Abraham Maslow

Lore & Background

Abraham Harold Maslow was an American psychologist active from the 1930s until his death in 1970, ranked by a 2002 survey as the tenth most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He is best known for creating the hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health based on fulfilling innate human needs in priority order, culminating in self-actualization. Maslow stressed focusing on positive human qualities rather than treating people as a "bag of symptoms." He taught at several institutions, including Cornell University, Brooklyn College, Brandeis University, The New School for Social Research, and Columbia University. Born in 1908 and raised in Brooklyn, New York, he was the oldest of seven children to first-generation Jewish immigrants from Kyiv who fled czarist persecution. His parents were poor but valued education. He experienced antisemitic harassment and developed a strong revulsion toward his mother, citing her selfishness and lack of love. He grew up in libraries, developing a love for reading, and attended Boys High School in Brooklyn, where he edited the Latin magazine and a physics paper. He later studied at City College of New York, briefly attended Cornell, and earned a master's degree in psychology from the University of Wisconsin, where his early research was experimental-behaviorist, including primate dominance and sexuality. He found a mentor in Alfred Adler at Columbia. From 1937 to 1951, he taught at Brooklyn College, and World War II inspired his studies of self-actualizing individuals, influenced by anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer. He was a professor at Brandeis from 1951 to 1969 and later a resident fellow at the Laughlin Institute in California. He suffered a serious heart attack in 1967.

Reader's Guide

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, his central contribution, proposes that human psychological health depends on fulfilling a sequence of innate needs, beginning with basic physiological requirements and ascending through safety, love and belonging, esteem, and finally self-actualization. He stressed that psychology should focus on positive human qualities rather than treating people as mere collections of symptoms. His thinking was shaped by his early life as the oldest of seven children born to poor Jewish immigrants from Kyiv who settled in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood; he experienced antisemitic harassment and developed a strong aversion to his mother, whom he described as selfish, unloving, and exploitative. Lacking many friends, he turned to libraries and books, excelling at Boys High School as an editor of both the Latin magazine and the school’s physics paper. After briefly studying law and attending Cornell, he graduated from City College of New York and earned a master’s degree in psychology at the University of Wisconsin, where his research on primate dominance and sexuality was rooted in experimental behaviorism. He later found a mentor in Alfred Adler at Columbia University. From 1937 to 1951, he taught at Brooklyn College, and World War II inspired him to study self-actualizing individuals, initially by observing anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, whom he admired as exemplary human beings. This work led him to develop humanistic psychology, a new discipline emphasizing human potential. He taught at Brandeis University from 1951 to 1969 and became a resident fellow at the Laughlin Institute. A 2002 survey ranked him the tenth most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Did You Know?

• Maslow argued that humans no longer have instincts because we have the ability to override them in certain situations.
• He felt that what is called instinct is often imprecisely defined and really amounts to strong drives.
• For Maslow, an instinct is something which cannot be overridden.
• He believed that while the term 'instinct' may have applied to humans in the past, it no longer does.

The Redefinition of Instinct

Abraham Maslow, working as a psychologist, challenged a term that had long gone unexamined in discussions of human behavior: instinct. In his view, the word was routinely deployed in a sloppy, imprecise way, lumping together phenomena that deserved sharper distinction. For Maslow, what many thinkers casually labeled an instinct was, upon closer inspection, nothing more than a powerful drive—a strong motivational force that pushes a person toward a particular action. A true instinct, by his strict definition, occupied a different category entirely. It was a behavioral pattern so fixed and so resistant to modification that no amount of will, learning, or situational pressure could alter it. Once a behavior could be set aside, redirected, or suppressed under the right circumstances, it had already fallen outside the proper meaning of the word. Maslow's insistence on this boundary was not merely semantic; it reshaped how one understood the architecture of human motivation and the degree of freedom a person actually possesses over their own impulses.

The Override Principle

At the heart of Maslow's argument lay a single, decisive criterion: the capacity to override. If a behavioral tendency can be resisted, postponed, or deliberately set aside when the situation calls for it, then it does not meet his threshold for what genuinely qualifies as an instinct. He pointed to the everyday reality that human beings routinely do exactly this—choosing restraint over impulse, patience over aggression, cooperation over selfishness. In those moments of self-governance, the so-called instinct reveals itself as something far more flexible than the label suggests. Maslow treated this override capacity not as an exception or a rare triumph of reason, but as evidence that the underlying mechanism was, all along, a drive of considerable strength rather than an immutable biological command. The distinction mattered because it placed human agency at the center of the discussion, refusing to reduce people to creatures simply executing pre-programmed scripts.

A Historical Shift in Human Nature

Maslow did not dismiss the possibility that the term instinct once carried genuine weight when applied to human beings. He allowed that, at some earlier stage in the species' development, certain behavioral patterns may have been so rigid and so impervious to modification that they satisfied his strict definition. In that historical sense, calling them instincts would have been defensible. What he insisted upon was the present tense: the conditions that once made such rigidity possible no longer obtain. The very ability to override—to step back from an impulse, to weigh alternatives, to act against the strongest pull—had become a stable feature of human psychology. This meant the vocabulary itself needed updating. A word that accurately described a past condition could mislead if carried forward unchanged into a present where the underlying reality had shifted. Maslow's position thus carried an implicit claim about human development: we are not the same kind of behavioral system we once were, and our language about ourselves should reflect that change.

His Position in the Moral Psychology Debate

Maslow's remarks on instinct and drive sit within a broader and more contentious conversation about the foundations of human morality. In the landscape of that debate, one camp—sometimes labeled the veneer position—treats moral behavior as a thin cultural coating over an essentially selfish and brutish substrate, a view traceable to thinkers like Hobbes and Huxley and echoed in the work of biologists such as George C. Williams. Maslow's framework, as presented in this context, complicates that picture. By insisting that what is called instinct is often merely a strong drive, and by emphasizing the human capacity to override such drives, he opens space for a view in which moral behavior is neither a fragile overlay nor a fixed biological command but something shaped by a genuine, exercisable capacity for self-direction. He does not simply deny that powerful impulses exist; he reclassifies them, and in doing so, he shifts the explanatory burden away from a static, selfish nature and toward the dynamic interplay between drive, choice, and circumstance that characterizes human social life.

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