Sublime

In a paper entitled ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’ published in Psychological Review in 1943, Maslow arranged our longings and appetites in a pyramid-shaped continuum, ranging from what he called the lower needs, largely focused on the body, to the higher needs, largely focused on the psyche and encompassing such elements as the need for status, re

In 1943, the psychologist Abraham Maslow published his hugely influential paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” which famously described people as having a hierarchy of needs. It is often depicted as a pyramid. At the bottom are our basic needs—the essentials of physiological survival (such as food, water, and air) and of safety (such as law, order

Maslow is best known for defining the “hierarchy of needs,” which describes how human desires evolve as more primary needs are met.

Maslow maintained that human motivation had deeper causes and a loftier purpose. Our highest need—indeed, what makes us human—was what he called self-actualization, the yearning to engage our talents and realize our potential.

When Abraham Maslow did clinical studies of people who self-actualized, one thing that set them apart from others was, he wrote, that they lived “more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs, and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world.”

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs — “Maslow used the terms ‘physiological’, ‘safety’, ‘belongingness’ and ‘love’, ‘esteem’, ‘self-actualization’, and ‘self-transcendence’ to describe the pattern that human motivations generally move through… [though there is] little evidence for the ranking of needs that Maslow described or for the existence of a definit