I’ve been looking forward to writing this blog for ages, as it’s on one of my favourite psychologists; the humanist Abraham Maslow. The reason I like Maslow so much is that he was different from the psychologists before him:  he did not use psychology for looking at people’s symptoms, but instead for looking at the healthiest and most whole people- for example, he studied only the healthiest 1% of college students in most of his experiments.

Maslow continued Rogers’ optimistic approach to psychology, seeking to understand what drove the most successful and productive people. His theory was that people were driven by needs at 4 different levels, which correspond with the 4 ways of seeing the world that Existential Psychology talked about. Unfortunately,  I have no idea if this was coincidental or not. These levels formed his moderately famous Hierarchy of Needs, where the lower needs have to be met to enable later needs to develop and be met. However, there are flaws with this theory, such as why people who temporarily reach self-actualisation are able to ignore their other needs…a good example of this is the stereotype of the “starving artist”.