Robert Sternberg, renowned psychologist, past President of the American Psychological Association, author, rabbi, and chef has written a book titled, Defying the Crowd: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity. His theme has to do with allowing creativity in the interests of fostering progress. Often times a position of the status quo (the “crowd” in Sternberg‘s title) somehow comes to be viewed as suspect, with growing doubts finally paving a way to successful challenges in the wider course of progress.
Minding Maslow’s Mystery doubts and challenges the established milieu for valuing Abraham Maslow’s famous theory of motivation. While his theory includes the hierarchy of needs, it is much bigger than only the hierarchy of needs. The hierarchy proper is just the second part of Maslow’s single four-part theory. He uses his full four-part context to express a problem set centered around the notion, “As good as it seems, how and why is it that the hierarchy of needs must not be quite right?” This was part of Maslow’s broader attempt to discover or define a goals-of-motivation problem that could serve science more productively than the meanings-of-life questions had served philosophy and religion before it. Minding Maslow’s Mystery shows how we’ve missed his problematic challenges with resulting opportunities, and sold the theory way short. I’m nearly sure he would be stunned by the extent to which his most practical openings have been missed, glossed over, or otherwise neglected. Partly due to the acclaim accruing to the theory during Maslow’s lifetime, he never realized how completely we failed to share his appreciation of the theory as an opportunity-laden problem set. So despite related and abiding bewilderment on his part, he was never quite able to identify and correct the miscommunication.
Minding Maslow’s Mystery offers beginning balance to this historical situation. Part 1, “Sharing Probletunity,” challenges the zeitgeist for valuing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Part 2, “Attempting Progress,” makes an initial offer of a little progress that is much needed.