Abraham Maslow (1908 to 1970) was an American psychologist and one of the founders of humanistic psychology, best known for his ‘hierarchy of needs’ and for the idea of self-actualisation, a person growing into the fullest version of who they can be. His portrait of the self-actualised person, open, realistic, accepting of self and others and given to ‘peak experiences’, closely matches descriptions of healthy hunter-gatherer adults, though Therapeutic Shamanism sees it as leaving out reconnection with the more-than-human world. Critics have questioned the evidence for the hierarchy, and there is a live debate about how far his 1938 stay with the Siksika (Blackfoot) people shaped it.
Who was Abraham Maslow? #
He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1908, and died in Menlo Park, California, in 1970. His paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” (1943) set out the hierarchy of needs, and his books include Motivation and Personality (1954), Toward a Psychology of Being (1962) and the posthumous The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971).1 He wanted a psychology of health rather than of illness, a ‘third force’ alongside behaviourism and psychoanalysis, and with Carl Rogers he became one of the leading figures of the humanistic movement. See Who was Carl Rogers, and why does he matter to Therapeutic Shamanism?
What is the hierarchy of needs? #
Maslow’s account of what motivates people. The more basic needs come first, the body’s needs, then safety, then love and belonging, then esteem. When these are reasonably met, the need for self-actualisation comes forward. He did not see it as a rigid ladder. People have needs partly met and partly unmet at the same time, and the order in which needs emerge is not fixed. Late in life he came to think that self-transcendence, not self-actualisation, was the peak of human motivation.2
The famous pyramid is not his. Researchers looking for its origin found no trace of it in any of Maslow’s writings; the earliest pyramid they could find was drawn by the consulting psychologist Charles McDermid in a business magazine in 1960.2
What is a self-actualised person? #
Someone who has grown into much of what they are capable of being. Maslow’s list of their qualities includes a clear perception of reality and comfort with it; acceptance of self, of others and of nature; autonomy alongside a feeling for community; a gentle, unhostile sense of humour; a continual freshness of perception; democratic, non-authoritarian relationships; spontaneity and creativity; and peak experiences, moments of wonder, unity and timelessness. He insisted that peak experiences cannot be made to happen. “We cannot command the peak-experience. It happens to us.”3
He saw the inner nature that grows towards all this as real but fragile, “not strong and overpowering and unmistakable like the instincts of animals”, and easily drowned out by habit, culture and wrong attitudes.4 That is very close to the humanistic idea, shared with Rogers, that every living thing has a drive to become the best it can be, given the right conditions.
What does Therapeutic Shamanism find in Maslow? #
A good deal. The qualities that Rogers called the fully functioning person, and Maslow the self-actualised person, very much match the descriptions anthropologists have left of healthy hunter-gatherer adults. When Therapeutic Shamanism drew up its own list of the qualities of a True AdultTrue Adult. Not someone with a job and a mortgage, but a person shocked out of childish separateness who has taken up their place, interdependently, in both the human tribe and the more-than-human web. Adults decide; Elders advise. Read the full answer, it drew partly on psychotherapy, particularly on Rogers, Maslow, Reich and Jung.5 See What does it mean to become a True Adult?
Maslow’s idea of healthy shame belongs here too. A degree of shaming is needed for growing up, because it teaches us that we are not gods, that the universe does not revolve around us, that other people matter and that we need to get over ourselves. See What are the pre-personal, personal and transpersonal, and what is the pre-trans fallacy?
His peak experiences also have their place. In Therapeutic Shamanism moments of awakening are a natural part of a healthy human life, though the more someone lives from their Soul, the less the big experiences matter, because what grows instead is a quieter, steadier sense of rightness.6 See What are moments of awakening?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see further? #
In one main way. The humanistic portrait describes a healthy human being among other humans, and therapy does not usually reconnect people with the other-than-human world. That is the one major difference between the self-actualised person and the healthy hunter-gatherer adult, for whom belonging to the land, the animals and the plants was part of being grown up. More widely, much psychotherapy tends to reduce everything to the human level. It is mostly done indoors, focuses on human relationships and inner human processes, and has little awareness of nature, the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer or the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer.7 See What can shamanism offer person-centred therapy?
What have critics said he got wrong? #
Mainly that the evidence is thin. Critics within psychology have called his ideas too soft scientifically, pointed out that he chose his self-actualisers by his own judgement, from people who lived out his own values, and noted that research has found little support for a fixed order of needs.8 Maslow himself said much the same about his early study, warning that “the data cannot be considered reliable until someone else repeats the study”.9
Others have found support for the broader picture. A survey of 123 countries by the psychologists Louis Tay and Ed Diener found that the needs Maslow named are broadly universal and go with well-being, though people do not always meet them in his order, and Maslow had already said the order was not fixed.10 A further charge, that the hierarchy reflects the individualism of the culture it came from, is part of the debate about the Blackfoot.
Did the Blackfoot shape the hierarchy of needs? #
This is debated. In the summer of 1938 Maslow spent about six weeks at Siksika, the reserve of the Siksika (Northern Blackfoot) people east of Calgary in Alberta.11 The Siksika had been bison hunters of the northern Plains, moving between hunting grounds with horses and dogs, but by then the herds had been wiped out, they had signed Treaty 7 in 1877 and been confined to a reserve, and many farmed, ranched or worked in the reserve’s coal mines.12 So what Maslow met was a people whose hunting way of life had been broken by settlement within living memory, not a hunter-gatherer band.
On one side, the Blackfoot scholars Narcisse Blood and Ryan Heavy Head have linked Maslow’s ideas to what he learned from Blackfoot people, and the historian of education Adrea Lawrence argues that what he saw of Blackfoot education can be read as the basis for the hierarchy of needs and self-actualisation, whilst adding that he did not fully understand the Blackfoot worldview.11 On the other side, the Blackfoot ElderElder (True Elder). The rarer stage beyond Adulthood. Adults decide; Elders advise. More about this Roy Bear Chief (Oom Kapisi) and his co-authors write that Maslow’s own writings do not support the idea that Blackfoot knowledge influenced him greatly, and that his construct does not represent Blackfoot philosophy, which is circular, not pyramid-shaped, and rooted in community and place.13
