Abraham Maslow

Abraham Maslow (born 1 April 1908, died 8 June 1970) was an American psychologist who spent most of his career at Brooklyn College and then Brandeis University, and who is remembered above all for the hierarchy of needs and the idea of self-actualization. His major books — Motivation and Personality (1954), Toward a Psychology of Being (1962) and Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences (1964) — argued that psychology had studied sickness so thoroughly it had forgotten to study health. Humour genuinely mattered to him: in his portrait of self-actualizing people, a “philosophical, unhostile sense of humor” sits in the list alongside spontaneity, autonomy and peak experiences — which is exactly why a line like this one attaches to him so easily.