The Social World of Self-Actualizing People: Reflections by Maslow’s Biographer

Do Self-Actualizing People Have Friends?

It is an undeniably stark question and while the short answer is an emphatic “yes,” it requires a nuanced, tripronged response. First, Maslow definitely extolled the warm pleasures of friendship among psychologically healthy persons. For example, he defined identification-love as “a kind of transcendence, e.g., for one’s child or beloved friend” (Maslow, 1971j, p. 262) and in an unpublished paper in 1964, he commented, “It is a privilege to love family members and friends, even though doing so inevitably means to suffer all their pain in addition to your own” (Maslow, 1996f, p. 22). Second, Maslow sharply differentiated what he regarded as true friendships, marked by authenticity and self-disclosure, from the shallow pseudofriendships he regarded as dominant in modern American society; the writings of Erich Fromm (1947, 1955), David Riesman (1950, 1954), and especially Karen Horney (1939, 1950) strongly influenced this viewpoint. Third, though Maslow saw self-actualizers as typically enjoying deep friendships, he considered such relations as only mildly necessary for the sustained emotional well-being of self-actualizers because their needs for belongingness and esteem had already been met. In this light, it would be inaccurate to state that Maslow asserted that self-actualizing people had transcended the need for friendship; rather, he believed that they required fewer interactions with friends for optimal functioning. I will highlight each point in turn.

First, Maslow certainly viewed self-actualizers as having close friends. His original two personal exemplars of self-actualization were Ruth Benedict and Max Wertheimer, and both delighted in their varied friendships. Indeed, A. I. Miller (1975) recounted that among Wertheimer’s friends was Albert Einstein (another of Maslow’s exemplars of self-actualization) as they shared interests in music, sailing, and physics; they played chamber music together and remained close until Wertheimer’s death in 1943. As reported by Luchins and Luchins (2009), Wertheimer and Einstein also shared a predilection for solving brainteasers, a mutuality to which the latter warmly alluded in a 1937 letter to Wertheimer. To what extent Wertheimer discussed with Maslow this friendship is historically unknown, but it seems likely that from the outset of Maslow’s conceptualization of self-actualization, he saw that self-actualizers not only had friends but cherished their companionship as well. By the late 1960s, humanistic psychologists including James Bugental (1965, 1967), Clark Moustakas (1966), and Sidney Jourard (1964, 1968) had developed considerable theory and research on healthy social relationships, and Maslow drew amply from it. In particular, he stressed the importance of both authenticity and self-disclosure as vital to trusting relationships. As expounded by Bugental and Moustakas, authenticity involves both the ability to identify and take responsibility for one’s experiences in life and the ability to act in ways consistent with these experiences (Compton & Hoffman, 2013). In concrete terms, this means the capacity to act according to one’s deepest values, rather than to those of others. Jourard emphasized the importance of self-disclosure (i.e., revealing one’s feelings and thoughts honestly and openly) in achieving satisfying interpersonal relationships. In view of Maslow’s outlook that authenticity and self-disclosure characterize healthy individual functioning, it seems reasonable to extrapolate that he regarded these two qualities, in addition to warmth and shared interests, as salient in the friendships of self-actualizers.

Second, Maslow was highly critical of the shallowness of most friendships in the United States. For example, he stated that, “The average American does not have a real friend in the world. Very few people have what a psychologist would call real friendships.” (Maslow, 1971g, p. 219). In this regard, he was strongly influenced by the writings of Fromm (1947, 1955), Riesman (1950, 1954), and especially Horney (1939, 1950) who condemned American social relationships as characteristically superficial, ephemeral, and self-aggrandizing. As an outgrowth of Fromm’s democratic socialistic viewpoint, he argued that many Americans held a market mentality in assessing the worth of their friendships; that is, were they useful financially or vocationally? Riesman railed against the shallow, upbeat glad-handedness which he saw as ubiquitous in the American workplace with its concomitant pressure to conform. Most significantly in affecting Maslow’s perspective, Horney argued that the social relationships of emotionally immature persons were driven by what she termed neurotic needs, such as for affection and approval, personal admiration, social status and prestige, and seeking to control others. Throughout Maslow’s writings, he cited Horney’s work in asserting that neurotic needs were absent in the social relations of psychologically healthy individuals. For example, in his list of “Motivations and Gratifications of Self-Actualizing People,” Maslow (1971a), reported that, “They avoid publicity, fame, glory, honors, popularity, or celebrity, or at least do not seek it. . . . They do not need to be loved by everyone” (p. 298).

Finally, Maslow’s writing has sometimes been attacked as stating; however implicitly, that self-actualizers have outgrown the need for friends. In view of the fact that he personally experienced warm friendships with Benedict and Wertheimer, and later with Aldous Huxley (all of whom were in midlife or beyond) such criticism appears unjustified. Rather, Maslow suggested that because self-actualizing people lacked Horney’s taxonomy of neurotic needs and had already satisfied their needs for esteem and belongingness, they were more autonomous, that is, less emotionally dependent on others. Maslow (1968), explicitly presented this notion:

The needs for safety, belongingness, love relations and for respect can be satisfied only by other people, i.e., only from outside the person. This means considerable dependence. . . . In contrast, the self-actualizing individual, by definition gratified in his basic needs, is far less dependent, far less beholden, far more autonomous and self-directed. . . . (p. 36)

Love hunger is a deficiency disease, like salt hunger or the avitaminoses. The healthy person, not having this deficiency, does not need to receive love except in steady, small, maintenance doses and he may even do without these for periods of time. (p. 42)

In short, Maslow regarded self-actualizers as typically enjoying close friendships, free from self-aggrandizing motivations for esteem or control. Contrastingly, he viewed most American friendships as highly superficial due to the presence of neurotic needs and the relative absence of authenticity and self-disclosure. Maslow did not assert that self-actualizing people have outgrown their need for friendship. However, it can be accurately construed from his writings that such persons might well prefer solitude to socially interacting with individuals dominated by needs for constant praise, reassurance, or control.

