Abraham Maslow

On April 1, 1908, American psychologist Abraham Maslow was born.

Abraham Maslow is a famous American social psychologist and the pioneer of the third generation of psychology. He proposed a humanistic psychology that integrates psychoanalytical psychology and behaviorist psychology, integrating its aesthetic thoughts. His main achievements include proposing humanistic psychology and Maslow's theory of hierarchy of needs. Representative works include "Motivation and Personality","Exploration of Existential Psychology","The Realm of Human Performance", etc.

Maslow was born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York City, USA, and died of a heart attack in Menlo Park, California, USA. His parents were Jews who immigrated to the United States from the former Soviet Union. He was the eldest of seven children in his family. His father drank heavily and had very strict requirements on the children. His mother was extremely superstitious and cold, cruel and irritable. Maslow once brought two kittens home when he was a child. He was beaten to death by his mother in front of him. Maslow had a painful childhood and never received the love of his mother. When his mother passed away, he refused to attend the funeral, which shows the bad relationship between her mother and son. He experienced a lot of loneliness and pain in his childhood. Not only that, as Jews, they lived in a non-Jewish neighborhood and were one of the few Jews in school after going to school, which made Maslow a shy, sensitive and neurotic child who sought comfort by using books as a refuge. Later, when he recalled his childhood, he said: "I was very lonely and unfortunate. I grew up in library books and had hardly any friends. After going to school, Maslow had excellent academic performance due to his extremely high talent, but his condition changed later.

Maslow has been a book addict since he was five years old. He often browsed books in the neighborhood library. When he studied American history in his lower grades, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln became his heroes. Decades later, when he began to develop the theory of self-realization, these people became basic examples of the self-realizers he studied. In his youth, he was extremely inferior due to his weakness and ugliness (his nose was too big), and he used physical exercise to seek compensation. After entering college, he read the concepts of inferiority and transcendence in A. Adler's works, and was inspired by it, which changed his life from then on. Maslow's early experiences not only influenced Maslow as a child, but also made Maslow still afraid of speaking in public after adulthood and even becoming famous. So much so that he would experience extremely intense anxiety before every speech.

His parents were uneducated, but they insisted that he study law. At first he satisfied their wishes and entered the City College of New York in 1926 to specialize in law. But after only two weeks, he decided that his interest was not in law, and felt that he was not fit to be a lawyer and chose a wide range of other favorite subjects. After three semesters, he transferred to Cornell University. His introductory psychology course was taught by W. Wundt's student E. Tiechiner, founder of the constructivist school, but he soon grew tired of the elemental analysis of constructivist psychology and Tiechiner's tedium. He soon returned to the City College of New York. In 1928, Maslow married his cousin Bertha Goodman, a high school classmate, over the objections of his parents, and they had two daughters. Maslow claimed that his real life began when he married and transferred to the University of Wisconsin, when Maslow was 20 and Bertha was 19. After the marriage, Maslow and Bertha moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Wisconsin to continue his studies, which was also an important turning point for him to really enter his academic field. At this time, Maslow discovered behaviorism and was overjoyed, and soon studied animal learning behavior under one of the representatives of behaviorism at the time, C. Hull. However, as he increasingly studied Gestalt psychology and the psychology of S. Freud, Maslow's enthusiasm for behaviorism gradually waned. When the young Maslow couple had a family of their own, Maslow made another important discovery. He wrote: "Our first baby changed my career in psychology, and he made the behaviorism I used to be obsessed with look so stupid that I could no longer stand it. It is not tenable."

Maslow Maslow received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Wisconsin in 1930, a master's degree in psychology the following year, and a doctorate in psychology in 1934. At the University of Wisconsin, he enrolled as a leading researcher in the study of primates in the United States, in a research internship with H. Harlow, known for his studies of monkeys and attachment behavior, and became Harlow's research assistant and later his first doctoral student. During this period, another famous Gestalt psychologist, M. Weitheimer, also served as Maslow's teacher. By this time, he gradually became interested in apes and confidently found his own field of study. In the study of ape dominance and sexual behavior, Maslow ventured into an almost completely unknown territory. From February 1932 to May 1933, Maslow spent hours every day, without disturbing the animals, quietly observing and taking detailed notes on 35 different species of primates. He completed a doctoral thesis entitled "The Determining Role of Dominance Drives in Social Behavior of Great Ape Primates", which was used to demonstrate that dominance drives are a key determinant not only in apes, but also in the social behavior and organization of other mammals and birds. He noticed that dominance seemed to arise from an "innate confidence" or "superiority" rather than through physical aggression. In a sense, he was formulating a preliminary theory based on dominance drives to explain many social behaviors in higher animals. Due to his excellent thesis, he made a deep impression on behavioral psychologist E. Thorndike. Thorndike offered Maslow a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University and invited Maslow to assist him in new research projects at his School of Educational Studies. In 1935, Maslow was an assistant to Thorndike in psychological research at Columbia University. This shows that although Maslow opposed behaviorism, he was educated in behaviorism. It was not until 1937 that he became an associate professor of psychology at Brooklyn College in New York City that he gave up behaviorism in his thinking and turned to humanism.

The reasons that influenced Maslow's thoughts on psychology during his time at Brooklyn College were: After his first child was born, he observed the wonderful phenomena of infant behavior, which made him realize that behavioral psychologists attempted to use the results of animal research to infer and explain human behavior. It is simply unrealistic. Therefore, he once said to people: 'I dare say that anyone who has raised children personally will never believe in behaviorism! "Maslow's teaching in Brooklyn was a period of academic thoughts on Nazi persecution in Germany. Many famous European psychologists took refuge in the United States. As a result, he became acquainted with Gestalt psychologists Wetheimer, W. Kohler, and Kofka, and psychoanalytical psychologists K. Honey, Adler, and E. Fromm. The thoughts of these people all had an impact on his humanistic psychology.