Abraham Maslow

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What were some of Abraham Maslow's greatest accomplishments?

-- kim hemphill (kmbrly375@cs.com), November 12, 2001

Answers

The development of the "hierarchy of needs." See any personality text or even dictionary of psychology. Maslow's work is even more commonly found in business texts on personnel.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), November 12, 2001.

Unlike Freud and others, who focused mainly on mental illness and how to cure it, Maslow invited us to instead study health and how to imitate it. Imagine teaching architecture based on failed buildings....what would one learn? Then imagine teaching architecture based on magnificent and technically responsible structures....wouldn't one's approach be entirely different?

-- visualize me (visualizeme@webtv.net), November 14, 2001.

Abraham Maslow's three major accomplishments (or so the textbook story goes) are his hierarchy of needs, characteristics of the self- actualized person, and his contributions to the founding of the humanistic psychology movement. He was also a vocal critic of the scientific method in psychology, although historical analyses have highlighted his ambivalence in this area.

-- Alexandra Rutherford (alexr@yorku.ca), December 05, 2001.

In addition to his theoretical contributions, Maslow was an enthusistic organizer of humanistic psychology. He founded the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and the American Association for Humanistic psychology. Roy DeCarvalho's "History of the 'Third Force" (Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 1990, v. 30. pp. 22-44) and _The Founders of Humanistic Psychology_ (1991, NY: Praeger)describe Maslow's role in these early organizational accomplishments.

-- Warren Street (warren@cwu.edu), December 05, 2001.

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