When you say the name Maslow to most people, there is an immediate glint of recognition, a faint smile, a mental struggle to remember something about him, followed by a slightly awkward realization that the person should remember more but does not. While Maslow’s influence is all around us, recognition of how he has influenced our thinking and behavior is only now penetrating public awareness. When you realize how much a loner he was, the lack of a school. or group of graduate students to pick up his work, and the indirect hostility of the field of psychology to his non-traditional approach, it is actually amazing that his influence is as great as it is.
Hostility to some of his theories and use of a phenomenological approach to gain some experiential infomation continues to the present, but the great bulk of his work would fit neatly into positive psychology. What Maslow did that was most revolutionary was taken on the two predominant schools of psychology psychodynamic and behavioral and insist that a third and potentially more important area of study warranted attention—Positive Psychology
In this Blog, I will name some of the most common Maslow Myths and go into details about them in future blogs. Common Myths include 1 Only a few people can achieve self-actualization 2 Lower needs must be fulfilled before you can address higher ones 3 Self-actualized people focus predominantly on themselves, 4 the peak of the hierarchy is self-actualization, 5 there is no scientific basis to the hierarchy of meeds or self-actualization. You will learn that all of these suppositions are false
