Maslow was so embarrassed by his master's thesis that he hid it
Before he mapped human needs into a famous hierarchy, Abraham Maslow wrote a thesis on memorising verbal material, judged it trivial, and tore its listing out of the library catalogue. His adviser disagreed and pushed it into print. The man who later studied the healthiest minds began as a strict behaviourist.
Born on 1 April 1908, Maslow grew up in Brooklyn as the eldest of seven children of poor Jewish immigrants from Kyiv who had fled Tsarist persecution. Antisemitic gangs chased him and threw rocks; he recoiled from his mother and found refuge in libraries. At Boys High School he edited the physics paper Principia and the Latin magazine, and he lifted weights hoping, without success, to look tougher. College was bumpy: night classes in law lasted barely any time, and a single semester at Cornell ended over poor grades and cost.
Graduate work at the University of Wisconsin was firmly experimental and behaviourist, including studies of dominance and sexuality in primates. His 1931 master's thesis, suggested by professor Hulsey Cason, felt so trivial to him that he removed the copy from the psychology library, yet Cason's encouragement saw it published as two articles in 1934. At Columbia he gained a new mentor in Alfred Adler, an early colleague of Freud, and from 1937 to 1951 he taught at Brooklyn College.
Too old at 33, and already a father of two, to serve when America entered the Second World War in 1941, Maslow was instead stirred toward a vision of peace. Guided by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict and the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, whom he admired as people as well as thinkers, he began studying self-actualising individuals. Out of this came the hierarchy of needs, metamotivation and the idea of peak experiences: moments of rapture or deep understanding in which a person feels both whole and connected to the world. Late in life he added calmer, longer plateau experiences, a term borrowed from the Indian yoga practitioner U. A. Asrani.
He called the resulting field humanistic psychology and framed it as the healthy half that Freud had left out. Critics fault it for thin empirical support and limited use with severe disorders. Maslow taught at Brandeis from 1951 to 1969, turned down the presidency of the Association for Humanistic Psychology in 1963 because he thought the movement should stay leaderless, and died of a heart attack while jogging on 8 June 1970, aged 62. A 2002 survey ranked him the tenth most cited psychologist of the twentieth century.
Source: Abraham Maslow