Do Self-Actualizing People Fall in Love?

For someone whose romantic experience was limited to a single partner in college whom he soon married, Maslow had a surprisingly strong, sustained interest in the topic. As early as Maslow (1953) in his book chapter “Love in healthy people,” he described romantic ardor among individuals at a high level of personality functioning, and the following year, in an unpublished essay titled “Acceptance of the Beloved in Being-Love” (Maslow, 1996a), he further developed this conceptualization. For the rest of Maslow’s life, he sought to refine his notion of what he called “Being-love,” often included amid his analyses on the wider subject of “Being-psychology” or related to “Being-cognition.” In essence, Maslow believed that because self-actualizers were free of neurotic needs (see description by Horney, 1950) for admiration, praise, or dominance, their love relations were more empathic and caring. Later, influenced by Jourard’s studies (1964, 1968), Maslow also asserted that psychologically healthy persons were more self-disclosing too: that is, comfortable with being “naked” with one’s beloved, emotionally as well as physically. Perhaps even more salient for Maslow, because self-actualizers had satisfied their esteem and respect, they were able to focus wholeheartedly on their loved one. Using contemporary terminology, we might say that are capable of showing greater mindfulness in their relationship. Maslow (1996a) stated as follows:

Certainly during moments of great love, we do not compare this person with another—either physically or mentally. Rather, we experience the lover as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. . . . To be fully aware . . . means to focus wholly on the experience: to concentrate utterly, to pour one’s whole self into it, and to be unaware of everything else in the entire world and in all of time. (p. 37)

In this same essay, Maslow (1996a) stated that in deep romantic love, psychologically healthy people are content to “respect, enjoy, appreciate, and end-experience the other in a passive, accepting, and yielding way rather than in a domineering, interfering, ‘seeking,’ or even improving way.” (p. 36). Beginning in the mid-1960s and influenced by Eastern thought, Maslow would describe this mindset as comprising “Taoist receptivity,” which he saw as paradigmatic among lovers gazing blissfully into each other’s eyes or mothers staring in wonderment at their newborn baby. In his view, the psychological state of “Being-love” entails seeing one’s romantic partner as not only wonderful and extraordinary but as essentially perfect. Though acknowledging that from the perspective of daily life such a mindset was certainly unrealistic, Maslow considered it absolutely necessary for romance to exist and thrive. For once one regards his or her partner solely from “Deficiency-love” consciousness, that is, as merely a flawed, ordinary human being, romance is gone. And then, as Maslow observed darkly, “It can get very ugly both for men and women, and can deprive them of all the great pleasures of life” (Maslow, 1970, p. 105).

It is fascinating to note than more than 45 years ago, Maslow’s emphasis on the importance of idealizing or sacrilizing (to use his term) one’s romantic partner foreshadowed recent psychological research on the role of positive illusions in love. For example, a longitudinal study of married couples found that newlyweds who most idealized their partner showed no decline in marital satisfaction after 3 years compared with other newlyweds, whose marital satisfaction declined sharply during this period (Murray et al., 2011). In a considerably longer term longitudinal study, investigators found that newlywed couples who idealized each other were more in love with each other than other newlyweds and also less likely to experience loss of love after 13 years of marriage. However, newlywed levels of idealization did not predict divorce (Miller, Niehuis, & Huston, 2006). Such studies support the satirical message of the musical comedy, I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, which first opened off-Broadway in 1997 and has been widely performed internationally. In short, idealizing or even sacrilizing one’s partner seems vital to maintaining passion. In this context, it is not surprising that the demand-withdraw pattern of marital communication (one spouse demands change from the other, who thereupon withdraws from the interaction) has been found highly toxic and associated with low marital satisfaction and spousal depression (Papp, Kouros, & Cummings, 2009).

Certainly relevant to the topic of romantic love for Maslow was human sexuality. In the mid-to-late 1930s, it was among his primary research interests, and earlier, his doctoral dissertation had examined the link between social and sexual behavior in chimpanzees. In an appendix to Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences titled “An Example of B-Analysis,” Maslow (1970) focused on erotic love between men and women. Extrapolating from the work of Eliade (1961), Jung (1933, 1963), and others, Maslow (1964) approvingly noted that technologically primitive cultures viewed sexuality as sacred and

the ceremony of puberty, which we make nothing of, is extremely important [to them]. When the girl menstruates for the first time and becomes a woman, it is . . . a great religious moment . . . not only of the girl herself but also for the whole tribe . . . so also for the boy’s puberty. (p. 113)

Observing that nonindustrial cultures “have kept their sense of the sacred about the basic biological things of life” (Maslow, 1970, p. 113), Maslow (1970) thereupon suggested that young American men and women be taught to revere their sexual anatomy, and their sexual relations, in this same way:

Any woman who is at all sensitive to the philosophical must occasionally be awed by the great storms of sexuality that she can arouse in her man, and also by her power to allay and quiet these storms. This can be seen as goddess-like power, and therefore may be used as one basis for her profound biological self-esteem as a woman. Something similar can be true for male self-esteem, to the extent that he is able to arouse and to calm sexual storms in his [beloved]. (pp. 115-116)

Did Maslow really believe that contemporary romance in the United States could be infused with what he called a sense of sacrilization? In his view, empirical research conducted by Kirkendall (1961) provided scientific support for the view that lovemaking was most satisfying when it involved strong emotional involvement with one’s partner. As a leading social researcher sympathetic to the work of Adler, Fromm, and Horney, Kirkendall conducted extended interviews with 200 primarily college-age men who had experienced sexual intercourse; their sexual partners included prostitutes and bar pickups as well as women whom they were casually dating, regularly dating, or engaged to marry. The closer the emotional bond, the more gratifying was intercourse; conversely, the emotionally emptier the relationship, the less gratifying was intercourse. Often when discussing romantic love, Maslow cited this book-length investigation as evidence that emotional intimacy is essential for sexual fulfillment, and can thereby ultimately serve as the basis for experiencing ecstatic transcendence. He also noted that, “There are many paths to heaven, and sex is one of them . . . among the most widespread” (Maslow, 1971b, p. 169).

