Abraham Maslow

Abraham Harold Maslow was born on April 1, 1908, in Brooklyn, New York, the oldest of seven children of first-generation Jewish immigrants from Kyiv.1 He studied psychology at the University of Wisconsin, where he worked with Harry Harlow on primate behavior, and later studied Gestalt psychology at the New School for Social Research. In 1937, he joined the faculty of Brooklyn College.

In 1943, Maslow published "A Theory of Human Motivation" in the journal Psychological Review, proposing that human needs are organized into a hierarchy of prepotency.2 The five levels, from most basic to highest, were physiological needs, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Maslow argued that lower needs must be substantially gratified before higher ones emerge as dominant motivators. He elaborated the framework in his 1954 book Motivation and Personality.

The pyramid diagram now universally associated with Maslow's theory was not his creation. The first known depiction appeared in a 1960 article in the journal Business Horizons by Charles McDermid, an American consulting psychologist, who described the hierarchy as "arranged in a pyramid of five levels."3 Maslow himself described the needs as fluid and overlapping, noting that multiple motivations operate simultaneously. In his later writings, he added a sixth level of "metaneeds" concerned with intrinsic values that transcend self-interest.4

Maslow served as a professor at Brandeis University from 1951 to 1969, and as president of the American Psychological Association. A 2002 survey in the Review of General Psychology ranked him as the tenth most cited psychologist of the twentieth century.5

His study of self-actualized individuals drew criticism for its methodology. The sample was heavily weighted toward educated Western men, including Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Albert Einstein, with fewer women such as Eleanor Roosevelt.6 Maslow died of a heart attack on June 8, 1970, in Menlo Park, California, at the age of sixty-two.