Abraham Maslow
Abraham Maslow
Abraham Harold Maslowwas an American psychologist who was best known for creating Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization. Maslow was a psychology professor at Alliant International University, Brandeis University, Brooklyn College, New School for Social Research, and Columbia University. He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a "bag of symptoms." A Review of General Psychology...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth1 April 1908
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
We can consider the process of healthy growth to be a never ending series of free choice situations, confronting each individual at every point throughout his life, in which he must choose between the delights of safety and growth, dependence and independence, regression and progression, immaturity and maturity.
A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
What does 'happy' mean? Happiness is not a state like Vermont.
One can go back toward safety or forward toward growth.
The human being needs a framework of values, a philosophy of life, a religion or religion-surrogate to live by and understand by, in about the same sense that he needs sunlight, calcium or love.
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, an poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This weed we call self-actualization….It refers to man’s desire for self-fulfillment, namely to the tendency for him to become actually in what he is potentially: to become everything one is capable of becoming.
No psychological health is possible unless this essential care of the person is fundamentally accepted, loved and respected by others and by himself.
What we call 'normal' in psychology is really a psychopathology of the average, so undramatic and so widely spread that we don't even notice it ordinarily.
One cannot choose wisely for a life unless he dares to listen to himself, his own self, at each moment of his life.
The loss of illusions and the discovery of identity, though painful at first, can be ultimately exhilarating and strengthening.
Whereas the average individuals "often have not the slightest idea of what they are, of what they want, of what their own opinions are," self-actualizing individuals have "superior awareness of their own impulses, desires, opinions, and subjective reactions in general."
(Some people) have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy.
Human beings seem to be far more autonomous and self-governed than modern psychological theory allows for.
If you treat your children at home in the same way you treat your animals in the lab, your wife will scratch your eyes out. My wife ferociously warned me against experimenting on her babies.