Do Self-Actualizing People Marry, and Do They Experience Lasting Intimacy?

Maslow did not publish any material specifically on marriage among self-actualizers. However, in his seminal work on the 15 characteristics of such individuals, he titled one section “Interpersonal Relationships” and began by stating, “Self-actualizing people have deeper and more profound interpersonal relations than any other adults.” (Maslow, 1950, p. 15). It is also relevant to note that virtually all of the contemporary self-actualizers whom Maslow identified had been married. Some of these persons, such as Albert Einstein, had divorced and remarried, while others, including Ruth Benedict and Max Wertheimer, had remained single after divorce. Maslow did not explicitly mention the importance of marriage in fostering personality growth leading to self-actualization, but his view can be gleaned from this statement in an unpublished essay he probably wrote in the mid-to-late 1950s:

Monkish celibacy . . . provides an easy way to avoid the problems inherent in marriage and family life. To be sure, one definitely gains serenity by not having to assume any responsibility for other people. But such a life also means a “giving up” of the possibility for greater heights. In organized religion, celibacy seems essentially to be a safety device rather than a growth device, an avoidance of danger rather than an integration and mastery of it. (Maslow, 1996b, p. 34)

In other words, Maslow implicitly regarded marriage as a means by which people learn to overcome egoism, or to use his own terminology, to gratify their basic, legitimate needs for love and respect. Of course, Maslow did not believe that marriage automatically bestowed emotional maturity on spouses, for he estimated that only 1% of American adults (the vast majority of whom in the 1950s-1960s were married) could be defined as self-actualizing. Nevertheless, Maslow clearly believed that marriage was a necessary though not sufficient criterion for self-actualization because its alternative—namely, celibacy—precluded the varied and intense life experiences necessary for personality growth. Maslow’s harsh attitude toward celibacy as an evasion of personal responsibility and growth may have been influenced by his Jewish heritage, for in 2,000 years of rabbinic history, rabbis have never been expected to be celibates. Indeed, no major rabbinic thinker or community leader was ever unmarried (though some were divorced). In addition, the two most revered Jewish leaders in the Hebrew Bible were Abraham and Moses, and both men were married with several children. As the son of East European Jewish immigrants, Maslow seems to have had a “blind spot” concerning the growth motivation and potential of Christian priests and nuns, as well as of Eastern monks, who embraced celibacy as an aid to spiritual development. Probably, though, he would have conceded that if such individuals experienced through other means the type of intense mutual caregiving inherent in marriage, then self-actualization was possible.

Although Maslow did not say so explicitly, he regarded self-actualizing people as both feeling and expressing ample gratitude in marriage. This outlook flowed from his seminal studies on peak-experiences (Maslow, 1959, 1968), in which gratitude was a frequent concomitant of moments of great happiness and meaning. In an unpublished essay most likely written a year before death, Maslow (1996e) stated,

The quality of gratitude is important for emotional health. Both to prevent possible devaluing of daily life and to help retrigger peak-experiences, it is vital that people “count their blessings:” to appreciate what they possess without having to undergo its actual loss. (p. 78)

What does this mean concretely? In the same essay, Maslow recalled how he had spent a whole day serving as an unpaid chauffeur for his beloved Aunt Pearl before she died. He also suggested two mental activities to strengthen gratitude toward a loved one, which presumably included a spouse: (a) imagining that this person might or will die soon and (b) imagine oneself to be dying or facing imminent execution. In doing so, Maslow advised, picture yourself saying goodbye to this person. What would you say? What would you do? How would you feel? In the decades since Maslow wrote that essay, gratitude has become the focus of increased psychological research. In particular, there is mounting evidence that gratitude helps maintain and enhance social relationships, including friendships and romantic involvements (Emmons & Mishra, 2011). Research shows that spousal gratitude is associated with experiencing frequent small acts of kindness rather than bombastic but rare kindly acts (Algoe, Gable, & Maisel, 2010; Gordon et al., 2012), and intriguingly, also mediates financial distress in marriage (Barton, Futris, & Nielsen, 2015).

Perhaps even more important for Maslow than gratitude in keeping marriages strong was the quality of tenderness. By the mid-1960s, the divorce rate in the United States had begun to climb sharply despite the country’s unprecedented affluence. In seeking causes for this situation, Maslow drew on the work of the iconoclastic Scottish psychiatrist Ian Suttie, who had challenged Sigmund Freud’s view of the psyche. In Suttie’s view, Freud had overemphasized intrapsychic rather than interpersonal factors in delineating human life. Allied with other Scottish thinkers including psychoanalyst W.R.D. Fairburn and philosopher John MacMurray, Suttie was more interested in how persons relate to one another (Miller, 2008). Suttie died of illness shortly before his sole book The Origins of Love and Hate was published in 1935, and 30 years later, Maslow found its viewpoint compelling. In essence, Suttie insisted, contemporary European society’s great taboo was not about sexuality, but about tenderness. For example, Suttie (1935/1988) observed, “A man may take a condescending interest in children under the guise of amusing them, but how many men can exhibit a real tenderness for babies?” (p. 83). Suttie asserted that a large number of women and especially men suffered from what he called “love hunger” and “love starvation,” that is, a lack of receiving tender feelings in daily life.

