Craig Chalquist, PhD, PhD
Who was Abraham Maslow psychologically? Is his Hierarchy of Needs still relevant? If not, what in his work still speaks to us?
Two books bought at random in a mall in Thousand Oaks, California precipitated my career in psychology. One was Karen Horney’s Self-Analysis. The other was Maslow’s The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. I did not understand all I read in them, but even as a young college student, I heard in their words the inner bell tones of destiny.
While teaching as an adjunct psychology instructor at Sonoma State, I came across Maslow’s journals in the school library and read them. They portrayed a man very different in some ways from the one I had read about as an upbeat founder of humanistic psychology. The reaction paper I wrote was sharply critical.
Revisiting the journals almost two decades later, I retained some of my initial concerns but understood more about both the shadows of higher ed and the use of a journal to explore what might appear to some as dark and even monstrous fantasies.
This paper, revised and expanded, describes Maslow the man, then offers a current assessment of the work he gave us. The quotations come from his journals.
Origins
Abraham Maslow was born in New York City, site of an ongoing historical motif of rises and falls, on April 1, 1908, to working class Ukrainian Jewish immigrants Samuel and Rose Maslow. He was the oldest of seven children and grew up in Brooklyn.
The boy did not see much of his father growing up; Samuel not only worked hard making barrels to support his growing family, but likely stayed away on purpose to avoid fighting with his wife/cousin, an obsessively religious woman whom young Abe believed hated him almost from the cradle. As an adult he told stories of her bolting the lock on the refrigerator, and of smashing the heads of two stray kittens he brought home. When she died, her reactively atheistic son did not attend her funeral.
Understandably, he was a loner. His childhood was spent mostly at the library reading books. He had learned his father’s strategy of avoiding home whenever possible. His feeling of being ugly combined with frequent relocations to make friendships hard to come by until high school. While enrolled there he met Bertha Goodman, his cousin and future wife, who had just arrived from Russia. He tutored her in English and fell in love. They married in 1928.
Like many gifted young people, Maslow was a mediocre student. He especially hated math, but on his own time he read the work of Upton Sinclair and other socialist writers and was deeply impressed. His studies under the famous but pedantic Edward Titchener convinced him that psychology had nothing to do with understanding what he would eventually call “the farther reaches of human nature.”
What turned him back to psychology was, oddly enough, the work of John Watson. Although as mechanistic as Titchener’s brand of structuralism, Watson’s writings reflected a conviction of the equality of all human beings and the improvability of society. His scientistic aspirations fired young Maslow’s enthusiasm so hotly that he decided to become a psychologist after all. Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams also impressed him. His work in Harry Harlowe’s laboratory, though boring at times, convinced him to take seriously Alfred Adler’s ideas about the need to feel powerful and dominant. Transferring to Columbia, Maslow worked under Edward Thorndike, who did not care for Maslow’s budding interest in human sexuality but felt impressed by the high score Maslow achieved on one of Thorndike’s IQ tests.
As the Depression eased and the Second World War loomed and then burst over Europe, émigrés of impressive scholarly stature began to arrive in New York City. Maslow made it his business to get to know them: Adler, then Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, the biologist Kurt Goldstein, Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka (two men of Gestalt psychology fame), Erik Erikson, and the anthropologist Ruth Benedict. In Wertheimer and Benedict Maslow saw examples of fully achieving human beings; from a reluctant Goldstein he took the term “self-actualization” to describe such people. To a young psychologist raised by an embittered mother, Wertheimer’s question must have sounded like strains of angelic music: Are there not tendencies toward kindness and justness in adults and children—tendencies which vanish if one only studies the psychologically ill?
Taking the advice of Benedict, Maslow and two colleagues spent some time among the Blackfoot Indians of Canada. He marveled to see their nonauthoritarian leadership styles, their affection for their children, their openness, and their lack of crime, dishonesty, and aggression. He began to suspect that the prevalent social science emphasis on cultural relativity concealed a biologically based, species-wide human nature centered on common needs and values.
