History of
Psychology
Copyright 2001 by the Educational Publishing Foundation
2001, Vol.
4, No. I, 79‑91
1093‑4510/0165.00 DOl: 10.1037//1093‑4510.4.1.79
"GIVING UP MALENESS":
Abraham Maslow,
Masculinity, and the Boundaries of
Psychology
Psychology's
boundaries consist of a network of methods, categories, and institutional
practices. Strategically important, these markers distinguish the field from
common sense and popular psychology. Although psychologists have attempted to
define themselves in terms of natural science, gender considerations have also
been woven into the fabric of the field. This article examines psychology's
gender identity through a consideration of the career of Abraham Maslow.
Trained as an experimentalist, Maslow is widely known for his attempt to expand
the discipline's boundaries into humanistic domains. He was convinced that
psychology had become too masculine for its own good, yet he struggled to find
a way to "soften" psychology without completely undermining its "rigorous"
foundation. His work highlights the connection between masculinity and science
and the difficulty of redrawing psychology's boundaries without undermining its
credibility.
In recent years,
historians of psychology have become increasingly sensitive to the ways in
which the discipline has been shaped by competition from rival forms of
psychological know‑how. Like all academic disciplines, psychology has made a
series of claims to a particular domain of expertise and, like other fields,
its claims have not gone uncontested. Common sense, popular psychology,
spiritualism, and other academic fields have encroached on the discipline's
claims and threatened its professional authority, financial support, and
institutional recognition (Coon, 1992; Gieryn, 1983; Morawski & Hornstein,
1991). The field has responded to these threats by constructing an intellectual
and professional boundary using the methods and language of natural science
(Bumham, 1987; Romanyshyn, 1971; Toulmin & Leary, 1985). In so doing, psychologists
have endeavored to position themselves as objective observers of psychological
nature while portraying their rivals as self‑interested amateurs mired in
custom and mysticism.
Although not entirely unsuccessful, the use of the
idiom of natural science as a boundary has created difficulties for a
discipline committed to examining the psychological complexities of human
nature (Ash, 1992). The pursuit of scientific objectivity has often been done
at the expense of human interest, and in the past the field has sacrificed a
great deal of cultural ground to psychoanalysis, popular
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Ian A. M. Nicholson is an assistant professor of psychology at St. Thomas University and a graduate of the History and Theory of Psychology Program at York University. A recipient of the American Psychological Association Division 26 early career award, his forthcoming book is entitled Inventing Personality: Gordon Allport and the Science of Selfhood.
I gratefully acknowledge the help of Suzanne Prior, David
Baker, and the staff at the Archives of the History of American Psychology at
the University of Akron
psychology, and other
discursively grounded systems (Hornstein, 1992). Psychologists have not been
unmindful of these shortcomings and at various points in the discipline's past
attempts have been made to construct defensible boundaries for psychology while
simultaneously speaking to the diversity and complexity of human experience. In
this article I examine one of the more interesting and historically significant
attempts to reconstruct the boundaries of psychology: Abraham Maslow's
humanistic psychology. Maslow is widely known as one of the founders of
humanistic psychology, and he had an abiding interest in broad, overarching
questions concerning the discipline's scope and method. Beginning in the late
1940s, and continuing throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he devoted himself to the
task of moving the discipline's boundaries, thereby creating a "larger
jurisdiction for psychology" (Maslow, 1962/1968, P. xv). This was as much
a metaphysical ambition as it was a bureaucratic project. Psychology's
"larger jurisdiction" was to be a zone where conventional
distinctions no longer applied: science, religion, psychology, and
pseudo-science would all melt into one persuasive and empowering idiom that
could take humanity to a higher plane of experience. Implicit in this project
was the idea that the problematic elements of the boundary question could be
resolved: One could develop a discourse that was popular and scholarly,
personal and rigorous, spiritually uplifting and scientifically grounded.
