1. Abraham Maslow and the Hierarchy of Human Needs
By Aislinn, Brittany, Melina, and Cynthia

2. Biography Born in April 1st, 1908 in New York City.
His parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants.
He was the eldest of seven children.
They stressed academics upon their children as they were very uneducated.
He had a very unhappy childhood; his parents were unloving and he faced anti-Semitism at school.
He married his first cousin Bertha Goodman and they had two children together.

3. Education
His father wished for him to be a lawyer, and so he studied at Coty College of New York, then transferred to Cornell, and then once again back to CCNY.
When he and his wife moved away from New York, he decided to pursue psychology at the University of Wisconsin.
He received his BA in 1930, his Masters in 1931, and then his PhD in 1934 all in psychology.
He then returned to New York and began research at Columbia University, and afterwards taught full time at Brooklyn college.
Soon after he became the chairman of the psychology department of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts from 1951 to 1969.

4. Deteriorating Health and his Death
In 1945 he suffered a heart attack and his health began to generally deteriorate.
A year before his death, in 1969, he discovered he had hypoglycaemia.
In 1970 he died from a heart attack.

5. Hierarchy of Human Needs
Maslow’s theory on human motivation and the most important needs from the most basic to fulfilling all human potentials. Mostly developed in the 1940s and 50s. Consists of material needs, social needs, and moral needs.
Displayed as a pyramid containing five levels. If a person completes the first level of the pyramid, he is allowed move on to the next. All lower needs must be met before one can go on to the higher level needs.
The lower levels deal with being healthy mentally and physically. The higher levels deal with personal development and influence.

6. #1. Physiological Needs
Includes all of an individual’s biological needs:
The very basic of the human needs: oxygen, water, protein, salt, sugar, calcium, vitamins and minerals.
Being active, sleeping, avoiding pain, having sex.
Maintaining a balanced pH and body temperature.

7. #2. Safety and Security Needs
Finding protection and stability in all environs:
Develop the need for structure and order, as well as set limits.
Fears and anxieties begin to appear.
Insurance in work, at home and in the neighbourhood, and on bought objects.

8. #3. Love and Belonging Needs
The need for affectionate, caring relationships with others:
Friends, lovers, children.
Creating a sense of community.
Although this stage creates susceptibility to social anxieties and loneliness during this stage.

9. #4. Esteem Needs
The need for having self-esteem and receiving esteem from others:
People begin to seek a substantial level of self-respect, independence, and accomplishment as well as respect from others.
The need for importance.
The need for reputation and recognition.

10. #5. Self-Actualization
This is the ‘complete’ stage of being, although very few people reach it. Those who have usually never truly complete this stage, as there is always room to improve, grow, and accomplish as a human being. Self actualization is to be self-aware, only concerned with personal growth and fulfillment, no true interest in what other people think of them.

12. Video

13. Criticism
There is much criticism of his methodology; accusations it of not being scientific enough. Maslow would choose the people he saw as self-actualized and then do research or interview them, this is where he gathered most characteristics of self-actualization.
Many have said that such artists as Van Gogh, scientists like Galileo, and intellectuals like Viktor Frankl (neurologist and psychiatrist) and mathematician Jakow Trachtenburg could be considered self-actualized people because of what they achieved and discovered in their lifetime or afterwards. However, Maslow states in his hierarchy that one need must be satisfied before moving onto another, so could Van Gogh and Galileo, who both suffered from mental illness, and Trachtenburg and Frankl, who suffered through depravity in Nazi concentration camps during WWII, truly be considered self-actualized?

14. Bibliography
Esquire Magazine, December 1983.
World’s Book Biographical Encyclopaedia of Scientists.