Abraham Maslow

Lore & Background

Abraham Harold Maslow (April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970) was an American psychologist best known for creating the hierarchy of needs, a framework for psychological health based on prioritizing innate human needs, culminating in self-actualization. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he was the eldest of seven children to first-generation Jewish immigrants from Kyiv, then part of the Russian Empire, who fled czarist persecution. Raised in a poor, multiethnic, working-class neighborhood, Maslow faced antisemitic harassment and developed a strong aversion to his mother, whom he described as selfish, narcissistic, and unloving. He had few friends besides his cousin Will and spent much of his youth in libraries, fostering a love for reading. He attended Boys High School, where he served as an officer in academic clubs and edited the Latin magazine and a physics paper. After high school, he briefly studied law at City College of New York and attended Cornell University for one semester before graduating from City College. He married his first cousin Bertha in 1928 and earned a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Wisconsin, where his early research focused on primate dominance and sexuality under an experimental-behaviorist framework. He later taught at Brooklyn College, Columbia University, Brandeis University, and other institutions. His experiences during World War II inspired studies of self-actualizing individuals, drawing on mentors Ruth Benedict and Max Wertheimer. Maslow emphasized positive human qualities over pathology and is considered a pioneer of humanistic psychology. A 2002 survey ranked him the tenth most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Reader's Guide

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the core of his theory, proposes that human motivation is driven by a series of innate needs arranged in priority, from basic physiological requirements up to self-actualization. He argued that psychological health depends on fulfilling these needs in order, and he stressed the importance of focusing on people’s positive qualities rather than treating them as a collection of symptoms. His work emerged from a dissatisfaction with the dominant behaviorist and psychoanalytic schools; after World War II, he began questioning how psychologists reached their conclusions and developed his own approach, which he called humanistic psychology. This new discipline emphasized human potential and mental health. His groundbreaking studies of self-actualizing individuals were inspired by two mentors he admired, anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, whom he considered wonderful human beings. He took notes on their behavior, which became the foundation for his lifelong research. Maslow extended his ideas by borrowing from other psychologists and adding concepts such as metaneeds, metamotivation, and peak experiences. His hierarchy of needs has had a profound influence across psychology, education, and management, and a 2002 survey ranked him as 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.

Gallery