he developed his academic gifts (DeCarvalho, 1991). Consequently, Maslow later attributed his interest in self-actualization and the optimization of the human experience to his timid nature and the isolation it caused (Frick, 2000).

 

Education and Career

After attending public school in a working-class neighborhood in New York, Maslow attended the University of Wisconsin to study psychology. Initially, he was interested in philosophy, but he soon grew frustrated with its inapplicability to real-world situations and switched his focus to psychology (Frick, 2000).

Maslow was originally engaged in the field of behaviorism, which argues that human behavior can be explained and altered using forms of conditioning. In line with the laboratory-based methods at the time, Maslow conducted research with dogs and apes, and some of his earliest works looked at the emotion of disgust in dogs and the learning processes of primates (DeCarvalho, 1991).

While Maslow ultimately pivoted from behaviorism, he was observed to have remained staunchly loyal to the principles of positivism throughout all stages of his education and career, which are at the foundation of this branch of psychology (Hoffman, 2008).

According to this philosophy, only that which is scientifically verifiable or can be shown using logical or mathematical proof is considered valid.

As such, Maslow was a firm believer in the power of empirical data and measurability for forwarding human knowledge. He was known to have resisted the interest in mysticism that dominated in the 1960s, preferring instead to study businesses and entrepreneurship (Hoffman, 2008).

Maslow eventually studied gestalt psychology at the New School for Social Research in New York. He later joined the faculty of Brooklyn College and rose to become head of the psychology department at Brandeis University in Waltham, where he remained until 1969 (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2021).

During his career, Maslow co-founded the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 1961, and the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology in 1969 (Richards, 2017). Today, both journals are highly cited, well-respected outlets in their fields, serving as a tribute to Maslow’s legacy in the field of psychology.

 

The Impact of World War II

With the onset of World War II, Maslow’s intellectual focus is reported to have changed, and this was when his work began to shift the landscape of the psychology field. At the time, Maslow was thirty-three years old and the father of two children.

In his writings, he lamented that the U.S. forces did not understand the German opposition and felt that the field of psychology could help facilitate understanding and restore peace to the world (Hoffman, 1999).

Therefore, given the horrors of the war, Maslow conducted his research with a renewed sense of urgency. This led to his famous works on the concept of self-actualization and the introduction of his seminal hierarchy of needs in the mid-1940s (Hoffman, 2008).

Maslow’s Contributions to Humanistic Psychology

Soon after Maslow began his career, he grew frustrated with the two dominant forces of psychology at the time, Freudian psychoanalysis and behavioral psychology (Koznjak, 2017).

Maslow believed that psychoanalysis focused too much on “the sick half of psychology” (Koznjak, 2017, p. 261). Likewise, he believed that behaviorism did not focus enough on how humans differ from the animals studied in behaviorism. He thus contributed to the third force of psychology that arose in response to this frustration: humanistic psychology.

Humanistic psychology gained influence in the mid-20th century for its focus on individuals’ innate drive to self-actualize, express oneself, and achieve their full potential.

Such foci represented a significant shift from the pathologizing and behaviorist approaches of the past, and Abraham Maslow’s work is widely considered having been at the center of this movement.

At the core of the humanistic psychology movement was the idea from gestalt psychology that human beings are more than just the sum of their parts and that spiritual aspiration is a fundamental part of one’s psyche.

Maslow himself was known to have been a big believer in this view; he was widely known for his optimism throughout his research. Further, his works were some of the first to deviate from psychology’s dominant focus on pathology and instead explore what it takes for humans to reach their full potential.

A key reason why Maslow’s work triggered a movement is owed to the way he positioned the role of human unconsciousness. Like Freud, a proponent of the dominant psychoanalytic approach at the time, Maslow acknowledged the presence of the human unconscious (The Psychology Notes HQ, n.d.).

However, whereas Freud argued that much of who we are as people is inaccessible to us, Maslow argued people are acutely aware of their own motivations and drives in an ongoing pursuit of self-understanding and self-acceptance. These ideas were ultimately reflected in his seminal works on self-actualization and his hierarchy of human needs (The Psychology Notes HQ, n.d.).

Source: ( https://positivepsychology.com/abraham-maslow/ )

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