Maslow and Hertzberg

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Abraham Maslow died in 1970, having spent most of his long working life as lecturer and professor in psychology at Brandeis University in the State of New York. From an intellectual standpoint, Maslow’s most formative years were those which he had spent in the late 1930s in New York, then, as he later declared, ‘beyond a doubt, the centre of the psychological universe of that time.’1 His preceding studies at the University of Wisconsin had included comparative and experimental psychology, biology and neurophysiology. In New York he concentrated upon the study of psycho-analysis under Erich Fromm, and he was himself analysed by Emil Oberholzer, which he judged to be ‘the best learning experience of all’. But discussions with Alfred Adler not only introduced him to some of the shortcomings of the various forms of the Freudian theory, but also gave him a lasting sense that Adler’s own contribution had been insufficiently appreciated by US psychologists. Besides the analytical school, Maslow also studied the two other incipient schools in the contemporary psychology of his day, which he named respectively the ‘holistic’ and the ‘cultural’. The word ‘holism’ (from the Greek word for whole) had been first introduced in 1926 by J C Smuts in his seminal book Holism and Evolution to describe ‘the principle which makes for the origin and progress of wholes in the universe’.2 Maslow learnt the application of the holistic approach to psychology from Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, both prominent members of the Gestalt school. Later he believed that he had found a bridge between the holistic and analytic schools in the teachings of Kurt Goldstein, whose book The Organism, published in 1939, in particular exerted a profound and lifelong influence on Maslow. Apart from investigating the social and cultural aspects of psychology, primarily with the aid of the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, Maslow also made a short field study of the Northern Blackfoot...