Biography of Abraham Maslow
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There have been many great psychologists, psychoanalysts, immunologists, endocrinologists, and psychotherapists that have made a name for themselves here in America. Sigmund Freud, Carl Rogers, Stanley Milgram, Walter Cannon, and Janice Glaser are just a few. However, the one who piques my interest more than Freud or any other person who has extensively studied psychology as in depth and thoroughly as the ones above mentioned is Mr. Abraham Harold Maslow. Out of all psychologists in the known world, there has never been and never will be anyone who comes close to his ideas, thoughts, actions, and psychoanalyses of the human mind.
Maslow was born on April 1, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York. He was the oldest of seven children born to his Jewish parents that emigrated from Russia. They had no education and wanted Maslow to get as much education as he could while living here in America. He did as his parents wished of him, and that eventually caused him to be a very shy, lonely child. He turned to books for comfort, and became a very smart student. After graduating high school, he tried to satisfy his parents by enrolling in City College of New York to study law. He was only there for three semesters before transferring to Cornell, but he eventually returned to City College of New York. Of course, as we all know, Maslow did not stay with studying law long.
He married his first cousin, Bertha Goodman, and moved to Wisconsin to attend the University of Wisconsin. This is where he became interested in Psychology and greatly improved in his school work. He spent time there with Harry Harlow, another famous psychologist, and excelled in everything he put in his mind to learn. He received his BA in 1930, his MA in 1931, and his PhD in 1934, and they were all in the field of Psychology. He returned to New York one year after graduating from the University of Wisconsin and went to work at Columbia University, where he became interested in research on human sexuality.
After teaching at Columbia University for a short time, he began teaching at Brooklyn College. It was during this time that he came in contact with many European intellectuals that were immigrating to the US at that time–people like Adler, Fromm, Horney, as well as several Gestalt and Freudian psychologists.
He served as the chair of the psychology department at Brandeis from 1951 to 1969. It was here that he began his crusade for a humanistic psychology–something ultimately much more important to him than his own theorizing. He spent his final years in semi-retirement in California, until, on June 8 1970, he died of a heart attack after years of ill health. It is amazing to know that a man with this much knowledge, understanding, compassion, and insight died in the same year that I, Pearl Evelyn Parker, was born. It would have meant so much for me to be able to meet him and hear him speak of the different ways that I as a person could have put into action some of his famous ideas and theories.
Speaking of theories, his most famous theory to date is his Hierarchy of Needs. He came up with this theory in 1943, and it