In Maslow’s view, this situation had considerably worsened since Suttie’s seminal formulation, due to the rise of cynicism in American culture (what Maslow termed countervaluing), and had now infected contemporary marriage. In an unpublished 1965 lecture, he stated as follows:

If you are a man and you are not struck dumb by your woman once in a while, you’re missing something, you’re being blind to something which is there—and vice versa, of course. As a matter of fact, there is as much desacralizing of the male by our females as there is the other way around. It’s quite rare to find a wife adoring her husband. It just isn’t done. It’s permitted, I think, still for a husband to adore his wife: that is, to get really sloppy about it in a nice way. I don’t think it’s possible anymore for women to get sloppy about their husbands. I think that’s forbidden now. (Hoffman, 1999, p. 265)

Maslow’s ironic closing sentence may have alluded to the burst of feminism catalyzed by Betty Friedan’s bestseller, The Feminine Mystique, published 2 years earlier. Though he had provided Friedan with considerable assistance on the book, Maslow was disappointed by her downplaying of important nurturant activities traditionally with femininity, such as mothering and family caregiving; in any event, he regarded tenderness as a vital constituent of healthy marriages.

As a final comment on Maslow’s view of marriage in this context, I must emphasize that he never stated that its function was to serve the self-actualization of its spouses or that divorce was warranted when this process was stalled or absent. From the early 1970s with popular books like Open Marriage (O’Neill & O’Neill, 1972) to recent articles in peer-reviewed journals (Finkel, Hui, Carswell, & Larson, 2014), this misinterpretation unfortunately persists. Maslow would probably have also rejected the recent concept of the “Michelangelo phenomenon” (Gable & Gosnell, 2011; Rusbult, Finkel, & Kumashiro, 2009), at least in its extreme form, that marriages should be based on each spouse’s effort to promote the other’s growth. For one thing, Maslow viewed child rearing as an essential aspect of married life and as a mutual, and ideally synergic, activity between spouses. Because he viewed parenthood as a primary focus of marriage for most couples, he never endorsed the view that its raison d’être or foundation should be individual self-actualization. Thus, in an unpublished essay in 1964, he noted that, “Parents should . . . have the awareness that having cute children is a great privilege and a great good fortune and that it is possible not to have any children” (Maslow, 1996f, p. 25). How about childless or “empty nest” marriages? In advocating what he called “Taoistic receptivity” in family relationships, Maslow seems to have been most disposed to advise that spouses tenderly allow themselves to be authentic together and let personal growth take its own course rather than “pushed,” however, benevolently. Perhaps this lesson was learned the hard way, as his widow Bertha Maslow related that, after decades of marriage as a housewife, she finally insisted that he stop encouraging her to become an artist (Hoffman, 1999).

What Are Self-Actualizing People Like as Parents?

Maslow had relatively little professional interest in childhood and adolescence throughout his career, and addressed in a publication the topic of parenting only once: namely, “Adolescent and Juvenile Delinquency in Two Different Cultures,” which he coauthored with the Mexican psychiatrist Rogelio Diaz-Guerrero in 1960. Maslow also presented his views on child rearing in a brief unpublished paper, in 1957, focusing on children’s need for safety as the foundation for their personality growth, and ultimately, their self-actualization (Maslow, 1996f). Based on these two papers, and various comments scattered throughout Maslow’s published writings, it is possible to glean his conception of how self-actualizers actually function as parents. It is also important to note that he and his wife Bertha raised two daughters, and he lived to see the birth and toddlerhood of his granddaughter Jeannie. She was born just a few months after Maslow’s major heart attack in December 1967, and he took great delight in her presence. He also utilized his observations about Jeannie’s behavior as a springboard for expanding his ideas on playfulness, spontaneity, peak-experiences, and societal conditioning of individual personality.

It is certainly possible that Maslow’s fatherly experiences also catalyzed his theorizing, but he did not regularly keep a journal as a younger man, and so historical evidence is lacking. We do know that his daughter Ann’s birth in 1938, followed by Ellen’s in 1940, spurred him to break decisively with the behaviorist outlook in favor of Kurt Goldstein’s more biological, organismic conception. Maslow (1971b) reminisced that, “Becoming a father changed my whole life. It taught me as if by revelation. It made the behaviorism I has been so enthusiastic about look so foolish that I couldn’t stomach it anymore. It was impossible.” (p. 163). In observing that Ann and Ellen had shown markedly different personalities even while still in the womb, Maslow became increasingly convinced that a truly comprehensive theory of human nature must substantially include innate factors. Indeed, throughout Maslow’s subsequent writings on personality growth was an emphasis on biological aspects. For example, late in career, Maslow (1971f) explicitly stated the following:

To talk of self-actualization implies that there is a self to be actualized. A human being is not a tabula rosa, not a lump of clay or Plasticine. He is something which is already there, at least a “cartilaginous” structure of some kind. A human being is, at minimum, his temperament, his biochemical balances, and so on. There is a self, and what I have sometimes referred to as “listening to the impulse voices” means letting the self emerge. (p. 44)

Of course, the field of developmental psychology today has acquired considerably more scientific knowledge about temperament than existed at the time of Maslow’s death in 1970. In a review of research on this subject, Rothbart (2006) noted that many psychologists are aware of the nine dimensions of temperament identified by Thomas and Chess in their 1977 longitudinal study, which included activity level, mood, attention span, persistence, and distractibility, and that subsequent research has established a link between dimensions of temperament and the Big Five personality factors of Extroversion, Neuroticism, and Conscientiousness. More recently, an experimental study of musical preferences and cognitive abilities of 4-year-old children showed that temperament rather than home environment was significantly associated with both extroversion and musical preference (Flohr, Persellin, Miller, & Meeuwsen, 2011).