When Maslow joined the faculty at Brooklyn College, he found promotion so slow there that he did not become an assistant professor for eight years. His students liked his informal teaching style, however, and he was happy to instruct groups of students who clearly appreciated the chance to be in school after growing up Jewish in tough, racially conflicted New York neighborhoods. He counseled some of them informally.
As the war exploded, Maslow went through two inner transformations that remained important to him forever after. One was triggered by the birth of his daughters Ann and Ellen. Their individualized characters, noticeable even in the womb, convinced Maslow to move beyond the behavioristic overemphasis on environmental determinants. The second occurred when he saw a rather pathetic parade of veterans near Brooklyn College. Tears ran down his face as he took in the flag, the old uniforms, the Boy Scouts playing the flute off key. It dawned on him that he must dedicate himself to creating “a psychology for the peace table,” a theory capable of understanding what drove human nature.
The kernel of it appeared in his 1943 article “A Theory of Human Motivation.” It set forth a Hierarchy of Needs and the idea that thwarting them led to psychopathology, as in Karen Horney’s system of basic needs, whereas meeting them led to health and wholeness. In two years Maslow started a Good Human Being Notebook to understand what distinguished self-actualizers from their less fulfilled fellows. Why aren’t we all Beethovens? How good a person does a particular society allow?
As Maslow made plans for research into these and related topics, a sudden illness deprived him of energy: the first of many bouts of fatigue, depression, and heartbeat irregularities that would disrupt his explorations into the nature of health.
In 1951, Maslow accepted the opportunity to staff a psychology department at the new Brandeis University in Boston. In three more years his book Motivation and Personality hit the shelves to challenge psychologists to spend less time on sickness and weakness and more on health, growth, and the creative possibilities embedded in a higher human nature. (He later criticized the book for overemphasizing individuality while not highlighting the power of groups and communities.)
Although gifted with highly skilled faculty, Brandeis disappointed Maslow on many levels. His colleagues considered his idealism naïve, and his students displayed little of the respect or motivation he was used to at Brooklyn College. In his journal he complained about graduates as well, especially their desire for more guidance from him. His model of the relationship was that students should learn what they could from their teachers “from above down” without being a distraction from more important concerns such as writing and creating psychological theory. Privately, he wished that all but the brightest would drop out so that “reconnaissance men” like himself could work undisturbed. “Students are dispensable here; discoverers are not.”
It was around this time that the American Psychological Association began rejecting Maslow’s articles for publication. He had written about transcendent, or “peak,” experiences of bliss, joy, and unity, all frightening to readers safer with routine, rigidity, and glumness. Meanwhile, the university began hiring faculty against Maslow’s will while rejecting his suggestions for appointments.
Outside his field, however, demands for Maslow’s time began to accumulate as leaders of business and science sought him out as a consultant. He met these demands eagerly, dismissing the concerns of Fromm and Herbert Marcuse that industrialists wanted only more efficient psychological techniques for squeezing more production out of “human resources.” They did not see that business “had changed its nature entirely.”
Taking note of his growing popularity, the APA elected Maslow president, much to his surprise. His growing reputation had impressed them despite his lack of interest in the mechanics of administration. He preferred being out on the psychological frontiers.
From their 1959 inception onward, Maslow’s journals paint a picture of an occasionally depressed and angry idea man fighting against his daughter Ellen’s brand of anti-authoritarianism, his desire to speak openly about his support for Lyndon Johnson and contempt for anti-war protesters (he referred to Mario Savio of the Free Speech Movement as a “jerk”), his frustration with Esalen’s conversion of humanistic ideas into an experiential “you do your thing and I’ll do my thing” adolescent free-for-all, his own body (spastic colon, chest pains, anemia), moods (frustration, fear, rage), and recurrent bad dreams. He complained in his journal about not being paid better or invited to lecture at Harvard but did not say whether he had asked for either.
