17 HUMAN MOTIVATION AND THE THEORIES OF MASLOW,
17.1 ABRAHAM MASLOW’S HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY AND THE PYRAMID OF HUMAN NEEDS
Abraham H. Maslow (1908-1970), was born in Brooklyn from immigrant parents who had migrated from Russia to New York. After High School he enrolled at the City College of New York, transferred for a short time to Cornell, and then he returned to C.C.N.Y. His Bachelor’s, Master’s and Ph.D. in Psychology degrees, however, were earned at the University of Wisconsin. He held a variety of University positions and finally from 1951 to 1969 he was at the department of Psychology at Brandeis University in the city of Waltham, Massachusetts.
Maslow has left a legacy for his pioneer work in Humanistic Psychology, which grew out of the expressed opposition of many psychologists to the two mainstreams in psychology and psychiatry prevalent during his time, namely ‘behaviourism’ and ‘psychoanalysis’.
Behaviourism has its roots in the pioneer work of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov and his experiments in shaping the behaviour of dogs. Pavlov’s work known originally as
‘classical conditioning’, was continued and further expanded through the work of the American psychologist J. B. Watson who rejected his contemporaries’ emphasis in introspection and insisted that psychologists should deal only with observable behaviour.
Later on, B.F. Skinner, Harvard professor of Psychology, using the so-called ‘Skinner Box’
in studying the behaviour of rats and pigeons, became the father of ‘operant conditioning’
accepting the existence of what is popularly referred to as the ‘mind’. Skinner highlighted the existence of the chain of ‘stimulus-response’ processes in learning. He added to it the concept of ‘positive and negative reinforcement’ in shaping the end-behaviour of experimental rats and pigeons. Skinner surprised many of his contemporaries presenting in his book ‘Walden Two’
(1948) his thesis refuting the existence of ‘free will’ in human beings.
Psychoanalysis was started and ‘fathered’ by Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurologist. In its classic view, psychoanalysis posited that individual behaviour is formed during the first
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7 years of childhood and all its later manifestations are based on the experiences gained during childhood. This view was later revised by the so-called ‘neo-Freudians’. They proposed that the formation of behaviour patterns continues during adolescence. Psychoanalysis views human personality as a complex entity containing the following three elements which interact producing human behaviour:
The ‘Id’, which is present at birth, is buried into the subconscious and is governed by the
‘pleasure principle’ which strives for the immediate gratification of needs, wants and desires.
The ‘Ego’ emerges from the ‘Id’ as the child is growing and is governed by the ‘reality principle’.
This principle ensures adjustment to the individual’s socio-psychological environment as it strives to postpone immediate satisfaction of the ‘Id’s’ desires adopting socially acceptable and more realistic behaviour.
The ‘Superego’ does not refer to an ‘inflated, super type of Ego’, but it is the internalized synthesis of moral rules, guidelines and ideals that the child acquires from his parents and the prevalent institutions of the society in which he lives and grows. The ‘superego’ contains the ‘Conscience’ i.e. our understanding of what is good or bad, right or wrong, moral or immoral. It also contains the ‘Ego Ideal’ a concept referring to the image each one of us holds dear about the type of person we admire and therefore the type of person we want and strive to be as we proceed to adulthood.
The ‘Superego’ strives to suppress and curtail the satisfaction of all of the ‘Id’s’ desires, urges and wants which are judged to be socially and morally wrong and unacceptable; and it also strives to guide the ‘Ego’ obliging it to act within the moral standards it prescribes.
Considered as a significant architect in the creation and growth of Humanistic Psychology, Maslow was critical of evaluating human behaviour on the same level as animal behaviour studied in laboratories. He was also critical of the psychoanalytic view of human behaviour centring on its pathological expressions as understood and described by psychoanalysis.
In his classic paper published in the Psychological Review in 1943, Maslow presented his
‘Theory of Human Motivation’ which was schematically structured as a five level pyramid listing human needs from the lower physiological ones to the upper intellectual ones. Maslow’s theory and his pyramid of needs have gained such widespread publicity globally that he is ranking as one of the most cited American psychologists of the 20th century.
Maslow in his pyramid hierarchy of needs placed at its base, the bottom level of the pyramid, the so-called ‘physiological needs’, namely air, food, water, clothing and shelter. It should be noted that these needs were also characterized as ‘deficiency needs’ a term which denotes that
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their satisfaction does not signal the emergence of any significant feelings but that on the contrary if they are not timely met the individual may become anxiety ridden.
Progressing upward on the pyramid, satisfaction of the next level of needs containing the
‘safety needs’, i.e. stable health, personal and financial security, become the motivators for the individual’s behaviour, when they are met and satisfied to the individual’s expectations.
On the third level of the pyramid, Maslow placed the needs for ‘belonging and love’, which include interpersonal relations such as friendship, intimacy, family as well as group affiliations and belonging in the individuals’ social settings or in their work environments.
The fourth level, the human need for ‘esteem and self-respect’ assumes striving in order to gain the desired social status and recognition, personal achievement and social prestige.
Once the first four levels of needs are satisfactorily met, the individual may strive to ascend to the fifth level, referred to and presented as ‘self-actualization’. This construct has been variously defined and characterized as the aim of each person, each individual to become what he or she can be, to become the most one can be, to realize his or her full potential within his or her given socio-economic, cultural and psychological environment.
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Going beyond the original article with the 5-level pyramidal hierarchy of needs, Maslow further advanced and solidified his theory in his book (1954) published under the title
‘Motivation and Personality’. He added and highlighted in that book his belief that humans possess an innate ‘curiosity need’ which channels and guides some aspects of our behaviour.
17.2 FREDERICK HERZBERG AND HIS ‘HYGIENE-