MASLOW'S REVOLUTION

MASLOW'S REVOLUTION

In initiating the most revolutionary paradigm shift in psychology in the twentieth century, Abraham Maslow wrote five books and more than a hundred articles. In fact two of his last books were essentially collections of his articles (Toward a Psychology of Being; Farther Reaches of Human Nature). In these he mostly was making intuitive leaps into the unknown as he continued pioneering a whole new way of thinking about human beings and human nature. But if you read his first book and his first articles, well, that's a very different story. It's a very different story in both of content and style.

First, content. In 1941 Maslow and Bela Mittelmann, a psychiatrist, co-authored a massive book under the title, Principles of Abnormal Psychology: The Dynamics of Psychic Illness. I say massive because it is a textbook of 600 pages of small print with dozens upon dozens of case studies. And unlike the books and articles that followed, this book was written with all of the rigor of two very careful scientists. And as a result, Principles of Abnormal Psychology established Maslow, and probably Mittelmann as well, as experts in the field of psychology.

Second, style. This past weekend at the NLP Conference in London, someone told me that he had read that Maslow was an "N" on the Myers-Brigg Personality Typing Instrument. He wanted to know my opinion. Now if he had asked me prior to reading that book (as well as his scholarly articles on chimpanezes, dominance, and sexuality) I would have said, "Yes, without question. But having read Principles I had to say, "No, I really doubt it."

One most immediate and powerful impressions I got as I read this 600-page book is its exhaustiveness. It covers everything you can imagine about abnormality! They covered about everything that a person could cover under the category of "abnormal"—genetic disorders, physiological and somatic disorders, alcoholism, war trauma, childhood disorders, errors in parenting, problems with school, peers, stuttering, bedwetting, criminality, personality disorders, and the list goes on and on. At the time Maslow was teaching abnormal psychology and perhaps this was his way to summarize his own learnings and to put them into a single source.

The book also covers a very wide range of psychotherapeutic processes for intervening. Even in 1941, Maslow and Mittelmann describe Adlerian, Gestalt, the body-therapies, psychodrama, group therapy, and many, many other techniques for bringing about healing. I was also surprisingly amazed at the breadth of reading and comprehension that is revealed in his book. And as I noted in the last Meta Reflection, the most revolutionary thing Maslow did was to describe abnormality in terms of the psychologically healthy person. That was new, it was different, and it was mapping out a whole new approach.

Yet something else impresses me about this first book of Maslow. Given that it is almost an encyclopedia about abnormality, I have a hallucination about it and what it did to him. My mind-read is that due to the exhaustive nature of the book, it served as a completion for him. I think it is as if Maslow reached closure on the subject of abnormality and that the book freed him so that he could move on to the next step in his own development. And that next step also happened to be the next development in the evolution of the field of psychology itself. And, of course, the next stop would be the psychologically healthy person.

It's kind of ironic, isn't it? Abnormality and his study of gathering together everything one could know about abnormality (in that day) using Psychoanalysis and Behaviorism (the first two forces in psychology) freed Maslow to pursue normality and then "the farther reaches of human nature." It freed him to create the new paradigm shift and to launch "the third force" in psychology— which he labeled in numerous ways as self-actualization psychology, humanistic psychology, positive psychology, and growth psychology.

In the new psychology, Maslow wrote about "normality." He described the different ways that term is used and then went on to not only talk about the "best specimens" of humans, but to model hundreds of people who were "self-actualizers." From that sampling, he then began describing a new "syndrome" (alias, pattern or model), namely, that of psychologically healthy people. Later he would say that these are not ordinary people who something added, but "ordinary people with nothing taken away." I like that.

Ordinary people, he would later say, are people whose natural powers, resources, and potentials have been inhibited and dampened. That's the problem. The dampening and inhibiting of our basic powers. Yet since every child has within him or her the natural drive and disposition to actualize his or her best, what primarily interferes with that is the way those potential powers are inhibited and dampened. And that's because our so-called "instincts" are so weak, so fragile, so easily disturbed and distorted.

What little "instinct" we have left is so easily overwhelmed by culture, by learning, by school, by family, etc. It doesn't stand a chance. All that's left of our "instinct" is a weak little inner voice. And because of this gap, we humans have the chance to replace programmed instincts with choice, with learning, with conscious decisions, and with any understanding or belief that we so design.

Which brings me back to abnormality. Maslow introduced one other revolutionary idea into the whole picture. He said that much, if not most, of abnormality, of neurosis is not human nature gone back, gone wrong, gone evil. It is rather human nature creatively searching for answers, for ideas, and for solutions in the wrong places and in the wrong way. A neurosis is an attempted solution for healing, an attempt that just didn't work. Yet within it is a positive intention.

In saying that neurosis is "a failure of personal growth," Maslow shifted the focus and put a new frame on things, didn't he? Neurosis is no longer some big mysterious entity, but simply an interruption of the growth/ development process. In another place, he referred to neurosis as the feeling of being cut off from one's own powers. And so the Bright-side Psychology revolution began.