Abraham Maslow

Mr. Upmesh Kr. Talwar

RINPAS, Ranchi.
 Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
“Human nature is not
nearly as bad as it
has been thought to
be”

“third force” father of

humanistic
psychology
 Theory
• One of the many interesting things Maslow noticed
while he worked with monkeys early in his career,
was that some needs take precedence over
others.  For e.g., if you are hungry & thirsty, you will
tend to try to take care of the thirst first.  After all,
you can do without food for weeks, but you can
only do without water for a couple of days!  Thirst is
a “stronger” need than hunger.  Likewise, if you are
very very thirsty, but someone has put a choke hold
on you and you can’t breath, which is more
important?  The need to breathe, of course.  On the
other hand, sex is less powerful than any of these. 
You won’t die if you don’t get it!
 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

• D-needs: deficiency needs (have an absence of something)

• B-values: being level (must have all other levels satisfied); self-actualization
• Maslow took this idea and created his now
famous hierarchy of needs. Beyond the
details of air, water, food, and sex, he laid out
five broader layers: 
• the physiological needs,
• the needs for safety and security,
• the needs for love and belonging,
• the needs for esteem, and
• the need to actualize the self, in that order.
• 1.  The physiological needs.  These include the
needs we have for oxygen, water, protein, salt,
sugar, calcium, and other minerals and vitamins. 
They also include the need to maintain a pH
balance (getting too acidic or base will kill you) and
temperature (98.6 or near to it).  Also, there’s the
needs to be active, to rest, to sleep, to get rid of
wastes (CO2,  sweat, urine, and feces), to avoid
pain, and to have sex. 
• Maslow believed, and research supports him, that
these are in fact individual needs, and that a lack of,
say, vitamin C, will lead to a very specific hunger for
things which have in the past provided that vitamin
C -- e.g. orange juice. 
• 2.  The safety and security needs.  When the
physiological needs are largely taken care of,
this second layer of needs comes into play. 
You become increasingly interested in finding
safe circumstances, stability, protection.  You
might develop a need for structure, for order,
some limits.
• Looking at it negatively, you become
concerned, not with needs like hunger & thirst,
but with your fears & anxieties. In an adult, this
set of needs manifest themselves in the form of
our urges to have a home in a safe
neighborhood, job security, a good retirement
plan, a bit of insurance, & so on.
• 3.  The love and belonging needs.  When
physiological needs & safety needs are, by &
large, taken care of, a third layer starts to show
up.  You begin to feel the need for friends, a
sweetheart, children, affectionate relationships
in general, even a sense of community. Looked
at negatively, you become increasing
susceptible to loneliness & social anxieties.
• In our day-to-day life, we exhibit these needs in
our desires to marry, have a family, be a part of
a community, a brother in the fraternity, a part of
a club.  It is also a part of what we look for in a
career.
• 4.  The esteem needs.  Next, we begin to look
for a little self-esteem.  Maslow noted two
versions of esteem needs, a lower one and a
higher one.  The lower one is the need for the
respect of others, the need for status, fame,
glory, recognition, attention, reputation,
appreciation, dignity, even dominance.  The
higher form involves the need for self-respect,
including such feelings as confidence,
competence, achievement, mastery,
independence, and freedom.  Note that this is
the “higher” form because, unlike the respect of
others, once you have self-respect, it’s a lot
harder to lose!
• The negative version of these needs is low self-
esteem and inferiority complexes.  Maslow felt
that Adler was correct when he proposed that
these were at the roots of many, if not most, of
our psychological problems.  In modern
countries, most of us have what we need in
regard to our physiological and safety needs. 
We, more often than not, have quite a bit of
love and belonging, too.  It’s a little respect that
often seems so very hard to get!
• All of the preceding four levels he calls deficit
needs, or D-needs.  If you don’t have enough
of something -- i.e. you have a deficit -- you feel
the need.  But if you get all you need, you feel
nothing at all!  In other words, they cease to be
motivating.  As the old blues song goes, “you
don’t miss your water till your well runs dry!”
• He also talks about these levels in terms of homeostasis.
Homeostasis is the principle by which your furnace thermostat
operates:  When it gets too cold, it switches the heat on; when
it gets too hot, it switches the heat off.  In the same way, our
body, when it lacks a certain substance, develops a hunger
for it;  When it gets enough of it, then the hunger stops.
Maslow simply extends the homeostatic principle to needs,
