Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) was the high priest of the 1960s 'Human Potential Movement'. It was he who introduced the core idea of the 'Self-actualising Person' in his path breaking book Motivation & Personality. In more ways than one he is the father of modern humanistic psychology. He presented a new image of human nature that excited a whole generation.

Humanistic psychology is a school of psychology that emerged in the 1950s as a reaction against both behaviorism and psychoanalysis. It was explicitly concerned with the human dimension of psychology and the human context for the development of psychological theory. Historically speaking, humanistic psychology has its roots in the existentialist thought of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre.

It is also sometimes understood within the concept of the three different 'Forces' of psychology, namely, Behaviorism, Psychonanalysis and Humanism. The 'First Force' grew out of Ivan Pavlov's work with the conditioned reflex, and laid the foundations for academic psychology in the United States associated with the names of Watson and Skinner. This school was later called the Science of Behaviour. It was Abraham Maslow who later gave it the name of 'The First Force'.

During this period of his life, he came into contact with the many European intellectuals that were immigrating to the US, and Brooklyn in particular, at that time?people like Adler, Fromm, Horney, as well as several Gestalt and Freudian psychologists.

Maslow served as the chair of the psychology department at Brandeis from 1951 to 1969. While there he met Kurt Goldstein, who had originated the idea of self-actualisation in his famous book, The Organism (1934). It was also here that he began his crusade for a humanistic psychology?something ultimately much more important to him than his own theorising. 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.

Maslow's 'Hierarchy of Needs' is a famous concept in humanistic psychology. He organised human needs into three broad levels: i) The physiological?air, food and water, ii) The psychological?safety, love, self-esteem, and iii) Self-actualisation. Maslow was of the view that the higher needs were as much a part of our nature as the lower, indeed were instinctive and biological. Most civilisations had mistakenly put the higher and lower needs at odds with each other, seeing the animalistic basic drives as conflicting with the finer things to which we aspire like truth, love, and beauty.

In striking contrast, Maslow saw these needs as a continuum, in which the satisfaction of the lower needs came before a person's higher mental and moral development. Having met the basic bodily requirements, and reached the state where we feel we are loved, respected and enjoy a sense of belonging including philosophical or religious identity, we seek self-actualisation. He said that 'the self-actualising people have attained the full use and exploitation of talents, capacities, potentialities and the like'.

He began by picking out a group of people, some historical figures, some people he knew, whom he felt clearly met the standard of self-actualization. Included in this august group were Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Adams, William James, Albert Schweitzer, Benedict Spinoza, and Alduous Huxley, plus 12 unnamed people who were alive at the time Maslow did his research. He then looked at their biographies, writings, the acts and words of those he knew personally, and so on. From these sources, he developed a list of qualities that seemed characteristic of these people, as opposed to the great mass of us.

The question becomes, of course, what exactly does Maslow mean by self-actualisation? To answer that, we need to look at the kind of people he called self-actualisers. Fortunately, he did this for us, using a qualitative method called biographical analysis.

These people were reality-centered, which means they could differentiate what is fake and dishonest from what is real and genuine. They were problem-centered, meaning they treated life's difficulties as problems demanding solutions, not as personal troubles to be railed at or surrendered to. And they had a different perception of means and ends. They enjoyed solitude, and were comfortable being alone. At the same time they enjoyed deeper personal relations with a few close friends and family members, rather than mere shallow relationships with many people. They enjoyed autonomy, a relative independence from physical and social needs. And they resisted enculturation, that is, they were not susceptible to social pressure to be 'well adjusted' or to 'fit in' ? they were, in fact, nonconformists in the best sense. They had an unhostile sense of humour ? preferring to joke at their own expense, or at the human condition, and never directing their humour at others. They were noted for their spontaneity and simplicity.

They preferred being themselves rather than being pretentious or artificial. Further, they had a sense of humility and respect towards others?something Maslow also called democratic values?meaning that they were open to ethnic and individual variety, even treasuring it. They had a quality Maslow called human kinship or social interest, marked by compassion and humanity. This human kinship was fortified by a strong ethics, which was spiritual but seldom conventionally religious in nature. They had a certain freshness of appreciation, an ability to see things, even ordinary things, with wonder.

This attitude gave them their ability to be creative, inventive, and original. And, finally, these people tended to have more peak experiences than the average person. A peak experience is one that takes you out of yourself, that makes you feel very tiny, or very large, to some extent one with life or nature or God. It gives you a feeling of being a part of the infinite and the eternal. These experiences tend to leave their mark on a person, change them for the better, and many people actively seek them out. They are also called mystical experiences, and are an important part of many religious and philosophical traditions.

Certainly, his hierarchy of needs has been seminal to understanding motivation in the workplace, and the self-actualisation of the employee has become a serious concern in corporate business in all parts of the world. He has been a very inspirational figure in personality theories.

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