Carl Rogers’s unfavorable response to Maslow’s disdain for studying the “cripples” and “losers” of the species was also troubling, as was Rogers’ anger at Maslow’s emphasis on “aggridants”: natural leaders and superior personalities produced by favorable genetics. After telling admirer Betty Freidan about women actualizing themselves mainly through family life, Maslow faced a swelling tide of feminist concern.
It can be difficult to hold onto the popular image of warm, fuzzy Abe. In his journal, which he thought to publish one day, he asked whether people who become political activists (“Simone Weil types”) or commit suicide or get killed perpetrating violent crime are doing unconscious but effective favors for the human gene pool. At times his enthusiasm for encouraging a “biological elite” sounds less like Third Force psychology than like the musings of the Third Reich. After calling in his journal for the Fifth Amendment (which includes due process and the right to a jury) to be heavily modified or abolished, he wrote that one should “consider the right to bear children a social privilege & not an absolute right.”
“And then the awful question: should we try to stop the death-wishers from killing themselves? Every one who dies before reproducing has improved the human species!” (To this day, no evidence shows the influence of genetics to be as simple or straightforward as Maslow believed it to be.) Another idea: show compassion to those now living, but restrict reproduction—and consider executing violent revolutionaries, dictators, and enemies of the state like Joseph McCarthy. They could be euthanized—“putting them out of their misery”—from a Being-perspective, with love and sorrow rather than hate or fear, “for their own good.”
Elsewhere, about rioters, “I’d shoot them if necessary, even to kill if unavoidable” if the society were behind him. For those who prided themselves on being arrested, real punishment might deter them, “even if I had to change the laws about cruel & unusual punishment.” The safety of society was “prepotent” to rights and liberties. As for “unemployed loafers,” let them starve. At the lower need levels of society, perhaps an “authoritarian” style worked better than a democratic one. After all, why should the same laws apply to “low” persons as to “high” ones, or vice versa?
It is hard to say how seriously Maslow took any of this. His journal writings often have the ring of a chronically frustrated man blowing off stream. Later in his journal he wrote, “Mustn’t write off anyone!” The predator-prey model could not be carried over into the human world. As for suicidal impulses, they often passed and shouldn’t be indulged literally. Look at Lincoln, suicidal at one point and, later, a self-actualizer.
“In the industrial work, it often looks as if the blue-collar workers are content to stay at the lower need levels. Certainly this can be learned & cultural, but might it also be in part genetic? Perception of one’s own inferiority?” So much, he writes, for Thoreau’s observation that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”–it must be a projection, and a snotty one at that. Mentioning the work done on his house by a skilled carpenter, he compares the man’s creativity to that of Beethoven, but without mentioning that Beethoven was self-employed, internationally renowned, and able to set his own fees. Eventually, Maslow quit doing therapy because he kept wanting to tell his clients that they could will themselves into a happier life.
Politically, Maslow saw himself as situated between or against liberal and conservative, both extremist and both made obsolete by the emerging knowledge of human nature. The first blamed society for everything, the second attributed all privilege to one’s own efforts. The day Kennedy was shot by Oswald, Maslow wrote:
What kind of society is it that permits him to have a gun? What kind of society permits & protects violence as if it were a sacred right? How can the National Rifle Association be so dedicated, so devoted, & so numerous as to block the U. S. & the Congress from making violence less possible?
1968 brought an opportunity: five years of consulting for Saga, an innovative corporation based at Stanford University in California and apparently committed to Maslow’s ideas about humanistic management and “metapay.” Heart problems, more opportunities outside of higher education, and his increasingly resistant students convinced him finally to leave Brandeis and move to the peak of Mountain View, where he and his wife rented an apartment at Del Medio Arms. (Maslow himself was now armed with nitroglycerin, for his faltering heart.) The final stop was Menlo Park, where Maslow and Bertha received a Mercedez-Benz and enough funds for a new house and a swimming pool.
