(Ephesians 1:15-23; Hebrews 2:5-10)
How many of you recognize the name of Abraham Maslow? For those who don’t, he was an American psychologist of the last century who was one of the founders of the discipline of humanistic psychology. If you know his name, though, the first thing that comes to your mind probably isn’t “humanistic psychology,” it’s this:
Recently, Maslow’s hierarchy has been on my mind quite a bit. For one thing, Sara is working her way through the online coursework for the Transition to Teaching program, and has discovered that the folks who developed the program are true believers in Maslow’s hierarchy who present it uncritically as the truth about human nature. That’s the sort of presentation calculated to raise her hackles, so she’s been mounting a counterattack in the privacy of our home.
As it happens, she’s had a fair bit of material to hand for the purpose, beginning with the thing that first drew my attention back to Maslow—a remarkably efficient takedown of his hierarchy published a few months ago in Christianity Today. Once Sara started me looking, I quickly discovered an avalanche of arguments against his work; one piece in Forbes declared, “Simple, orderly, intuitively sensible, cognitively appealing and offering order out of chaos, the hierarchy of needs has only one problem: it is plain, flat, dead wrong.”