Maslow devoted himself to the challenge of bringing about
this synthesis in a series of books and articles on humanistic psychology
published throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. In his mind, the principal
challenge facing psychologists who wanted new borders was disciplinary; one
needed to convince reluctant behaviorists in particular of the benefits of
methodological and conceptual diversity. This was indeed a concern; however,
the question of psychology's borders was also implicated in a issue that
extended well beyond theoretical particularities: gender. In this article I
argue that Maslow' s attempt to broaden what it meant to be a psychologist was
intimately connected to the question of what it meant to be a man. Like many of
his contemporaries (Furumoto, 1998), he had been reared on the language of "muscular
science" and, for all of his humanitarian leanings, he was convinced that
there were an essential masculinity and femininity. Believing that science had
become too masculine for its own good, Maslow struggled to find a way to
"soften" scientific psychology without completely undermining what he
believed was its essentially male nature. His experience illustrates a powerful
and largely unacknowledged undercurrent in the history of humanistic psychology
while simultaneously revealing the extent to which gender has been woven into
the discipline's boundaries.
"An Intrapersonal Problem"
Maslow experienced the challenges of boundary work in
psychology in a very vivid and personal way. In his journal he described the
task of reconstituting psychology as an "intrapersonal problem" of
bringing together "the artist in me & the scientist" (Maslow,
1979, p. 390). Cliched though it may sound, this was a genuine concern for
Maslow, for he brought a complex personal and intellectual background to the
question of psychology's future. Born in New York in 1908, Maslow's youth was
scarred by deep feelings of personal inadequacy. Although
he was relatively confident intellectually, his sense
of inferiority was grounded in what his family regarded as his physical
deficiencies. His mother and father often commented on his large nose,
"skinny" physique, and "ugly" appearance (Maslow, 1925, p.
39). By the time he was 17, Maslow was convinced that he had "never seen
anyone yet who is so ugly or unhandsome" as he (Maslow, 1925, p. 39).
The anguish Maslow felt over his body was a
reflection of the prevailing standards of American manhood. The Industrial
Revolution had transformed the ideal of manliness from an emphasis on character
and emotional control to a focus on "passionate manhood": the
unrestrained expression of primitive instincts, athletic competition, and
militarism (Bederman, 1995; Rotundo, 1993). Within this new discourse of
maleness, physical size and strength became important markers of masculinity.
Young men were encouraged to take up bodybuilding, gymnastics, cycling, and
others forms of strenuous activity to cultivate their manhood.
Maslow was among those American boys whose maleness
was assuming increasingly physical forms. As a youth, his mind was stirred by
dreams of physical prowess. He envisioned himself "beating up whole herds
of gangsters and toughs, of performing feats of strength, [and] of having the
body of an Adonis or Hercules" (Maslow, 1932). In his spare time, he took
up athletics and weight lifting in the hope of becoming a "big‑muscle
boy." Unfortunately for Maslow, no amount of physical exertion could
transform his modest frame and shy, bookish demeanor into an aggressive,
hulking mass. His best efforts brought him only frustration and ridicule, but
try as he might he could not shake the idea that true manhood was grounded in
an animalistic physicality. In graduate school, he remarked that his "wish‑fulfilment
dreams and fantasies are not so much sexual or intellectual as physical"
(Maslow, 1932).
Graduate school in psychology gave Maslow an
opportunity to bring an intellectual focus onto personally relevant questions
concerning masculinity, instincts, dominance, and sexuality. He studied
experimental psychology with Harry Harlow at the University of Wisconsin, and
he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the relation between sexual conduct and
dominance hierarchies in monkeys. A hard-working and original student, Maslow
was highly regarded by Harlow, who later described him as a "fine monkey
man" (Harlow, 1972).
