Abraham Maslow

He was the oldest of seven, born in Brooklyn to parents who had left Kyiv ahead of the Tsarist pogroms and who were poor, unbookish and insistent about school. Gangs chased him and threw rocks. He had almost no friends besides his cousin Will, and grew up in libraries instead. At Boys High School he edited the Latin magazine and the physics paper and lifted weights hoping to turn into someone tough-looking, which did not take. Of his mother he later wrote out an itemized account: her stinginess, her total selfishness, her lack of love for anyone in the world including her own husband and children. In 1928 he married his first cousin Bertha, who was still in high school.

Wisconsin trained him as a behaviorist under Harry Harlow, and his graduate research ran to dominance and sexuality in primates. His master's thesis, on the retention of verbal material, embarrassed him so badly that he pulled it off the psychology library shelf and tore out its catalog listing. The turn came at Columbia with Alfred Adler, and then at Brooklyn College, where he began taking notes on two colleagues he simply admired — the anthropologist Ruth Benedict and the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer — and asked what a psychology built around such people would look like. A Theory of Human Motivation ran in Psychological Review in 1943 and set human wants in a rising order of urgency. Motivation and Personality followed in 1954, Toward a Psychology of Being in 1962. He was president of the American Psychological Association in 1968.

The method was the weak point. He selected his self-actualizing subjects himself, on his own judgment of who qualified — Jefferson, Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, Einstein, Thoreau were among them — and then derived the traits of self-actualization from people already chosen for having those traits. Biographical analysis of that kind rests entirely on the researcher's opinion, which is the standard objection, and a second one holds that a hierarchy offered as human encodes a particular set of Western assumptions. He never resolved why so many people with food, safety and company never climb to the top of it. And the diagram everyone knows is not his. None of his published work contains a pyramid. The shape appears to have come from a psychology textbook publisher, as an illustration.

A heart attack in 1967 told him how much time was left. He left Brandeis in 1969 for a fellowship at the Laughlin Institute in California, and on June 8, 1970 a second attack caught him while jogging. He died at 62 in Menlo Park and is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery. A 2002 survey in Review of General Psychology ranked him the tenth most cited psychologist of the twentieth century, which is roughly the shape of the afterlife: the research programme did not outlive its own method, while the pyramid he never drew went everywhere. He had applied the theory to business himself in Eupsychian Management in 1965. Martin Seligman and the positive psychologists claimed him from 1999.

Abraham Maslow's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Theory of Human Motivation article
  Psychological Review — the paper that set out the hierarchy of needs 1943
• Motivation and Personality book
  The hierarchy worked out at length, with the self-actualizing case studies 1954
• Toward a Psychology of Being book
  Revised in 1968 and the most widely read of his books 1962
• Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences book
  An atheist's account of what religion is for 1964
• Eupsychian Management book
  His own application of the theory to the workplace, reissued as Maslow on Management 1965
• The Farther Reaches of Human Nature book
  Published after his death 1971

• 1927 aged ~19 Lasts one semester at Cornell before poor grades and cost send him home
• 1928 aged ~20 Marries his first cousin Bertha Goodman, then still in high school
• 1931 aged ~23 Finishes a master's thesis he is ashamed of and removes from the library He tore out its catalog listing. His adviser urged him to publish it anyway.
• 1937 aged ~29 Joins the faculty of Brooklyn College, where he stays 14 years
• 1943 aged ~35 Publishes A Theory of Human Motivation in Psychological Review
• 1951 aged ~43 Moves to Brandeis University
• 1963 aged ~55 Declines the presidency of the Association for Humanistic Psychology He argued the movement should grow without a leader.
• 1968 aged ~60 Serves as president of the American Psychological Association He had been named Humanist of the Year the year before.
• June 8, 1970 aged 62 Dies of a heart attack while jogging in Menlo Park, California A first attack in 1967 had told him his time was limited.

• Carl Rogers 1902–1987
  Created client-centered therapy and shaped modern counseling practice and training. co-founder of the movement
• B. F. Skinner 1904–1990
  Developed operant conditioning and made behaviorism the dominant mid-century American psychology. opposed
• Ruth Benedict 1887–1948
  Advanced culture-and-personality anthropology through Patterns of Culture and wartime studies of Japan. model and mentor
• William James 1842–1910
  Founded American psychology as a discipline and shaped pragmatist philosophy at Harvard. predecessor
• Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962
  First Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration. named a self-actualizing person