Abraham Harold Maslow was born in Brooklyn, New York in the year 1908. He was educated at the City College of New York and the University of Wisconsin. Maslow spent most of teaching career at Brandeis University. His strong disbelief in the orthodox behaviorism and psychoanalysis of the time, which mainly concentrated on illness, led him to his own theory. He developed a theory of motivation, it described the process by witch an individual progress from basic needs such as food and sex to the highest needs of what he called self-actuazation.Maslow was best known for establishing the theory of a hierarchy of needs, he wrote that humans are motivated by unsatisfied needs, and that a person can not move up until all other lower needs have been satisfied. Maslow studied exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Fredrick Douglas rather than the mentally ill or neurotic people. This is a radical difference from other psychologists of his time, which were Freud and B.F. Skinner. Freud saw little difference between the motivation of humans and animals. He also said that we are rational beings that do not always act that way. Maslow thought that this was the reason that Freud would study the mentally ill. Skinner on the other hand studied pigeons and white rats learned motivation. He stated that motivation is learned by reward and repletion. Maslow on the other hand found that there are general needs (physiology, safety, love, and self-esteem) that must be satisfied before a person can act unselfishly. He also called these needs “deficiency needs”. As long as we are striving to meet these needs we are moving towards self-actualization.Maslow’s theory of motivation was based upon a person always trying to better them selves. The next level or step could not be achieved until the previous had been satisfied completely. ...