Although Maslow spent more than 5 years studying
primate behavior, he was never completely enamored with the structure and ethos
of laboratory psychology. As a young graduate student he commented critically
on the publish‑or‑perish mentality that pervaded the laboratory and the kind of
atheoretical anti‑intellectualism that this ethos breeds:
I find in this department
[Wisconsin] a definitely expressed antagonism toward my interest in theoretical
problems .... The emphasis here is all on getting ahead. Getting ahead is
synonymous with doing one piffling experiment after another and publishing as a
result one piffling paper after another .... Two articles are good, four are
twice as good. It's all mathematical apparently. There is a direct relationship
between number of articles published and your "goodness" as a
psychologist. (Maslow, 1932)
The biting tone of this passage spilled over into
Maslow's assessment of the
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scholarly substance of psychology. As a graduate
student, he was convinced that the discipline had become hostage to a scientistic sensibility that put
loyalty to method ahead of intellectual creativity. Subsequent exposure to Adlerian psychology and cultural
anthropology further entrenched this idea, and by the early 1950s the
intellectual poverty of psychology had become a cornerstone of Maslovian
thought. In his famous 1954 book Motivation and Personality, he remarked that "the science [of psychology] as
a whole too often pursues limited or trivial goals with limited methods and
techniques under the guidance of limited vocabulary and concepts" (Maslow,
1954, p. 354). It was the frustration with these limitations that inspired
Maslow in his efforts to establish a new humanistic psychology.
Maslow' s theoretical and institutional efforts to
establish humanistic psychology have been well documented (DeCarvalho, 1991; E.
Hoffman, 1988). What has received comparatively little attention is the gender
character of his expansionist project. To appreciate the significance of gender
in Maslow's psychology it is important to consider his early training as an
animal researcher. In graduate school he had become fascinated by the notion of
dominance and how this related to sexual behavior. Although Maslow's research
interests changed as his career unfolded, his ideas about power, sexuality, and
knowledge remained embedded in the culturally weighted interpretations he
developed in the 1930s. Particularly problematic was Maslow' s tendency to view
different types of knowledge in highly sexualized, gender‑specific terms. Like
many of his contemporaries, he conjoined intellectual ability with male
sexuality; in his mind the imagery of male sexual potency blended
unproblematically with ideas of scholarly power. Complaining about psychology
as a graduate student, for example, Maslow described mainstream researchers as
a "bunch of intellectual castrates, timid and womanish" (italics
added), and he swore not to compromise his own scholarly masculinity. "But
God dammit," he wrote, "I'll keep my own intellectual virility if it
kills me. To hell with their jobs" (Maslow, 1932).
The conjunction of male sexuality and intellectual
ability emerged alongside an equally problematic, and depressingly predictable,
female counterpart. Maslow's work with primates was particularly important in
this regard. As a primatologist, he grew accustomed to moving back and forth
between the world of primates and the world of humans. Like the famous primate
psychologist Robert Yerkes of Yale (see Haraway, 1991), Maslow was convinced
that primates were an ideal mirror for scrutinizing morally complicated aspects
of human experience. "I always felt about the monkeys and apes," he
remarked, "as if I were seeing the roots of human nature laid bare"
(Maslow, 1979, p. 331). Although Maslow fancied himself a part‑time
anthropologist and made frequent references to the importance of culture in his
published research (Maslow, 1937), he believed that the sexual scripts of
monkeys were essentially the same as those of humans. After moving to New York
City in 1935 to take up a postdoctoral fellowship, he had an opportunity to
examine this idea in detail.
Working under the nominal direction of Edward L.
Thorndike, Maslow undertook a study of the demeanor and sexual behavior of
female students at Barnard College. He was convinced that his training as a
primatologist made him
eminently suitable for this type of investigation.
Simian subjects could be unco-operative and would occasionally "bare their
teeth, snarl or run away" ("Barnard Girls," 1936). Schooled in
reading sexuality and dominance in the face of such difficulties, Maslow
believed that his observations would be even more discerning given the
opportunity to study a group of well‑mannered young women. Speaking at a
meeting of the Psychology Society of the College of the City of New York, he
remarked that "Barnard girls, though complicated by culture, were easier
to investigate than the rhesus monkeys" ("Barnard Girls," 1936).