But how do self-actualizers as parents respond to the role of temperament? Maslow did not explicate this issue precisely in any specific body of writing. However, in a major paper on metamotivation, there is an important clue, for he provided a table listing the “Motivations and Gratifications of Self-Actualizing People” and among these was his comment that “Observations indicate great pleasure in their children and in helping them grow into good adults.” (Maslow, 1971a, p. 298). These two qualities, of course, are quite different from one another: A parent can impose a strong moral–ethical code on one’s child tepidly or even coldly, and another can revel in play with one’s son or daughter without ever instilling a sense of morality or ethics. Yet, Maslow was clearly intimating, these two qualities involving joyfulness and value-setting are not contradictory but unified among self-actualizers who raise children. In this context, it should be recalled that Maslow’s original two exemplars of self-actualizing people were his mentors Max Wertheimer and Ruth Benedict. Although Benedict was childless due to medical problems, Wertheimer was a doting, exuberant father of three young children (his first child died in infancy) who particularly impressed Maslow by frolicking with them on the floor at home. Recently, Max Wertheimer’s son Michael Wertheimer offered this detailed and historically important reminiscence:

First, my memory of him as a father was that he was, if anything, more like a grandfather than a father in his interactions with us children. He was 43 years old when he married my mother, and was 47 when I was born. But he was always loving, gentle, warm, supportive, and even very respectful of his children. One example of this is that whenever one of us would interrupt him during his days working at home, he almost always gave us some task to perform so that we too would be “working” like he was. And at the dinner table in the evenings, even when we were as young as five or six, we were always encouraged to join in the conversations and to express opinions—but then were also encouraged to defend those opinions, to give our reasons for having them.

As for skills, he encouraged many of them in many ways, including teaching us to play chess—and insisting that any “bad” moves be taken back and improved, so that the game itself would be as “good” as possible—with the result that my late older brother became the first board in the chess team at Columbia University when he was an undergraduate student there. As for music, we often spent evenings singing German and later American folk songs, with my father accompanying on the piano or my mother on the guitar, and he did encourage us to take piano and other music lessons.

Second, he did have some sayings, occasionally repeated, often somewhat humorous, providing advice about general life issues, such as doing anything one is doing as well as possible—if it is worth doing, it is worth doing as well as you can. (This included my producing with his encouragement a modest little monthly multipage typed newspaper, mostly about family events, for more than a year when I was 11 and 12 years old; at one point it had more than 30 subscribers!) Another saying, only partly tongue-in-cheek, was “cheer up, there is no hope.” But he was supportive of our achievements and efforts in many other ways, such as coming out one time onto a large lawn opposite our house where we were flying home-made balsa and tissue paper kites, taking the string, making the kite fly higher, and showing his admiration of how well we would made the kites and how well we were flying them. (Wertheimer, personal communication, 2017)

It can therefore be reasonably asserted that from Maslow’s perspective, self-actualizing people have a lot of fun with their children while concomitantly committed to teaching values for becoming (in his phrase) “a good person.”

Maslow viewed self-actualizers as highly sensitive to their child’s unique, individual makeup, encompassing physical, cognitive, and emotional characteristics. Such sensitivity comes from pure attentiveness (what today might be termed mindful parenting), and he saw no substitute for it. Thus, in his near-final essay, Toward a Humanistic Biology, Maslow (1971i) stated that,

The mother, fascinated with her baby, who examines every square inch of it again and again with the greatest absorption, is certainly going to know more about her baby in the most literal sense than someone who is not interested in that particular baby. (p. 16)

In this context, it is interesting to note how Maslow himself sought to maximize his attentiveness to his two daughters, utilizing a ploy suggested by his psychiatrist-friend David M. Levy’s play therapy innovations. From time to time, Maslow would ask Ann and Ellen to put on a puppet show, offering to pay them for their delightful entertainment. It was not until many years later that the girls recognized that he had been able to discern their underlying feelings through the self-revealing puppet stories they enacted (Hoffman, 1999).

Besides emphasizing that self-actualizers have a strong sensitivity to their child’s individuality shaped strongly by temperament, Maslow implicitly argued that they respected this uniqueness rather than sought to overhaul it. In a widely quoted formulation concerning education and creativity, he presented the metaphor of a boxing trainer who helps the young boxer become a “better version of himself” rather than attempt to imitate a boxing style alien to his particular physique and style of movement. Though Maslow never said so explicitly in the context of child rearing, he tacitly viewed self-actualizing parents as striving to help each child become a “better version of himself or herself.”

Maslow’s most pithy statement related to personality growth in children can be found in Goals and Implications of Humanistic Education, in which he asserted as follows:

A child cannot reach self-actualization until his needs for security, belongingness, dignity, love, respect, and esteem are all satisfied. In psychological terms, the child is free from anxiety because he feels himself to be love-worthy, and knows that he belongs in the world, that someone respects and wants him. (Maslow, 1971d, p. 183)

It is important to note Maslow’s emphasis on respect and also his use of the word “dignity” in specifying children’s emotional needs. Most psychologists today are well familiar with love and esteem building as crucial qualities of parenting, but those involving respect and particularly dignity have received much less attention. In this light, the salience of promoting children’s dignity has been addressed by several teams of researchers (Baumann & Bleisch, 2014; Reed, Smith, Fletcher, & Bradding, 2003).