Abandoned by friends who would not visit or call, disappointed by colleagues (Frankl “narcissistic,” Laing “bloodless,” Fromm and May “not empirical enough”), disturbed by what he saw as his family’s habit of “defeatism” (“Could they all have reacted against my optimism, reformism, hopefulness, do-good work?”), Maslow maintained interest in aggridants, or dominant personalities, as examples of the biological elite. How to foster them at a time when the old American values were coming under attack by the young, the rebellious, like those who saw no nobility in the Vietnam War? Why couldn’t people like Ellen accept that law-and-order security was prepotent to all other needs? How to put the elite—preferably a high-IQ elite—in charge of Eupsychia, the Good Society favorable to self-actualizers? How to get the majority on their side?
Maslow’s image of utopia touted progress: “Why not build whole cities, e.g., for insurance companies…prepare to have the UN run underdeveloped countries & offer a contract to build whole communities on the same Eupsychian principles. Try out my idea of having a clubhouse in each large city.” By contrast,
Last night I heard that Leonard Bernstein is giving benefits for the Black Panthers (not the NAACP), & at once I felt of him as an enemy, someone to fight any way I could. That makes a very long list of enemies, of people I have contempt for, including an awfully big proportion of the intelligentsia community.
Maslow’s journal reflects his ire at “shits” and “losers” who denounce U.S. imperialism, protest U.S. “power, wealth, success, superiority,” and protest Johnson and the war. (“I do run a kind of natural selection with people, paying lots of attention to the promising ones & brushing off the losers, the incapables.”) Foolish liberals and dangerous radicals: these were the people Maslow complained about, never pausing to ask whether they symbolized some hidden, protesting valve in his pounding heart of hearts.
Seeing news about these events often woke him in the middle of the night with a spastic colon. In any given week he took more than one medication, including belladonna, while writing about the need to cure psychological value diseases and eating candy bars to fight off hypoglycemia. The irony of having a “cure for cancer” while suffering from a bad heart and inflated by gas attacks bothered him. “Here I am panting to get home and work!” he wrote from the hospital. “But would such happy work hurt me? Maybe not.”
Giving up watching violent films like Bonnie and Clyde because they made his heart race, he thought over but vetoed his doctor’s suggestion to wear del medio arms of masks and helmets outside on cold days to preserve his diminishing body warmth. The T-groups he helped found went around in circles about taking off all armor—the now-familiar hatred of persona—but the real question was where to keep the discarded metal: as prudent protection against attacks from without, or as unconscious blockage within the worn-out heart.
In 1970, as Maslow, preoccupied with health and growth, was also immersed in making a new theory of human evil, he began to jog in place next to his swimming pool. He fell over and lay dead of a heart attack. At the age of 62, he had collapsed in Menlo Park, an origin city of the Silicon Valley to come.
Assessment
My main feeling toward Maslow and his work remains one of gratitude. His words helped launch my career, teach me about the shining goodness within human nature as well as the lurking shadows, and provide a framework for my own later work with the importance of inspiration and enchantment. I appreciate his optimism and admire his honesty, which he wielded even when it embarrassed him.
I also appreciate his description of Deficiency needs like hunger, safety, respect, and love, which disappear so long as they are satisfied, in contrast to Being needs (or “metaneeds” or “higher needs”) for beauty, wholeness, justice, liveliness, play, goodness, truth, and meaning. As important as our daily bread is, we do not live by it alone. D-needs are means-oriented, whereas B-needs are ends in themselves. (“To get stuck on the means & forget the end = idolatry.”) We cherish a lovely sunrise for its own sake, not for what it can do for us.
Discovering one’s basic needs & metaneeds, which everybody has, is discovering one’s specieshood. But the individual variations on the theme, the differences from the others, this is identity.
He also notes that “the world is one” does not mean it is homogenous.