Maslow may have found "girls more
tractable" than monkeys; however, his new human research did pose one
obvious problem to his primatologist sensibilities ("Barnard Girls,"
1936): The caged environment of the monkey population had given him an
unobstructed view of primate sexuality; now that he was working with female
undergraduates this level of visual penetration would obviously not be
possible. Undeterred, Maslow endeavored to approximate the panoptical gaze he
had achieved with his monkeys and bring it into focus on the sex lives of his
female subjects. He devised an "intensive interview" consisting of a
series of questions designed to reveal the most intimate aspects of female
sexuality (Maslow, 1939, p. 5): "What are your physical preferences during
lovemaking? How often do you masturbate? What particular fantasies do you
experience while masturbating?" (cited in E. Hoffman, 1988, p. 78).
Fascinated by the link between sexuality and dominance, Maslow also quizzed his
subjects about their thoughts of and behavior toward others: "Do you ever
feel smarter than the man you date? Do you feel superior to most women you
know?" He conducted this "conversational probing" himself, and
he later admitted that there was a strong element of prurient interest in the
sexual confessional he had constructed (Maslow, 1939, p. 5): "I was still
sort of young, and got a thrill of excitement interviewing the women"
(cited in E. Hoffman, 1988, p. 77).
Vicarious thrills notwithstanding, Maslow believed
the results of his study of female sexuality confirmed the psychological link
between primates and humans. "In general," he remarked in a 1942
article, "it is fair to say that human sexuality is almost exactly like
primate sexuality with the exception that cultural pressures added to the
picture, drive a good deal of sexual behavior underground into fantasies,
dreams, and unexpressed wishes" (Maslow, 1942, p. 291). Thus, for Maslow
human gender norms were largely a matter of nature, and any behavioral
incongruity one might perceive could be explained by referring to a mysterious
psychic "underground" where natural processes and desires played
themselves out. Maslow's commitment to this idea is clearly evident in his
explanation of the seemingly unnatural phenomenon of the socially dominant
woman:
Perhaps the best way to describe the situation is to
say that in these few women, they strive incessantly to dominate all with whom
they come in contact and tend to be sadistic in their dominance in so far as
they are allowed by cultural formulations. They do seem to get a sexual thrill
of a certain kind from this behavior. But when a man comes along who cannot be
dominated, who proves himself stronger, then these women tend to become
definitely masochistic, and to glory in being dominated. Apparently the sexual
pleasure so derived is strongly preferred over the other kind of thrill derived
from dominating. (Maslow, 1942, p. 289)
Note the socially dominant
woman in Maslow's account is still essentially submissive. All that is needed
is a sufficiently dominant male to draw out her repressed "natural"
desire to be dominated. Maslow retained this primate‑derived essentialist
vision of men and women long after he had abandoned laboratory research.
Indeed, the further he moved from primate research the more convinced he became
of its utility for understanding human nature. His unpublished writings from
the 1950s and 1960s are replete with simian analogies of human experience. For
example, in 1962 he repeated that men and women respond to biologically encoded
cues signaling dominance and submission:
It is his strength (ability
to give up her love) that will trigger off her surrender reflex (eroticizing her
submission‑ fear‑awe‑admiration, her child‑before‑the‑father reflex) so that
then she feels inclined to offer him what he deserves and to be thrilled by the
thought that this noble lord should want her & that she should be this
powerful, with the woman's power of being…sexually delectable & thrilling
enough to make him lose his controls & to go wild in sex. (Maslow, 1979, p.
252)
The tendency to read
personality characteristics such as dominance and intellect in heavily
gendered, naturalized terms placed severe constraints on Maslow as he attempted
to transcend long‑established distinctions in psychology between subjectivity
and objectivity, science and religion, and psychology and everyday life. His
entire critique was built around the idea that these distinctions had been
amplified beyond the point of usefulness; they had become rigid parodies of
their original forms, and they were standing in the way of self-actualization.
But because of his investment in gendered categories of knowledge Maslow had
difficulty marshalling his criticisms in a consistent fashion.
