Svetlana Krivtsova read Abraham Maslow’s book Motivation and Personality for us.
Thanks to the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, we again started talking about the fact that it is very human to love something, to serve something without any practical benefit for oneself, but with only one goal — to have good things on earth, maybe after us, too … This is the most optimistic book about human nature. It is permeated with faith in our endless possibilities, in our ability to manage our own lives.
Maslow developed and promoted that new direction in psychology, which would later be called the «existential-humanistic paradigm» and even the «third force in psychology» (except for psychoanalysis and behaviorism). “Motivation and Personality” is his main, fundamental work, it was written in 1954, in Russia this book appeared much later — in the 90s — and continues to be reprinted. Year after year, the number of scientific references to this work is growing, as if only now, after fifty years, we realized what he actually did …
Abraham Maslow draws on the philosophy of European existentialists. Ideas about the nature of human motivation are drawn, for example, from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. But how are they presented? For the first time in psychology, Maslow creates a hierarchical polymotivational theory, a “pyramid” of needs (a hierarchy from biological to transcendental). Indeed, man is too complex a creature to be driven by a single main motive, as the great Freud, Adler and even Frankl believed. But Maslow’s levels of motivation are nothing more than steps in the phenomenological method of self-knowledge, but presented as a well-done advertising project — a little simplistic, but memorable.
Or here are the meta-needs that are at the top of this hierarchy — the human needs for meaning and truth, beauty, justice … Before him, no one spoke about this in psychology. And although in its pure (philosophical) form the theory of internal values belongs to the German philosopher Max Scheler, we know about it thanks to Maslow, who recounted it. So it makes sense to read Motivation and Personality if you want to learn different aspects of existential philosophy from the hands of a talented promoter.