Abraham Maslow occupies a contested but persistent position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a resource and a target of critique. He enters the literature primarily as the architect of the needs hierarchy, the theorist of peak experiences, and the principal spokesman for humanistic psychology—a movement whose optimistic anthropology drew both serious engagement and sharp rebuke. Yalom recruits Maslow's distinction between deficiency-motivation and growth-motivation to illuminate modes of interpersonal relating and the structure of self-actualization, while also situating him among the founding figures—alongside May and Rogers—who eventually grew ambivalent about the anti-intellectual excesses of the movement they helped create. Hillman's critique is the most incisive: he credits Maslow with reintroducing pneuma into psychology through the peak-experience construct, yet faults him for confounding pneuma with psyche, spirit with soul. Campbell goes further still, arguing that Maslow's five values describe precisely the life of those seized by nothing sacred. Grof, by contrast, draws on Maslow's concepts of metamotivations and metavalues to frame transpersonal phenomena encountered in LSD research. The corpus thus treats Maslow as a generative but philosophically imprecise predecessor whose humanistic framework requires either refinement toward the transpersonal or correction toward the imaginal depths of soul.
Maslow's five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to.
Campbell inverts the Maslowian hierarchy, arguing that mythically inspired persons sacrifice all five of Maslow's values precisely because a genuine calling transcends the entire framework.
, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, 2004thesis
The language Maslow uses about the peak experience—'self-validating, self-justifying and carries its own intrinsic value with it'—the God-likeness and God-nearness, the absolutism and intensity, is a traditional way of describing spiritual experiences. Maslow deserves our gratitude for having reintroduced pneuma into psychology, even if his move has been compounded by the old confusion of pneuma with psyche.
Hillman grants Maslow credit for restoring pneumatic experience to psychological discourse while diagnosing the fatal conflation of spirit and soul that vitiates the peak-experience concept.
, Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline, 1975thesis
The model for the positive transcendence of our pathologies is called the 'peak experience.' 'Peak' evokes the work of Abraham Maslow, who fathered and still epitomizes the main attitudes of contemporary psychological humanism, whether in therapy groups, in church pulpits, or in the ways pri
Hillman identifies Maslow as the generative center of contemporary psychological humanism, whose peak-experience construct sets the normative standard against which archetypal psychology positions its alternative.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
The laws of their own inner nature, their potentialities and capacities, their talents, their latent resources, their creative impulses, their needs to know themselves and to become more and more integrated and unified, more and more aware of what they really are.
Yalom draws on Maslow's distinction between growth-motivated and deficiency-motivated persons to characterize how self-actualization reconstitutes interpersonal relations on a non-needy basis.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis
Eventually the three figures who supplied humanistic psychology with its initial intellectual leadership—May, Rogers, and Maslow—grew deeply ambivalent about these irrational trends and gradually decreased their active sponsorship.
Yalom situates Maslow as one of three founding authorities of humanistic psychology who collectively distanced themselves from the anti-intellectual popularization of their own movement.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting
In Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs, the satisfaction of materialistic motives frees a person to move on towards other, more transcendent motives. Maslow thought that the materialistic motivations that economists say are insatiable would virtually disappear in affluent societies.
Alexander invokes Maslow's hierarchy to refute the economic assumption of innate human insatiability, arguing that satiable needs, once met, orient persons toward transcendent rather than materialistic goals.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
Maslow also identified awe as a core moment in the process of change or as the spark to initiate transformation. These cases may occur when intense feelings of awe result in a need to accommodate many of one's mental structures or schemas.
Lench credits Maslow with identifying awe as a transformative catalyst that forces large-scale accommodation of existing cognitive and self-schemas.
, The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018supporting
Maslow (1970) believed that people pursue a hierarchy of needs, including physiological ones, safety, belongingness and love, esteem, and self-actualization.
Pargament situates Maslow's needs hierarchy within a broader comparative survey of motivational systems, using it to illustrate the plurality of objects human beings hold significant.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting
metamotivations and metavalues (A. Maslow) 38, 110 note, 125, 241
Grof's index entries confirm that Maslow's concepts of metamotivations and metavalues are substantively integrated into his theoretical framework for LSD psychotherapy and transpersonal experience.
, LSD Psychotherapy: The Healing Potential of Psychedelic Medicine, 1980supporting
metamotivations and metavalues (A. Maslow) 38, 110 note, 125, 241
The parallel index entry in Grof's second LSD volume corroborates the systematic role Maslowian metavalues play across his entire psychedelic research program.
, LSD Psychotherapy: Exploring the Frontiers of the Hidden Mind, 1980supporting
One explanation for this tendency can be found in Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of
Mathieu turns to Maslow's hierarchy to explain how recovering individuals develop unrealistic entitlement expectations once basic sobriety needs are met.
, Recovering Spirituality: Achieving Emotional Sobriety in Your Spiritual Practice, 2011supporting
Maslow, Abraham, 18, 20, 128; on isolation, 354; on need-free love, 368-70, 372, 407, 408; on self-actualization, 279-80, 438, 440
Yalom's index entries map the scope of Maslow's contribution to the text, covering need-free love, isolation, and self-actualization as distinct thematic nodes.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980aside
Abraham H. Maslow was one of the foremost spokesmen of the humanistic psychologies, an optimist, and a philosopher of science. In order to pursue the truth of things, to discover and develop a way of experiencing the highest levels of human awareness.
A promotional blurb presents Maslow as an exemplary humanistic spokesman committed to discovering the highest registers of human awareness, positioning his work alongside somatic and depth approaches.
, Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972aside
Maslow, A. H. (1964). Religions, values, and peak-experiences. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Maslow, A. H. (1968). Toward a psychology of being.
Bibliographic citations confirm Maslow's peak-experience and humanistic frameworks as standard reference points in the scientific study of self-transcendent experience.
, The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience, 2017aside