I also find Maslow’s coinages useful. They include Grumble Theory (we’re never entirely satisfied—and shouldn’t be), Jonah Complex (we fear our own light), the Amity-Enmity Complex (false solidarity from scapegoating outsiders), Eupsychia (a society that meets D-needs and encourages self-actualization), proctopsychologists (who treat human nature reductively), small-r (mystical-experiential) vs big-R (institutional) religion, peak and plateau experiences, the pathology of normalcy, and metamotivation toward full humanness.
Maslow’s critiques of “value-free” science selling out to the highest bidder stand. If anything, they are even more relevant in the age of AI, supersonic missiles, and military drones. His distinction between exploratory science and end-stage verification science needs wider circulation: pedantry and fussiness routinely kill useful pioneering work by attacking it with unconsciously religious “more rigorous than thou” standards. “Must trust future knowledge even before it is born.”
A resistance to reducing kindness, love, friendship, and other humane actions to psychopathology or to inhibited instincts for sex or aggression characterizes Maslow’s career. He rightly considered such reductions to be forms of unacknowledged paranoia and cynicism. (William James called them “nothing but” conjectures.) Nor was he blind to the damage done—personally, socially, relationally, politically—by the chronically immature. A good society could help grow people up psychologically, and they could help the society grow too.
For Maslow, neurosis was a failing attempt at healing and growth, like a plant stem twisting itself around an interfering stone to reach the light. Destructiveness, self-defeating strategies, and violence were secondary and reactive, not foundational. These signify the wounded child-within, and who condemns the child’s passing “I hate you!” outburst or desire for a rival to disappear? At the bottom of depression, valuelessness, cynicism, lack of pleasure, and the wish for death lurked not only wounding, but hopelessness.
Maslow has been criticized for appropriating his Hierarchy of Needs idea from the Blackfoot Indians he did a summer of fieldwork with. This seems exaggerated and perhaps untrue. There isn’t that much overlap. Also, Maslow openly credits them with getting him thinking about what self-actualizers look like in a community. To criticisms that he snowball-sampled actualizers he admired (mostly white) and conducted sloppy science he replied that almost no one had investigated them, and initial inquiry was better than none.
Later, he realized that his self-actualizers were also “B-people” who were ends-oriented idealists. One of the reasons for moving toward a “fourth force,” the transpersonal psychology named by Stanislav Grof, was Maslow’s shift of interest from self-actualizers to self-transcenders who might have all kinds of symptoms and not fit definitions of optimal health or strength.
Another frequent comment is that toward the end of his life, Maslow considered adding a sixth level above the Self-Actualization Needs: a Transcendence Needs level of devotion to larger causes than self-fulfillment. This observation, however, was already built into the SA Needs after Maslow discussed the issue with Viktor Frankl. (Related to this, I wish Maslow had said more about “societal SA,” which he mentions in passing in his journals.)
There are problems with the Hierarchy, which I consider the least important part of his work. One problem is that Maslow says little about the degree of need impoverishment. As he acknowledged, creative people routinely go days without food while enamored of some inspiring project. But if the focus is on extreme deprivation, we’re in the realm of common sense. Of course you need food if you are starving. In fact, in many cases the safety needs come first, not after the physiological needs. Security from fierce weather or immediate attack can be more urgent than finding food or water.
Aren’t all the needs really D-needs? Don’t we get starved for beauty, truth, creativity? When satisfied, don’t those needs eventually return? What about the need for fantasy and imagination? Some of Maslow’s ideas were inspired by science fiction novels, as he notes in his journals.
The idea of need prepotency—satisfy one set of needs and another comes alive—seems questionable and belabored with exceptions. If a baby is starved for touch, belonging needs would seem to be prepotent over physiological needs. Should the need for freedom be placed within the esteem needs? People give up their lives for freedom. In some cultures, face—especially when being disrespected—takes precedence over love and belonging. For many of us (including B-people) who must do without entire sets of needs satisfied, our work in the world keeps us going. Also, as Maslow noted, when all the deficiency needs are satisfied, sometimes people just get complacent and lazy rather than turning toward self-actualization.
