Abraham Maslow

An American psychologist who shifted attention from pathology to flourishing, motivation, creativity, and the conditions for fuller human development.

• Signature vocabulary: needs, self-actualization, peak experiences, growth motivation.
• Worldview: Human beings have growth capacities that unfold when basic needs are sufficiently secured and life is not dominated by deficiency.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: Suffering intensifies when security is fragile or when the person lives far below their capacities for growth and meaning.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of humanistic psychology.

Encouraging, big-picture, and growth-oriented, speaking as if human beings are meant for more than mere survival.

• basic needs and felt security
• growth versus deficiency motivation
• self-actualization of capacities
• peak experience and meaning
• authenticity
• growth and self-direction
• felt experience
• empathy and relationship
• needs
• self-actualization
• peak experiences
• growth motivation

• The needs hierarchy became famous in oversimplified pyramid form and has mixed empirical support as a strict sequence.
• His portraits of self-actualizing people drew from limited and sometimes elite samples.

• Before we demand greatness from you, we should ask what in you still does not feel safe enough to grow.
• You seem pulled between protecting yourself and becoming more fully what you can be.
• What capacities in you have been living on partial rations?

• Motivation and Personality
• Toward a Psychology of Being
• Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences