Maslow the Prophet of Humanity

The blog is a little different today – it's a brief account of the life of a psychologist I much admire: Abraham Maslow. He overcame poverty and deprivation to become a psychologist who had a deep belief that all of us are capable of becoming the best we can be. Something to strive for !
Abraham Maslow was born on April 1, 1908, in New York City, the first child of Samuel, a Russian Jewish immigrant. He grew up in Brooklyn, fearing his father, a rough, hard-drinking man, and loathing his mother, whom he later described as “schizophrenic” — the type of mother “who makes crazy people, crazy children.” She did her best to terrorise him with promises of God's revenge for ordinary childhood misbehaviour; from an early age he would test the reality of her rants and when he was not paralysed or struck blind on the spot for some minor offence, his suspicion that she was spouting superstitious rubbish was confirmed. Evidently she was a real horror. When he brought home two stray kittens and she found him feeding them milk from one of her good dishes, she dashed the tiny animals’ brains out against the basement walls. Maslow wondered why he didn’t turn out psychotic. Fortunately, a loving uncle, his mother’s brother, watched over him in adolescence and showed him what normality and decency were.

Cornell was the university of his dreams — it was the only Ivy League college to take more than a token number of Jews — but his mediocre high school grades meant that the best he could hope for was the City College of New York. After a year there, he also enrolled in night classes at Brooklyn Law School; his father had wanted to be a lawyer, and expected Abe to succeed where he could not. But legal study dealt “only with evil men, and with the sins of mankind,” and a class discussion on spite fences — property fences that neighbours erect to annoy one another — prompted Abe to walk out and never come back. Maslow managed to transfer to Cornell. However, even the most pleasant of the students made him feel unwelcome, as a Jew. Waiting on tables at a fraternity house, where none of the “brothers” would speak to him, filled him with resentment that he held onto for years. He lasted a semester, then went back home to City College.
New York in the 1930's was home to some of the finest psychologists of the twentieth century. Maslow would speak of himself as the luckiest man in the world when it came to the teachers he had. To his mind, New York in the 1930s was like Plato’s Athens; some of the finest European psychologists had gathered there, many of them Jews escaping Hitler. Erich Fromm, Kurt Koffka, Karen Horney, Max Wertheimer, and Kurt Goldstein all took a generous interest in the intellectual education of the keen young student.
It was Goldstein who coined the term self-actualisation, reviving the Aristotle's theory of teleology, largely discredited by modern science. Every organism, Goldstein maintained, inherently sought to attain the end it was made for. It was the social psychologist Wertheimer who, along with the pathbreaking anthropologist Ruth Benedict, would provide Maslow with the living model of self-actualising humanity. These two intellectuals were the finest persons Maslow knew, and not in intellect alone; several cuts above the ordinary run in most every crucial respect, they simply had a genius for living. “It was as if they came from another planet,” Maslow would say years later. He felt everybody ought to become the very best they were capable of.
It would become Maslow’s life’s work to describe such people, to explain their excellence, and to spread the word to the multitudes that this richness was in fact an inborn human possession, lost to most because of a deficient social background and emotional problems, but recoverable on a wide scale by overthrowing the pessimistic and oppressive view of mankind that had passed for wisdom. Maslow became confident that he would succeed where his predecessors had failed, not only in the scientific description of what man is, but in the moral prescription for the best that man can become.
At Ruth Benedict’s urging, in 1938 Maslow undertook anthropological fieldwork in Alberta with the North Blackfoot Indians. Nearly all of the Blackfoot, he discovered, displayed a level of emotional security that only the upper percentiles of the U.S. population reached, and Maslow attributed this in large measure to the Indians’ emphasis on personal responsibility instilled from early childhood. For example, a seven-year-old boy faced with a tough decision would go off into the woods by himself for several days to think things over. A demanding but loving upbringing enhanced the essential goodness and strength with which these children were born. Perhaps most important, their inborn virtues were not leached away. That is to say, their culture did not erode their fundamental humanity; people in other more “advanced” societies were not so fortunate. The combination of tenderness and hardiness that Maslow saw in the Blackfoot helped shape his ideas of the best sort of character. It was a universal ideal, then, that his fieldwork directed him toward, rather than a culturally specific one. Cultural relativism had to go. What all people shared in the best of their nature overrode even the differences between races, classes, or civilizations. Maslow’s project involved getting at the vital core of Man, pure and simple. We ought to become the very best we are capable of, me and you both.