The dilemma that gender,
especially notions of masculinity, posed for Maslow' s humanistic project is
apparent throughout his journals. He continued to equate intellectual ability
with a highly energized and self‑possessed male sexuality, and he interpreted
an absence of virility as a sign of intellectual stagnation that should be
acted on by those possessing an expansive sexuality. At times Maslow turned this
intellect‑virility conjunction against experimental psychology, just as he had
done as a graduate student. He suggested that part of the problem in mainstream
psychology was that the field had been taken over by those who were anal
retentive and sexually ill at ease: "Again I'm convinced that the basic
job‑or certainly a basic job‑in [humanistic psychology is to redefine science
and take it back from the tight‑asses" (Maslow, 1979, p. 272). Despite
frequent admonitions to this effect, Maslow had difficulty transcending the
logic of the rigid dichotomies he had constructed as a primatologist. He was
convinced that topics and methods of mainstream psychologists were the purview
of sexually inhibited "tight‑asses"; however, his proposal to take
psychology into the traditionally female domains of sensitivity, love, and
religion also represented a challenge to the conjunction of masculinity and
intellect that he revered.
Maslow indirectly
acknowledged this contradiction, and he struggled to broaden the concept of
science while simultaneously preserving its association with male virility. In
his book The Psychology of Science (1966), he tried to accomplish this goal by
reworking the meaning of masculinity. In a chapter
Page 85
entitled "Safety Science
and Growth Science," Maslow acknowledged the symmetry between "the
boy's conception of what a man should be" and the attributes of the "
'normal' scientist" (p. 35). The scientist, like the boy:
enjoys striking fear into the hearts of all the little girls‑and the big girls, too. He taboos his tenderness, his loving impulses, his compassion, his sympathy .... He wants to join the company of men .... He sees men as being tough, fearless, impervious to discomfort and pain, independent of emotional ties, quick to anger and frightening in their anger .... [Men are] earthshakers, doers, builders, masters of the real world .... All this he tries to be. (p. 36)
This construction was
prevalent, Maslow reasoned, but it was pathologically "defensive,"
"immature," and in need of reworking (p. 35). However, although
Maslow was able to acknowledge the exaggerated, pathological character of the
masculine‑scientist ideal, he was unable to completely escape its gravity. For
example, at one point he problematized the very notion of masculine and
feminine personality characteristics, suggesting that the scientists should
think of themselves as "humans" rather than as "men." The
"actually mature man," he argued, "is not threatened by what the
adolescent would call 'femininity' but what he would prefer to call
humanness" (p. 37). However, in the very same paragraph Maslow subverted
his own appeal for gender neutrality in science by inviting his readers to
think of the scientist in terms of an archetypal male image: the bullfighter.
"A certain bull‑fighter, is reputed to have said, 'Sir, anything I do is
masculine' " (p. 38). With this image, Maslow reaffirmed the essentially
masculine character of science. The research process was still a fundamentally
male domain; it just wasn't quite so strident and self‑conscious.
Maslow clearly believed that
humanistic psychology was compatible with a certain kind of masculine science.
However, his own experience reveals a profound incongruity between the
ambitions of humanistic psychology and the values of masculine science he had
learned while studying primate dominance hierarchies. The discordance between
these two frameworks is particularly apparent in Maslow' s discussions of what
it meant to be a psychologist. Although Maslow had written extensively about
the shortcomings of masculine science, he continued to value a kind of
gunslinger ideal as he reflected on his own career. In his journal, he
frequently chastised himself for not being hard nosed enough in his scholarly
dealings. He thought he needed to
stop identifying with all underdogs, with the weak,
the exploited, the female (italics added) .... It can all be looked at as a
growing will to self‑affirmation, healthy selfishness, to taking a more
dominant position .... Must make myself independent of praise & blame, of
pleasing others, of being a "nice guy." Have to become a little more
of a bastard & let weak take care of themselves. Must put breast back
inside blouse" (italics added). (Maslow, 1979, p. 33)
This quote clearly reveals
the depths of Maslow' s dilemma. He had diagnosed the problem of "muscular
science," and in his own personal dealings with people he had endeavored
to become more human defined as opposed to male defined. However, the power of
masculine discourse was not easily transcended. While acting in the spirit of
the humanistic psychology he had described, Maslow came to feel that his own
masculinity was being called into question. He felt himself
sliding toward a
sentimental, weak‑kneed femininity that he had been taught to despise, and in
his journal he described his new scholarly focus as being "almost like
giving up maleness" (italics added; Maslow, 1979, p. 731). Because
masculinity was so strongly associated with intellect, the threat that Maslow felt
to his own sexuality was frequently addressed in academic rather than gender
terms. Fearing a kind of creeping feminization of his scholarly self, he
repeatedly affirmed what he took to be his essential academic identity: hard,
male science. In his journal he condemned work that he had himself undertaken
to extend the field's borders beyond the male domain of experimental science:
"My impulse (or need or wish or something) is to despise the pure theorist‑speculator
in myself," he wrote (Maslow, 1979, p. 113). "I'm very suspicious of
being [perceived] hysterical (merely), soft‑headed (only), non‑empirical,
etc." (Maslow, 1979, p. 548). In response to these concerns, he insisted
that his "hysterical" and "softheaded" elaborations were
merely extensions of his essentially scientific‑read masculine‑self. "I
think of myself as a scientist," he noted (Maslow, 1979, p. 489).
