1908–1970

AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST, AUTHOR

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, PhD, 1934

Brief Overview

Abraham Maslow is one of the founding fathers of humanistic psychology, an approach to understanding behavior that developed in the middle part of the twentieth century. The humanistic approach is sometimes referred to as the "third force" in psychology, because it developed after both the psychoanalytic and behaviorist approaches were well established.

Maslow was an academic who spent most of his professional career teaching, conducting research, and developing his theories of behavior. Although he wrote an important text on abnormal psychology and provided informal counseling to some of his students, he never thought of himself as a psychotherapist, unlike many of the other contributors to the field of personality. He was much more focused on understanding healthy behavior than he was on treating mental disorders.

Maslow's theory centers on the role of motivation in personality...