He is the inventor of the pyramid of needs: Who is Abraham Maslow?

Abraham Maslow was born in New York on April 1, 1908, as the eldest of 7 children of a Jewish family who immigrated from Russia and could not find an education. The family puts their children under serious pressure for academic success with the effect on their own educational status; This pressure causes Maslow's childhood years to pass with loneliness and depression.

Being a child of a religious family also causes him to hear from his mother about what action he will be punished for and how he will be punished. Maslow, who spent his childhood and youth in those years due to the anti-Semitic movements that took place after the First World War, does not explain this conscientious choice.

Abraham Harold Maslow (April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970) was an American psychologist who created Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization. Maslow was a psychology professor at Brandeis University, Brooklyn College, New School for Social Research, and Columbia University. 

In those years, he describes himself as the “Jewish child of the non-Jewish neighborhood”; “I was ostracized and unhappy like the first black kid to go to a white school. I grew up with books in libraries and without friends,” he says.

After graduating from Brooklyn Boys' High School, Maslow also faces family pressure in his choice of major. Despite his unwillingness, he begins his law studies at the City College of New York at the request of his family. These years are the years when the turbulences in Maslow's inner world are reflected in the outside world. Unexpectedly, he decides to study Philosophy and Psychology at Cornell University. However, Maslow, who could not get along with his teacher, Edward Titchener, returned to the city college after studying for only three semesters.

He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a "bag of symptoms". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Maslow as the tenth most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

After this comeback, he makes a marriage that his family does not look very warmly. He married his cousin Bertha in December 1928. It is not known whether he made his marriage settle in Wisconsin or went on to the University of Wisconsin because he settled here. However, exactly one year after completing his undergraduate education in 1930, he had the opportunity to pursue a master's degree in philosophy, in one of his ideal fields.

He then pursues a doctorate in psychology, dealing with it. In 1934, when Maslow finished his doctorate, he was away from academic studies for a very short time due to his Jewishness, which was not well received during the Second World War, and due to the economic impact of the Great Depression. During this period, although he worked in fields outside his field such as medicine, he again focused on psychology when he realized that medicine, like law, was not suitable for him.

Between 1930 and 1940, he had the chance to contact many famous Psychoanalyst Psychologists who immigrated to the USA by fleeing the Nazi threat. Among them are names such as Alfred Adler, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Max Wertheimer, and Kurt Goldstein. Particularly influenced by Alfred Adler, he continued Adler's seminars for a long time. Around this time, he was also influenced by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict and made anthropological studies about the natives living in Canada. It is said that these studies had a significant impact on the emergence of the "Hierarchy of Needs Theory" that would be revealed in the future.

The Hierarchy of Needs Theory came into our lives with an article written by Maslow in 1943. While Maslow was creating this theory, he actually made important determinations about human nature. According to Maslow, if a person is thirsty, the primary need for that person is to quench his thirst. Maslow called this "the strongest need". If the same thirsty person becomes breathless at the same time, then the priorities will change and the more basic physiological need to breathe will take its place in the hierarchy as the “strongest need”.

Maslow categorizes the requirements as:

1. Physiological requirements

2. Security requirements

3. Belonging requirements

4. Value requirement

5. The need for self-actualization

The pyramid in question shows the life priorities of an individual. The logic of the pyramid is quite simple. Accordingly, the individual meets his needs in order from the bottom to the top. If the individual cannot satisfy the needs of a lower level at a certain level, he will not be able to move to the next level.

According to Maslow, the individual who does not meet the lower level needs will not perceive the higher level needs. Maslow suggested that the average individual may have satisfied 85% of physiological needs, 70% of safety needs, 50% of belongingness needs, 40% of self-esteem needs, and 10% of self-actualization needs.

Maslow is also a theorist who bridges the behavioral approach to humanistic psychology. He was originally a behavioral expert and thought that psychology with a mechanical natural science approach could solve all the world's problems. Later, the problems in his private life, the beginning of the Second World War, the changing philosophical thoughts about human nature, and his meeting with Gestalt and Psychoanalytic psychology changed Maslow's ideas about behaviorism. He is also influenced by his contacts with European psychologists such as Adler, Horney, Koffka, and Wertheimer, who came to the USA during the Second World War. His great respect for Max Wertheimer and the American anthropologist Ruth Benedict led Maslow to conduct his first research on psychologically healthy, self-actualized people.

Maslow, one of the leading names of humanistic psychology, makes very important contributions to this field. He wrote his book Toward a Psychology of Being, published in 1962, not to reveal a new trend against psychology or science, but to enrich psychology and to create a new branch of psychology.

Faced with many health problems in his life, Maslow sometimes takes a break from academic life due to these problems and works in the private sector. He died in 1970 due to a heart attack while walking.