Finally, it is crucial to note that Maslow not only regard playfulness as central to the parenting style of self-actualizers but also the ability to be stern when necessary. In his cross-cultural study with Diaz-Guerrero on family dynamics, Maslow was emphatic that American juvenile psychopathology such as gang warfare was directly attributable to psychologically absent:

adults, especially fathers, [who have] abdicated their ideal roles of structuring the world for the child, or providing him with a clear set of values, or “rights and wrongs.” . . . We postulate that juvenile violence, vandalism, cruelty, [and] defiance of authority . . . implies a hostile and contemptuous lashing-out against the weak adults who have failed them. (Maslow & Diaz-Guerrero, 1971, pp. 361-362)

Nearly a decade later, in Maslow’s “Theory Z” theoretical paper (Maslow, 1971h), he specifically identified the ability to be appropriately stern as a quality of self-actualizers. That is, one can deeply love one’s child, and even perceive its inherent sacredness, he insisted, and yet be able to carry out discipline decisively. “This punishment is quite compatible with godlike transfinite love,” Maslow asserted. He added:

From a transcendent point of view, it is easy to see that even for the good of the transgressor himself it may be better to punish him, frustrate him, to say “No,” rather than to gratify or please him now. (p. 280)

This viewpoint is highly consistent with that of Alfred Adler, another of Maslow’s key mentors, who regarded spoiling, or acquiescing to the child’s every demand, as one of the worst mistakes that parents can make (Adler, 1938/1998). Adler emphasized that chronic pampering produces a child who lacks the ability to defer gratification and to form healthy social relationships. Finally, it is important to note that Maslow (1996d) expressed this same idea in an unpublished essay, “Limits, Controls, and the Safety Needs in Children.” Citing the work of both Anna Freud and Kurt Goldstein, Maslow stated that children need clear, external limits to their behavior, and in the absence of parental limit setting, children become anxious and even frightened. In words that echoed Adler’s viewpoint, Maslow added that, “Overindulged children often feel contempt, scorn, and disgust for their weak parents. . . . Children need strong, firm, decisive, self-respecting, and autonomous parents—or else they become frightened.” (p. 46). He regarded self-actualizing persons as eminently capable of such responsibility.

Are Self-Actualizing People Involved in Service to Others?

Clearly, Maslow regarded self-actualizers as having close friends, familiar with romantic joy, and warmly involved in family life including parenting. Freed from the neurotic needs for flattery or controlling others, they expressed tenderness and emotionally intimacy without difficulty. However, in Maslow’s view, these admirable interpersonal qualities were secondary to a far more significant commonality: namely, an overriding commitment to helping humanity. It is crucial to note that from his first publication on self-actualization (Maslow, 1950) to his final pronouncements (Maslow, 1971f), he viewed this active benevolence as virtually a defining characteristic of such persons. Maslow’s (1971f) later representative statements include the following:

Self-actualizing people are, without a single exception, involved in a cause outside their own skin, in something outside of themselves. . . . One devotes his life to the law, another to justice, another to beauty or truth. (p. 42)

All such people are devoted to some task, call, vocation, beloved work (“outside themselves”) . . . generally the devotion and dedication is so marked that one can fairly use the old words vocation, calling, or mission to describe their passionate, selfless, and profound feeling for their “work.” (Maslow, 1971a, p. 291)

It is significant to note that Maslow drew on the spiritual tradition of Mahayana Buddhism rather than secular thought to best express his conception. In this respect, he was influenced by the writings of the Japanese Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki (1961), whom Maslow came to know personally. Arising within India in the early Common Era, Mahayana Buddhism evolved a complex metaphysics and especially a system of universal ethics which Maslow found immensely appealing. In particular, he seized on its teaching of the bodhisattva, the enlightened soul who renounces eternal bliss to voluntarily returns to earth in order to elevate all humanity. Specifically, Maslow (1970, p. xii) described the “bodhisattvic path” as “an integration of self-improvement and social zeal,” and highlighted five characteristics of the individual who follows this path:

A person who: a) would like to help others; b) who agrees he will be a better helper as he himself becomes more mature, healthy, more fully human; c) who knows when to be Taoistic and non-interfering; d) who offers his help or makes it available to be chosen or not chosen as the other person wishes; and e) who assumes that a good way to self-growth is via helping others. (Maslow, 1971e, p. 212)

In addition to Mahayana Buddhism, Maslow drew to a lesser extent from his ancestral tradition of Judaism, particularly Hasidism, in explicating his notion that all self-actualizing people, at least in the West, are committed to helping others as a primary characteristic. Thus, in an unpublished lecture in 1965, Maslow stated the following:

The best descriptive term I know is from the Jewish tradition involving the Hebrew language—a Tzaddik. . . . A Tzaddik is one who combines the best features of the saint and the politician, one who embodies both wisdom and pragmatism. (Maslow, 1996c)

Although Maslow generally identified the callings of self-actualizers as related to paid work, such as education, governmental service, law, medicine, or science, he was explicit that a calling was not necessarily work-related. In this context, he referred anonymously to his Aunt Pearl, who

devoted herself entirely to the task of being the mother, the wife, the housewife, and the clan matriarch. Her vocation, one could very reasonably call it, was to bring up her children, to make her husband happy, and to hold together a large number of relatives in a network of personal relations. . . . She loved her lot completely and totally, never yearning for anything else so far as I could tell, and using all her capacities well in the process. (Maslow, 1971a, pp. 291-292)

Nevertheless, it would be accurate to say that Maslow generally identified callings in vocational terms rather than in activities related to the domestic realm. Late in career, he seems to have conceded that some persons, at least in the Eastern world, could legitimately choose a contemplative way-of-life as their calling, but he questioned how many such privatistic individuals a healthy society could successfully integrate (Maslow, 1971b).

How did self-actualizers find their calling in life? What lessons can we learn from their ability to do so? Maslow was never precise in this regard, but in comparing it with the wondrous experience of falling in love with the right person, he implicitly saw such discovery as a trial-and-error process combined with a measure of luck or good fortune. For instance, in Maslow’s own life, he failed mathematics, struggled with philosophy, and later quit medical school before embracing psychology as his calling. On doing so, he sought out the greatest psychological thinkers of the time, such as Alfred Adler and Max Wertheimer, to be his mentors (Hoffman, 1999).

