Abraham Maslow

Lore & Background

Born in 1908 and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Maslow was the oldest of seven children. His parents were first-generation Jewish immigrants from Kyiv, then part of the Russian Empire, who fled from Czarist persecution. He attended Boys High School, where he served as an officer to many academic clubs and became editor of the Latin magazine; he also edited Principia, the school's physics paper, for a year.

He attended the City College of New York after high school. In 1926, he began taking legal studies classes at night in addition to his undergraduate course load, but disliked it and almost immediately dropped out. In 1927, he transferred to Cornell University but left after just one semester due to poor grades and high costs.

He later graduated from City College and went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin to study psychology. In 1928, he married his first cousin, Bertha. He wrote his master's thesis on 'learning, retention, and reproduction of verbal material' and was awarded his master's degree in psychology in 1931. From 1937 to 1951, Maslow was on the faculty of Brooklyn College.

He was a professor at Brandeis University from 1951 to 1969. He became a resident fellow of the Laughlin Institute in California. While jogging, Maslow had a severe heart attack and died on June 8, 1970, at the age of 62 in Menlo Park, California.

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.

Reader's Guide

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization. He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a 'bag of symptoms'.

He called his new discipline humanistic psychology. The basic principles include emphasizing the here and now, taking personal responsibility, recognizing inherent worth, and aiming for personal growth and understanding. Maslow believed that leadership should be non-intervening.