Psychologist Abraham Maslow was born and raised in Brooklyn, the first of seven children. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and uneducated ones at that.

Maslow was a smart boy during his childhood but very shy and introverted. As he grew up in a non-Jewish neighborhood he had few friends and experienced all the persecution inherent with being a social minority at the time. He spent most of his days reading and visiting libraries, where his mental skills grew by leaps and bounds.

When he was old enough Maslow attended City College of New York. Despite his father’s wishes that he go into law, however, Maslow went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin for psychology instead. Here he met his eventual mentor, Harry Harlow, a professor in psychology. While he was there, too, he married his cousin, Bertha.

While at Wisconsin Maslow delved into primate dominance and sexuality, a relatively untouched field of research, and continued with this line of research when he moved to Columbia University. By 1937 he was among the faculty at Brooklyn College. While at the college he met anthropologist Ruth Benedict and psychologist Max Wertheimer, both of whom he idolized and studied for their behavior. Using them as a kind of basis he began thinking about human mental patterns and potential, thus setting the standard for the rest of his life’s research. He spent the rest of his tenure at Brooklyn College (until 1951) writing on and studying human behavior, taking the research of others and expanding on what they’d found.

By the 1950’s and 60’s Maslow found himself the leader of a new school of thought in psychology that he called the “third force” that moved beyond Freudian theory and behaviorism. His ideas involved arranging human needs like a ladder: the more basic necessities (food, air, water, that sort of thing) sat at the bottom, and wants and desires (love, wealth, fame) all sat at the top. Individuals would have to climb the ladder, so to speak, overcoming all the lower needs in turn before they could ascend to the top and get the things they really wanted out of life. This became known as ‘Maslow’s hierarchy of needs’, and those at the top – those with a number of peak experiences in their lives – were considered ‘self-actualized’.

After his time with Brooklyn College Maslow served as the top wrung on the ladder of the psychology department at Brandeis, a position he maintained from 1951 to 1969. Unfortunately in these later years Maslow was the victim of increasingly ill health, and after several years of semi-retirement spent in California Maslow died of a heart attack on June 8, 1970. He was 70 years old.