"Ultimately, the scientist‑ checker‑validator is the Supreme Court who
gives the final decision" (Maslow, 1979, p. 113).
Maslow's repeated
affirmation that he was still a real scientist‑and by extension a real man‑came
against the backdrop of growing popular success. Many Americans had become
disaffected with the gray‑flannel conventionality of the 1950s, and in
humanistic psychology they discovered a refreshing alternative (Herman, 1995).
Younger people found Maslow's work especially appealing, and for many he became
a gurulike figure. He was besieged by speaking requests from across the country‑250
invitations in 1968‑and his colleagues in psychology frequently admonished him
for providing people with a "religion‑substitute" (Maslow, 1979, p.
377). The famous counterculture activist Abbie Hoffman was among those who
found inspiration in Maslow' s message. "Maslovian theory laid a solid
foundation for launching the optimism of the sixties," Hoffman (1980)
remarked. "Existential, altruistic, and upbeat, his teachings became my
personal code" (p. 26). Although hardly typical of all American youth,
Hoffman's remarks are indicative of the sort of cachet that Maslow enjoyed
among those searching for a new way of being.
Adulation was something that
Maslow had craved since his youth, and here again his commitment to the ideal
of "passionate manhood" and his background as a primatologist colored
his perception. Personal success was interpreted through a set of heavily
gendered, primeval images of powerful male hunters and attentive, admiring
females. Fulfillment involved ritualistic displays to women of one's predatory
prowess. In his journal Maslow (1979) described the completion of an academic
work as being analogous to killing a deer and "dumping it down before the
wife (or mother) in a lordly way so that she can adore and admire, be awed and
a little humbled, and a little frightened" (p. 68). To this image he added
the idea of male friendship. He admitted feeling the pull of the "the men,
'the boys,' the gang, [and] the fraternity," a gravity born out of his
willingness to confront the dangers of the hunt:
Their admiration, the
admiration of equals, of others who hunt and conquer and kill the deer so that
all may eat, means validation, acceptance, the yielding of doubts,
reservations, waiting .... I can go into the men's house where the women
are not admitted and of
which the women are afraid, where the men's secrets are shared, and only the
sons look on in admiration, look up to the men‑fathers. (Maslow, 1979, p. 70)
With these primeval images
in mind, Maslow experienced his growing popular success in the 1960s in
profoundly ambivalent terms. Brisk sales of his books and attentive audiences
were affirming; however, the constituency that was attracted to his work only
served to reinforce his growing fears of emasculation. "I feel uneasy
about the company I'm with," he remarked in 1961. "Religionists,
philosophers, yearners, utopians, Pollyannas, etc., rather than the tough‑minded
scientists I admire so much more" (p. 113). Maslow believed that he had
made the intellectual "kills" necessary to prove his manhood, and he
wanted to be admitted into that house where the women could not go. However, to
his consternation he felt that the "tough" guys of science did not
want to know him, and the sense of rejection weighed heavily as he struggled to
reconcile his need for masculine acknowledgement with an intellectual sense
that something was desperately wrong with male‑defined scientific psychology.