such as safety, belonging, and esteem, that we don’t
ordinarily think of in these terms.
• Maslow sees all these needs as essentially survival needs.
Even love and esteem are needed for the maintenance of
health.  He says we all have these needs built in to us
genetically, like instincts.  In fact, he calls them instinctoid --
instinct-like -- needs.
• In terms of overall development, we move through these
levels a bit like stages.  As newborns, our focus is on the
physiological.  Soon, we begin to recognize that we need to
be safe.  There after, we crave attention & affection. Later, we
look for self-esteem. 
• Under stressful conditions, /when survival is
threatened, we can “regress” to a lower need
level. When your family ups & leaves you, it seems
that love is again all you ever wanted. When you face
bankruptcy after a long & happy life, you suddenly
can’t think of anything except money.
• These things can occur on a society-wide basis as
well: When society suddenly flounders, people start
clamoring for a strong leader to take over & make
things right.  When the bombs start falling, they look
for safety.  When the food stops coming into the
stores, their needs become even more basic.
• Maslow suggested that we can ask people for their
“philosophy of the future” -- what would their ideal
life/ world be like -- & get significant information as to
what needs they do/ do not have covered.
• If you have significant problems along your
development -- a period of extreme insecurity/
hunger as a child, /the loss of a family member
through death/ divorce, /significant neglect/
abuse -- you may “fixate” on that set of needs for
the rest of your life.
• This is Maslow’s understanding of neurosis. 
Perhaps you went through a war as a kid. Now
you have everything your heart needs -- yet you
still find yourself obsessing over having enough
money and keeping the pantry well-stocked.  Or
perhaps your parents divorced when you were
young.  Now you have a wonderful spouse -- yet
you get insanely jealous or worry constantly that
they are going to leave you because you are not
“good enough” for them. 
 Self-actualization
• The last level is a bit different.  Maslow has used a variety of terms
to refer to this level:  He has called it growth motivation (in
contrast to deficit motivation), being needs (or B-needs, in
contrast to D-needs), and self-actualization.
• These r needs that do not involve balance/homeostasis. Once
engaged, they continue to be felt.  In fact, they are likely to become
stronger as we “feed” them!  They involve the continuous desire to
fulfill potentials, to “be all that you can be.”  They are a matter of
becoming the most complete, the fullest, “you” -- hence the term,
self-actualization.
• If you want to be truly self-actualizing, you need to have your lower
needs taken care of, at least to a considerable extent.  This makes
sense:  If you are hungry, you are scrambling to get food;  If you
are unsafe, you have to be continuously on guard;  If you are
isolated and unloved, you have to satisfy that need;  If you have a
low sense of self-esteem, you have to be defensive or
compensate.  When lower needs are unmet, you can’t fully devote
yourself to fulfilling your potentials.
 Self-actualization
• It is not surprising, then, that only a small percentage of the
world’s population is truly, predominantly, self-actualizing.
Maslow at one point suggested only about two percent!
• The question becomes, of course, what exactly does Maslow
mean by self-actualization.  To answer that, we need to look
at the kind of people he called self-actualizers.  He did this
using a qualitative method called biographical analysis.
• Included in this group were Abraham Lincoln, Thomas
Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Adams,
William James, Albert Schweitzer, Benedict Spinoza, and
Alduous Huxley, plus 12 unnamed people who were alive at
the time Maslow did his research.  He then looked at their
biographies, writings, the acts and words of those he knew
personally, and so on.  From these sources, he developed a
list of qualities that seemed characteristic of these people, as
opposed to the great mass of us.
 Self-actualization
• These people were reality-centered, which means
they could differentiate what is fake and dishonest
from what is real and genuine.  They were problem-
centered, meaning they treated life’s difficulties as
problems demanding solutions, not as personal
troubles to be railed at or surrendered to.  They had a
different perception of means & ends.  They felt
that the ends don’t necessarily justify the means, that
the means could be ends themselves, and that the
means -- the journey -- was often more important than
the ends.
• The self-actualizers also had a different way of
relating to others.  First, they enjoyed solitude, and
were comfortable being alone.   They enjoyed deeper
personal relations with a few close friends and
family members, rather than more shallow
relationships with many people.
• They enjoyed autonomy, a relative independence from physical