In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in the topic of callings, for these have been to have important consequences for individual success, resilience, and job satisfaction (Compton & Hoffman, 2013). Though investigators today acknowledge that individuals may view their work in a religious context, wide support exists for the secular definition proposed by Dik and Duffy (2009) that a calling is “an external summons to approach a life role in a manner oriented toward deriving a sense of purpose or meaningfulness” (p. 427). Research consensus is also emerging that a calling encompasses three key features: (a) An action orientation, that is, an emphasis on doing rather than passivity about work; (b) A sense of personal mission involving clarity of purpose and meaning; and, (c) A prosocial intention, that is, a desire to improve the world (Compton & Hoffman, 2013). Because this field remains in its infancy, still lacking are answers to such vital questions as follows: What role do books, movies, parents, teachers, friends, extended family members, travel experiences, and volunteer work exert in helping individuals find their calling? What about the role of luck or synchronicity? Must callings inevitably last a lifetime or can they be temporary? Even more fundamental, does everyone have a calling in life? Maslow was adamant that every baby in the world has the innate potential to be self-actualizing, so the answer is presumably “yes” based on his theorizing. What factors, then, block the discovery of one’s calling? One clue may relate to negative thinking, as Galles and Lenz (2013) found that college students who described greater negativity in career planning were less likely to report they had found their calling.

Conclusions

As I have sought to elucidate in this article, Maslow certainly did not view self-actualizing people as aloof loners or hermits. Quite the contrary; he repeatedly described self-actualizers as typically enjoying close friendships, familiar with romantic bliss, and deeply involved with family life including marriage and child rearing. Indeed, among the contemporary self-actualizers whom Maslow described was an unnamed woman whose talent lay in bringing a devoted, loving cohesion to her large, extended family. Also, essentially by definition at least for Westerners, Maslow regarded self-actualizing people as guided by highly benevolent motivation: that is, the desire to help others and make a better world. Heavily influenced in the late 1960s by the widespread campus interest in Buddhist spiritualty, Maslow explicitly called this outlook the “Bodhisattvic path.” He contended that based on his sampling results, such persons were often willing to accept lower income, fewer material benefits, and even adverse working conditions in order to fulfill their humanitarian calling. So how could critics, even in Maslow’s lifetime, accuse him of a hyperindividualistic view of self-actualization?

As a biographer as well as a psychologist, I believe it is impossible to divorce our theories (and even our specific research interests) from the surrounding zeitgeist: that is, the particular culture and historical era in which we live. Specifically, therefore, in explicating the qualities of self-actualizing people, Maslow in the early post–World War II period could not help but be influenced by the intellectual zeitgeist that associated social adjustment with the dangers of nationalistic fervor and concomitant militarism. Certainly, the United Nations Charter in 1945 derived from this internationalist outlook. Within the social science field, thinkers like psychoanalyst Erich Fromm and sociologist David Riesman argued that nationalism and authoritarianism stemmed from specific personality types (what they called “character types”), and in a seminal paper, Maslow (1951) explicitly followed their path.

Titled “Resistance to Acculturation,” Maslow’s paper partially drew on his work with self-actualizers to claim that maladjustment or nonconformity may not necessarily indicate emotional immaturity, but instead, superior psychological functioning. Quoting from his recent paper (Maslow, 1950), he offered more evidence that such persons tended to be critical minded rather than slavishly devoted to their culture’s prevailing norms. However, Maslow emphasized, they tended to adopt a cloak of conventionality in order to avoid needless, trivial conflict with others. For instance, he described a man who in his youth had been a union organizer under dangerous conditions. This fellow had given up in disgust and hopelessness but, becoming resigned to the slowness of change in America, turned finally to education of the young. In this same article, Maslow also offered the example of witnessing a man gracefully accept an award that he privately laughed at and even despised. In arguing that self-actualizing people are thus able to detach themselves from their culture or transcend it, Maslow also drew heavily on Riesman’s provocative essay, “The Saving Remnant: An Examination of Character Structure” (Riesman, 1950). For years to come, Riesman’s views on American culture would resonate with Maslow. During the mid-1950s, Maslow hoped to recruit Riesman for the interdisciplinary Values Institute that Maslow was seeking to establish at Brandeis University.

With a lucid writing style that would soon catapult Riesman to best-selling authorship (The Lonely Crowd) and the cover of Time Magazine, he argued in “The Saving Remnant” that contemporary Americans could be mainly characterized as either “inner-directed” or “other-directed.” Both were highly flawed in their character structure, insisted Riesman, who defined the former type as conforming to rigid, unexamined internalized mores “to be a good person,” and the latter type as driven by the conformist need to be liked by one’s neighbors and coworkers. The prevalence of these two character types posed a serious threat to the future of American democracy, Riesman warned. In his view, hope lay in the emergence of a third type of individual, whom he called “the rare autonomous character” (Riesman, 1950, p. 144). Riesman (1950) stated the following:

The people I speak of live under urbanized conditions in every land, but they are world citizens in thought and feeling. Sensitive to wide perspectives of time and space, they have largely transcended prejudices of race or time or class. Their guides are diverse, and they feel empathy and solidarity with their colleagues across all national boundaries. . . . The contemporary autonomous person has all the sensitivity to others of the other-directed type: he needs some interpersonal warmth, and close friends mean much to him; but he does not have an irrational craving for indiscriminate approval. (pp. 144-145)

Conceding that such individuals as yet had little power over the hands that held atom bombs, Riesman (1950) nevertheless asserted that,

Autonomous people can become a social force, indeed a “saving remnant.” By converting present helplessness into a condition of advance, they lay the groundwork for a new society. (p. 147)

If this formulation sounds unmistakably like that of Maslow, it is no coincidence. By arguing in the early post–World War II era that self-actualizing people were crucially more resistant to acculturation than their contemporaries, Maslow inadvertently fueled later criticism of his approach as both elitist and hyperindividualistic. In the aftermath of Nazism, the early post–World War II zeitgeist called for a vigorous intellectual repudiation of social adjustment as a signpost of mental health, and while Maslow in the late 1960s definitely took a more nuanced view, the notion of the self-actualizer as inherently anti-acculturation had already become embedded in his system of thought.