To gain the respect of the
discipline's "men" Maslow would have to face the prospect of parking
his critical faculties and embracing a scientistic perspective that was
"simply naive & self‑conscious" (Maslow, 1979, p. 210). However,
the alternative was to associate with a soft‑headed, "feminine‑thinking"
group. Neither alternative held much appeal, and in his journal Maslow
frequently complained about the lack of scholars who combined masculine
toughness and feminine sensitivity: "All the tender‑minded ones, the
existentialists, the Big Sur group, the religion people, are just not tough
enough for me," he remarked. "(And the tough‑minded ones are not
tender enough for me?)" (p. 427).
Torn by his own inner
conflict between masculinity and femininity, Maslow struggled to find a
scientific theory of human nature that would do justice to human potential
while simultaneously honoring what he regarded as the essential
"instinctoid" differences between men and women. Behaviorism and
psychoanalysis were dismissed for their pessimistic tone and reductionist
character. Unimpressed with the theories psychology had to offer, Maslow
undertook the "manly" venture of developing a new,
"positive" account of human motivation, the culmination of which was
his famous hierarchy of needs (Maslow, 1954, p. 199; 1943, p. 394). According
to this theory, human beings were motivated by five sets of hierarchically
arranged goals: physiological needs, safety, love, esteem, and self‑actualization.
When satisfaction had been achieved at one stage, the motivational focus of the
person would shift to the next goal. This new and "higher" need would
then "dominate the conscious life" of the person and "serve as a
center of organization of behavior" (Maslow, 1943, p. 395).
Conceived as the "basis
for a more universal science of psychology," Maslow hoped his theory would
provide a scientific warrant for personal growth and individual freedom. The
theory celebrated the language of inner feeling and conviction, and it invited
people to question the meaning of "adjustment." "The person who
gives in eagerly to the distorting forces in his culture," Maslow (1954)
argued, "may be less healthy than the delinquent, the criminal, the
neurotic who
may be demonstrating by his
reactions that he has spunk enough left to resist the breaking of his
psychological bones" (p. 145). This call to respond to one's inner nature
was an empowering message, and it was effectively mobilized by 1960s feminists
such as Betty Friedan. In her classic book The Feminine Mystique (1963),
Friedan drew extensively on Maslow' s work to advance the argument that
American culture was maladjusted insofar as it encouraged women to "evade
human growth" (p. 316).
Although Maslow partially
approved of feminist applications of his theory, the egalitarian tenor of
Frieden' s work left him somewhat uneasy. He had envisioned the hierarchy of
needs in universal terms, and he believed that women could and should strive
toward self‑actualization. At the same time, however, Maslow was unwilling to
abandon his simian‑inspired vision of a world where male sexuality underwrote
male control of society. He believed that the study of monkeys had proven that
male and female psychology had a different instinctual foundation, and
consequently he was convinced that men and women must pursue a different route
to self‑actualization. For women, this involved accepting the
"natural" role of mother and nest builder:
Self‑actualization for women does not mean a dichotomy between home & career, forcing an either‑or choice. Home & family, etc. are far more basic & important & prepotent, & must remain the base on which higher developments rest. If they're taken away, or rival the foundations, then the so‑called "higher" things, the career, etc., become empty & meaningless .... ...True self‑actualization for the female accepts the primacy of the family. (Maslow, 1979, p. 1139)
Maslow clearly held strong
convictions about gender roles and their psychological importance. Although he
spent a lot of time writing about these issues, he found it difficult to put
women in their biological place while delivering a message of human growth and
expanded potential. Uncertain how to reconcile biological constraint with
psychological possibility, Maslow deliberately played down his views on the sex‑specific
character of self‑actualization in his published writings. The topic was not
discussed in his 1943 article in which he introduced the hierarchy of needs,
and it was mentioned only in passing in Motivation and Personality (1954) and
Toward a Psychology of Being (1962/1968) despite the fact that he had accumulated
"huge mountains of writing on the subject" (Maslow, 1956). This self‑censorship
sat uneasily with Maslow, and it gnawed away at the cherished ideal of
scholarship as the pursuit of the brave and virile. His public caution was
transformed into private anger, and in his journal he complained bitterly about
deviations from masculine and feminine "nature." In one angry passage
he described American women as "dominant, castrating, discontent, [and]
lousy wives" (italics added) who "secretly keep on yearning" for
stronger men (Maslow, 1979, p. 77).
