One of the most legendary ideas in a history of psychology is located in an unassuming triangle, divided into five sections, referred to universally simply as Maslow's Pyramid. Of needs this profoundly influential pyramid. First saw the world in an academic journal in the United States in 1943, where it was crudely drawn in black and white, and surrounded by dense and jargon rich text.

It has since become a mainstay of psychological analyses, business presentations, and TED talks, and grown ever more colorful and emphatic in the process. The pyramid was the work of a 35 year old Jewish psychologist of Russian origins called Abraham Maslow, who'd been looking since the start of his professional career, for nothing less than the meaning of life.

No longer part of the close knit Orthodox family of his youth. Maslow wanted to find out what could make life purposeful for people himself included in modern day America, a country where the pursuit of money and fame seemed to have eclipsed any more interior or authentic aspirations. He saw psychology as the discipline that would enable him to answer the yearnings and questions that people had once taken to.

He suddenly saw that human beings could be said to have essentially five different kinds of need. On the one hand, the psychological or what one could term without any mysticism being meant by the word, the spiritual, and on the other, the material. For Maslow, we all start with a set of utterly non-negotiable and basic physiological needs for food, water, warmth, and.

In addition, we have urgent safety needs for bodily security and protection from attack, but then we start to enter the spiritual domain. We need belongingness and love. We need friends and lovers. We need esteem and respect. And lastly, and most grandly, we are driven by what Maslow called in and now legendary term, an urge for self-actualization, a vast touchingly nebulous, and yet hugely apt concept involving what Maslow described as living according to one's full potential and becoming who we really.

Part of the reason why the description of these needs laid out in Pyramid Form has proved so persuasive is their capacity to capture a profound structural truth about human existence. Maslow was putting his finger with unusual deafness and precision on a set of answers to very large questions that tend to confuse and perplex us viciously, particularly when we.

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