& soc needs. They resisted enculturation, i.e., they were not
susceptible to social pressure to be "well adjusted“/to "fit in" --
they were, in fact, nonconformists.
• They had an unhostile sense of humor -- preferring to joke at
their own expense,/ at the human condition, & never directing
their humor at others.  They had a quality he called acceptance
of self & others, by which he meant that these people would be
more likely to take you as you r than try to change you into what
they thought you should be.  This same acceptance applied to
their attitudes towards themselves:  If some quality of theirs
wasn’t harmful, they let it be, even enjoying it as a personal
quirk.  On the other hand, they were often strongly motivated to
change negative qualities in themselves that could be changed. 
• Along with this comes spontaneity and simplicity:  They
preferred being themselves rather than being pretentious or
artificial.  In fact, for all their nonconformity, he found that they
tended to be conventional on the surface, just where less self-
actualizing nonconformists tend to be the most dramatic.
• Further, they had a sense of humility and
respect towards others -- something
Maslow also called democratic values --
meaning that they were open to ethnic and
individual variety, even treasuring it.  They
had a quality Maslow called human
kinship -- social interest, compassion,
humanity.  And this was accompanied by
a strong ethics, which was spiritual but
seldom conventionally religious in nature.
• These people had a certain freshness of
appreciation, an ability to see things, even
ordinary things, with wonder.  Along with this
comes their ability to be creative, inventive, &
original. Finally, these people tended to have
more peak experiences than the avg person.  A
peak experience is one that takes you out of
yourself, that makes you feel very tiny, or very
large, to some extent one with life or nature or
God.  It gives you a feeling of being a part of the
infinite & the eternal.  These experiences tend to
leave their mark on a person, change them for the
better, and many people actively seek them out. 
They are also called mystical experiences, & r an
important part of many religious and philosophical
traditions.
• Maslow doesn’t think that self-actualizers r perfect. 
There were several flaws/ imperfections he
discovered: First, they often suffered considerable
anxiety & guilt -- but realistic anxiety & guilt, rather
than misplaced/ neurotic versions.  Some of them
were absentminded & overly kind. Some of them
had unexpected moments of ruthlessness, surgical
coldness, & loss of humor.
Two other points he makes about these self-
actualizers:  Their values were "natural" and
seemed to flow effortlessly from their
personalities.  And they appeared to transcend
many of the dichotomies others accept as being
undeniable, such as the differences between the
spiritual and the physical, the selfish and the
unselfish, and the masculine and the feminine.
 Metaneeds
• Another way in which Maslow approach the problem of what
is self-actualization is to talk about the special, driving needs
(B-needs, of course) of the self-actualizers.  They need the
following in their lives in order to be happy:
• Truth, rather than dishonesty. 
Goodness, rather than evil. 
Beauty, not ugliness or vulgarity. 
Unity, wholeness, and transcendence of opposites, not arbitrariness or
forced choices. 
Aliveness, not deadness or the mechanization of life. 
Uniqueness, not bland uniformity. 
Perfection and necessity, not sloppiness, inconsistency, or accident. 
Completion, rather than incompleteness. 
Justice and order, not injustice and lawlessness. 
Simplicity, not unnecessary complexity. 
Richness, not environmental impoverishment. 
Effortlessness, not strain. 
Playfulness, not grim, humorless, drudgery. 
Self-sufficiency, not dependency. 
Meaningfulness, rather than senselessness.
 Metapathologies
• At first glance, you might think that everyone
obviously needs these.  But think:  If you are
living through an economic depression or a war,
or are living in a ghetto or in rural poverty, do
you worry about these issues, or do you worry
about getting enough to eat and a roof over your
head?  In fact, Maslow believes that much of the
what is wrong with the world comes down to the
fact that very few people really are interested in
these values -- not because they are bad
people, but because they haven’t even had their
basic needs taken care of!
 Metapathologies
• When a self-actualizer doesn’t get these needs
fulfilled, they respond with metapathologies --
depression, despair, disgust, alienation, and a
degree of cynicism.
• Maslow hoped that his efforts at describing the
self-actualizing person would eventually lead to
a “periodic table” of the kinds of qualities,
problems, pathologies, and even solutions
characteristic of higher levels of human
potential.  Over time, he devoted increasing
attention, not to his own theory, but to
humanistic psychology and the human potentials
movement.
Thank You