Abraham Maslow was born in 1908 in Brooklyn, New York. He was a psychologist and a very inspirational figure in personality theories. In the 1960’s people were becoming fed up with the reductionistic, mechanistic messages of the behaviorists and physiological psychologists. People wanted purpose and meaning in their lives. Maslow was a pioneer in bringing the human being back into psychology and the person back into personality.
He is most popularily known for his hierarchy of needs pyramid, however, the reason I decided to add him in my blog is this; Instead of studying mentally ill and neurotic people like most psychologists at that time, he chose to study people like Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass. He also studied the healthiest 1 percent of the college student population. He wrote that “the study of crippled, stunted, immature and unhealthy specimens can yield only cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy. That, to me, makes him a hero. It’s no surprise that he has been called the father of humanism.
Abraham Maslow died from a heart attack in 1970, he was 62 years old.