Maslow would place what Erich Fromm called the need for a frame of orientation and devotion—in other words, a life philosophy or, per Joseph Campbell, a workable mythology—up in the actualizing sphere as a cognitive need. However, entire civilizations get sick without a path of big orienting stories to follow. Ours is. Even the hungry and thirsty need them. Additionally, that some people start self-actualizing early in life with little or no regard for meeting lower needs—some artists can scarcely be bothered with their own budgeting—makes questionable any firm distinction between D-needs and B-needs.
What I keep from the Hierarchy of Needs (the pyramid design wasn’t Maslow’s, but the levels were) are the valuing of B-needs as real and worthy ends in themselves, and the recognition that humans have basic or “instinctoid” needs that must be addressed by all institutions in all societies everywhere. (Cross-cultural research verifies basic needs but not the order of their prepotency.) These needs are also values, as Maslow pointed out, and he held them as basic rights. We could add others, such as needs for learning and for bodily autonomy, neither of which seems quite right filed under “safety needs.”
In his attempts to keep psychological needs connected to the body, Maslow went unhelpfully far in his biological speculations. A “born” leader can’t be proven genetically, for example; and even if it were possible, leaders of any sort need a firm grasp of the skills and learnings necessary for good leadership. That Mozart was a “born” composer seems likely, but as such he would have gotten nowhere without the years of hard work, discipline, and practice he put in.
Maslow also went far in his emphasis on choice and freedom of action, countering with a pendulum swing the passivity-engendering determinism of Freudians and behaviorists. He tended to underestimate oppressive conditions and social injustice and to characterize activists and protesters as whiners.
More innocent than May, Rogers, or Frankl about the lesser reaches of corporate nature, Maslow thought it a good idea for corporations buy up “the visionaries, dreamers, theorists…” Today this is known as globalization. It does not concern itself with self-actualization, but it reaps enormous profits while turning large chunks of the planet into trash. Its rallying cry, “the prepotency of security,” has never refuted a potentate but kept many in office. Maslow also missed how Synanon was turning into a cult.
He saw individuals more clearly. After being impressed by Synanon founder Charles Dederich, he picked up on his autocracy and distanced himself from it. Maslow also criticized Rogers for not having enough “sin, evil, & psychopathology in his system,” which remained rather surface (like Adler). “He needs more theory of fear, of resentment, of countervalues, of hostility….Where is anti-Semitism, anti-Negroism in Rogers’ theory? Where is murder? Death? Destruction?” Rollo May expressed similar concerns.
Far from being unrealistically optimistic…my tragic sense of life & evil, etc., can sometimes be so overwhelming that all I can do is fight against it the best way I can, so as to remind people--& myself—that it’s not necessary to be overwhelmed & to give up, that there is a counterforce in truth. That there are some hopeful possibilities.”
He saw overoptimism in other humanistic psychologists, in the Human Potential Movement, and in people addicted to peak experiences and mystical states: higher psychology without the lower, as he put it. He also criticized hyper-individualism and moved away from it, calling psychoanalysis good for individuals but “socially useless” and referring to what he did as “normative social psychology” (July 1967). The techniques taught at Esalen were useful and healing but could not constitute a way of life. “The hunting for the exotic & the esoteric hides the problem in the kitchen, in the back yard.”
Actualization of “potentials” was better described as movement toward full humanness, the “health beyond health” of the B-person, neuroses and all. “I really don’t care much about helping a privileged few to lead happier lives on the edge of catastrophe” (September 1967).
Maslow’s wife was right about a core conflict of his: being God or Freud while trying to be buddies with commoners or with questionable people whose respect he tried to win. The latter included colleagues like Benedict and Kinsey who often ignored him, organizations that used him, and freshmen more interested in being young and free (like freshmen the world over) than in sipping gratefully at the stately fountains of psychological knowledge. His examples of self-actualizers included opportunists like Harry Truman and Henry Ford. Notorious mailfist capitalists like Rockefeller he regarded as mentors.
