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
During all my first twenty years, I was depressed, terribly unhappy, lonely, isolated (and self-rejecting).
I have come to think of this humanist trend in psychology as a revolution in the truest, oldest sense of the word; the sense in which Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, Freud and Marx made revolutions, i.e. new ways of perceiving and thinking, new images of
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, treat everything as if it were a nail.
The great lesson from the true mystics is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, and in one's backyard.
Religion becomes. a state of mind achievable in almost any activity of life, if this activity is raised to a suitable level of perfection.
The neurosis in which the search for safety takes its clearest form is in the compulsive-obsessive neurosis. Compulsive-obsessive to frantically order and stabilize the world so that no unmanageable, unexpected or unfamiliar dangers will ever appear.
Man is ultimately not molded or shaped into humanness. The environment does not give him potentialities and capacities; he has them in inchoate or embryonic form, just exactly as he has embryonic arms and legs. And creativeness, spontaneity, selfhood
Education is learning to grow, learning what to grow toward, learning what is good and bad, learning what is desirable and undesirable, learning what to choose and what not to choose.
The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side; it has revealed to us much about man’s shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his psychological height. It is as if psychology had voluntarily restricted itself to only half its rightful jurisdiction, and that the darker, meaner half.
If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I'd still swim. And I'd despise the one who gave up.
It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.
Be independent of the good opinion of other people.
One's only rival is one's own potentialities. One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.
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.