Abraham Maslow — psych (hierarchy of needs) with roots in the Russian Empire
Abraham Harold Maslow was born on 1 April 1908 in Brooklyn, New York, though one reference work gives Manhattan, the eldest of seven children of Jewish immigrants from Kiev, then in the Russian Empire and now Kyiv, in Ukraine. His father, Samuel, had left Kiev at fourteen, penniless and without a word of English, spent a few years in Philadelphia and then settled in New York, where he married his cousin Rose and ran a barrel-making business. The family moved several times within Brooklyn as their circumstances improved.
Maslow went to Boys High School in Brooklyn, where his closest friend was his cousin Will Maslow. To please his parents he began studying law at the City College of New York, but after three semesters he moved to Cornell and then to the University of Wisconsin to study psychology. There he earned his bachelor's degree in 1930, his master's in 1931 and his doctorate in 1934, working with the primatologist Harry Harlow on the behaviour of monkeys.
Back in New York, at a time when anti-Jewish hiring practices kept him out of many universities, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at Teachers College, Columbia, under Edward Thorndike, and from 1937 taught at Brooklyn College, where he stayed until 1951. There he came to know Alfred Adler, Karen Horney and Erich Fromm, and above all the anthropologist Ruth Benedict and the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, whom he admired professionally and personally and whose example shaped his idea of the fully developed person. In 1943, in the paper A Theory of Human Motivation, he proposed his hierarchy of needs, from physiological needs and safety through love and esteem to what he called self-actualisation, an idea later popularly drawn as a pyramid.
In 1951 he moved to Brandeis University, where he chaired the psychology department and remained until 1969. His books Motivation and Personality (1954) and Toward a Psychology of Being (1962) made him a founding figure of humanistic psychology, and in 1968 he was elected president of the American Psychological Association. He died in Menlo Park, California, on 8 June 1970, aged sixty-two.
"Samuel and Rose Maslow emigrated from Kyiv to Brooklyn, New York, in the early 1900s."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kiev, Kiev Governorate (now Kyiv, Ukraine) (both parents)
Born in Brooklyn in 1908, the eldest of seven children of Jewish immigrants from Kiev, then in the Russian Empire. His father, Samuel, had left Kiev at fourteen, alone and without English.
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Kiev, Kiev Governorate (now Kyiv, Ukraine) (both parents). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.