Maslow’s reactive overemphasis on the otherwise laudable goals of health and growth did not permit him to see the saga in the soreness, the sense in the psychological symptom wiser than the analytic mind trying to heal it. For him, conflict meant a kind of blockage of inner arteries. The closest he came to seeing this was in 1967, when he wrote, “The B-person may be more symptom-loaded and have more value pathology than the symptom-free ‘healthies.’ Maybe one is symptom-free only by virtue of not knowing or caring about the B-realm…” –in other words, the realm of eternal otherworldly verities.
Yet he did not suspect his own symptoms of being inner activists protesting his alliances with people and organizations who could never understand him or the value of his work. Only toward the end did he sense the bitter truth in dream fantasies of being thrown out of the APA or of appearing at public events unshaven and unshowered. The night before a video interview, he dreamed of showing up to teach an auditorium filled with students, only to realize he did not know what class (!) he was in. So often in dreams the suffering dream ego is the most limited of figures, while the rest of the dream shows the true state of affairs.
That Maslow did not feel at home anywhere in supposedly classless American culture or academia echoes in his dreams of being cast out of his family and of wandering New York City unemployed. He was not even at home in his own body. That he died near his pool echoes a tragic reflection from a dream of bobbing in the middle of a big lake, unable to see the shore and just out of reach of a rowboat. At least once he wondered whether his own Eupsychia would have permitted him any offspring. He was too empathic and self-questioning to be a narcissist in the clinical sense, but his death near a pool might hint at the myth of the beautiful hunter too preoccupied with himself.
“I knew certainly the direct consequences of having no mother-love. But the whole thrust of my life-philosophy & all my research & theorizing also has its roots in a hatred for & revulsion against everything she stood for—which I hated so early that I was never tempted to seek her love or to want it or expect it.” Society’s was another matter. He added: “All so simple, so obvious–& to discover it at the age of 61! And after all the psychoanalysis & self-analysis.” He had realized it while speaking with his wife. At one point he had dreamed that President Johnson committed suicide to strike back at the unfairness and viciousness of it all.
In Mexico, Maslow had watched poor children waiting for scraps of food from dining Americans and wondered about them as “responsible” and oblivious individuals, but not as hoodwinked tourists socialized within international economic colossi that condemn millions to abject poverty while declaring occasional “wars on poverty” that are actually wars on the consciousness of poverty.
It is no coincidence that some of the transpersonal psychologies Maslow inspired spend so much effort charting the heights and peaks of ideal health and spirituality. At best, they sketch new landscapes of the mind to explore; at worst, their writings recall the tone of colonial cartographers ranking the benighted. When a transpersonal school in California went under, its faculty and administrators fired, the department I chaired at another school welcomed their abandoned doctoral candidates, who brought many tales of institutional shadows hidden too long by idealistic ventures upward and onward. Heedless rises always lead to descents.
In addition to his work, Maslow left us an honest account of his innermost struggles, failures, and weaknesses. That is no small gift. Along with those he gave us many moments of his happiness, closeness, insight, compassion, and sheer exuberance. Maslow was not only a height psychologist: he descended deeply into his angers and doubts, fears and sorrows, in a brave ongoing struggle to keep heights and depths consciously connected.
On June 5th, 1970, Maslow made a final journal entry having to do with overcoming selfishness. He wanted to keep working, but his heart had other plans. Three days later, having finished its own work, his heart stopped.
When the psychology industry steps back from mind and finally takes seriously the promptings and failings of the heart, psychology will no longer be an industry, self-actualization will no longer suffer divorce from social justice, and health of self and society will be recognized as impossible without a healthy planet to sustain them. “Utopianism,” Maslow wrote in his journal, “can be retrospective therapy,” and not just for individuals.
© 2006 by Craig Chalquist, revised 2024.
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