Masculine Science and the
Boundaries of Psychology
Maslow's struggle with
essentialist notions of masculine science should not obscure the emancipatory
potential that many of his contemporaries attached to his work. As Ellen Herman
(1992, 1995) has noted, Maslow's ideas were an important ideological resource
for a number of liberationist movements in the
1960s, including the women's
movement. That said, it is important to acknowledge the extent to which
questions of gender are subtly and in some cases quite explicitly woven into
scholarly debates about the meaning of science and the boundaries of
psychology. Maslow's humanistic psychology explicitly acknowledged the gendered
character of science, and it endeavored to go beyond the rigid dichotomy of
masculinity‑femininity. However, for all his awareness, Maslow remained mired
in the essentialist biology and masculine ethos he had learned in the 1930s. As
a consequence, his talk of methodological and conceptual diversity and a
"wider jurisdiction for psychology" had to be carefully hedged
against what he perceived to be the "biological" reality of male
dominance and female submissiveness.
The profound anxiety that
Maslow experienced as he moved away from the idiom of natural science is
clearly linked to the biographical particulars of his youth. Ugly and skinny as
a boy, Maslow felt himself to be a pathetic failure when measured against the
standards of vigorous, powerful masculinity put forward by the culture of the
day. Intellectual accomplishment in psychology provided some measure of
compensation, but the sense of diminished masculinity‑of not quite being a
"real man"‑haunted him throughout his life, and it had a significant
impact on his thought. What makes Maslow such a poignant historical figure is
his awareness of some of the ways in which masculinity, sexuality, and science
can crossconnect and play off each other on a personal and professional level.
He was mindful of his fragile masculinity‑even as a young graduate student‑and
he struggled to work through his insecurities while simultaneously highlighting
the extent to which psychology was itself nervously preoccupied with the cold,
steely detachment of the tough guy.
Sadly, Maslow was ultimately
unable to "give up maleness" with respect to science, and toward the
end of his life he felt himself trapped between a freewheeling and daringly
transgressive sense of humanistic potential and an equally strong desire for
patriarchal order, discipline, and respectability. This was perhaps an unhappy
end for one of American psychology's most inspiring figures. However, Maslow' s
struggle to come to terms with his masculinity should stand as a testament not
to his personal weakness but rather to the power of gender assumptions in
psychology and indeed in American professional life as a whole. He was caught
in the gravitational pull of a very powerful set of social principles that have
structured the status and gender of professional life since the 19th century.
The highest status professions have been those involving the greatest degree of
abstraction, detachment, and purity (Brumberg & Tomes, 1982; Furumoto,
1987). Lower status professions have involved more direct human contact and the
complexities that such contact brings. Women have been historically
concentrated in the lower status helping professions, and the values and skills
associated with these occupations‑compassion, understanding, connectednesshave
come to be encoded in heavily gendered terms.
For all of his biological
essentialism, Maslow had some understanding of this sort of gender encoding,
but his awareness could not completely insulate him from its corrosive effects.
By proposing to take his own profession into the heart of subjectivity and
complexity he was undertaking a socially discreditable feminization of the
field. Irrespective of the intellectual and moral merits of the move, Maslow
felt personally and professionally compromised by this reworking of the
field's boundaries, and he
oscillated between angry contempt for the discipline's obsessive one‑sidedness
and a deeply felt yearning for the acceptance and respectability of the predominantly
male world of laboratory psychology. Unhappy with either alternative, but
iconoclastic to the end, Maslow stands as a dramatic illustration of how
significant the search for a powerful masculinity can be for the seemingly
unrelated task of developing a powerful discipline.
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Received February 1, 2000
Accepted May 4, 2000