A second major reason for Maslow’s concept of self-actualization to be criticized as hyperindividualist undoubtedly relates to his influential writings on creativity. In Maslow’s first published work on self-actualizing people in 1950, he identified creativeness as among their most salient psychological qualities. In Maslow’s view, such persons tended to be highly creative as an outpouring of their very personality, not limited merely to aesthetic activities like painting or composing music. “In this sense,” he noted,

there can be creative shoemakers or carpenters or clerks. Whatever one does can be done with a certain attitude, a certain spirit which arises out of the nature of the person. . . . One can even see creatively, as the child does. (Hoffman, 1999, p. 173)

In other words, he regarded creativeness as essentially an intrapsychic characteristic of self-actualizing people; one’s family or workplace had minimal relevance.

Later, Maslow (1968) refined his view to suggest that creativity always encompasses two distinct processes: the primary, which he termed the Dionysian, and the secondary, which he called the Apollonian. He derived these terms from the mythological Greek gods of Dionysus and Apollo, both offspring of Zeus, and who signified wild emotionality and orderly rationality respectively. Maslow noted that Dionysian creativity involves spontaneity, inner release, and opening up to fantasy and imagination, whereas the Apollonian entails self-control, self-discipline, and hard work; though he did not say so explicitly, collaboration is also typically involved with it. Maslow (1968) explained that “this first phase . . . comes easily and without effort, as a spontaneous expression of an integrated person . . . [and] only if [one] is not afraid of his primary thought processes” (p. 143) In contrast, the second phase involves “essentially the consolidation and development of other people’s ideas. . . . It parallels the difference between the . . . pioneer and the settler” (p. 144) Maslow insisted that both phases are vital for anything to be actually produced, yet he strongly preferred researching the former to the latter. Indeed, in this same essay, Maslow conceded that he had studied “only primary creativity,” rather than the “secondary creativity” which he associated with the making of “automobiles, bridges, and houses.” Implicitly, Maslow was clearly suggesting that the requisites for the inspiration of primary creativity, namely solitude and deep intrapsychic exploration, are more important than the collaborative skills necessary for producing mass-consumer products and industrial structures.

But Maslow was capable of being quite explicit, too, in linking creativity to individuality rather than to teamwork or communal activity. In Toward a Humanistic Biology, written barely two years before his death, Maslow (1971i) stated that, “The pioneer, the creator, is generally a single, lonely person rather than a group” (p. 4). About a decade earlier, his essay Emotional Blocks to Creativity (Maslow, 1971c), had strongly endorsed the “lone wolf” conception of human creativity. This essay was based on a lecture he gave at Michigan State University in 1959, 2 years after the Soviet Union had alarmed many Americans by successfully launching the Sputnik satellite into orbit around the earth and thereby achieving first place in what journalists called the “Space Race.” In immediate response, the Eisenhower administration began recruiting diverse scientists and academicians to surpass its Cold War foe, and Maslow thus confided that “I’ve been amazed to be plucked at in the last couple of years by big industries of which I know nothing or organizations like the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers whose work I really don’t know at all” (p. 78).

In Emotional Blocks to Creativity, Maslow focused heavily on primary process creativity, its manifestations and its absence among uncreative people, including a former professor who exhibited obsessive–compulsive behaviors like saving all the newspapers he had ever read, bound by weeks. But more importantly for my viewpoint, Maslow argued in this influential essay that,

The problem of the management of creative personnel is both fantastically difficult and important . . . because what I am talking about is the lone wolf . . . [Such persons are] apt generally to work off in a corner or an attic by themselves.

In the final paragraph of this essay, Maslow (1971c) asserted, “The management of creative personnel becomes a new problem. . . . Customarily today such people are lone wolves” (p. 91).

Whether the most productively creative people are truly “lone wolves” as Maslow contended is a complex psychological issue that lies beyond the scope of this article. Perhaps the archetypal figure in this regard was Albert Einstein, whom Maslow greatly admired and identified as self-actualizing. Einstein, of course, had developed his revolutionary theory of relativity while working as an obscure young patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland. Fame and adulation came swiftly thereafter. Maslow and Einstein never met personally, but the latter often described himself as a lover of solitude who had never felt socially comfortable with others. Indeed, in words that could hardly be more emphatic, Einstein told a biographer, “I am a real ‘lone wolf’ who has never wholeheartedly belonged to the State, to my country, my circle of friends and not even to my family” (Neffe, 2007, p. 33). As a husband and father with close friends, many colleagues, and a trail of love affairs, Einstein was wont to exaggerate to interviewers his need for aloneness; historical evidence also exists that his first wife, Mileva Maric, assisted in his seminal work, though the extent to which she did so remains unclear (Brian, 2005).

Undeniably, though, Maslow promulgated the notion, based at least partially on Einstein’s public pronouncements about himself, that self-actualizing persons are basically “lone wolves” in their creative endeavors, with correspondingly strong needs for privacy and separateness from their colleagues and peers. In my view, these two aspects of Maslow’s conception of self-actualization, namely, resistance to acculturation and a “lone wolf” style of creative activity, have contributed significantly to the widespread misunderstanding that he regarded self-actualizers as hyperindividualists or even hermits. More productively, future theorists and researchers interested in maximizing human potential should recognize that Maslow viewed self-actualizing men and women as typically involved with the growth-enhancing social world of friendship, romantic love, marriage, child rearing, and societal service.