His parents were first-generation Jewish immigrants from Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire (now Kyiv, Ukraine), who fled from Czarist persecution in the early 20th century.

[7] Maslow and other young people with his background were struggling to overcome such acts of racism and ethnic prejudice in an attempt to establish an idealistic world based on widespread education and economic justice.

[12] He developed other strengths as well: As a young boy, Maslow believed physical strength to be the single most defining characteristic of a true male; hence, he exercised often and took up weight lifting in hopes of being transformed into a more muscular, tough-looking guy, however, he was unable to achieve this due to his humble-looking and chaste figure as well as his studiousness.

[17] Upon the recommendation of professor Hulsey Cason, Maslow wrote his master's thesis on "learning, retention, and reproduction of verbal material".

After World War II, Maslow began to question how psychologists had come to their conclusions, and though he did not completely disagree, he had his own ideas on how to understand the human mind.

[editorializing] The studies began under the supervision of two mentors, anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, whom he admired both professionally and personally.

[21] Maslow extended the subject, borrowing ideas from other psychologists and adding new ones, such as the concepts of a hierarchy of needs, metaneeds, metamotivation, self-actualizing persons, and peak experiences.

Consistent with this approach, he rejected a nomination in 1963 to be the Association for Humanistic Psychology president because he felt the organization should develop an intellectual movement without a leader.

[26] Humanistic psychologists believe that every person has a strong desire to realize their full potential, to reach a level of "self-actualization".

[29] To prove that humans are not blindly reacting to situations, but trying to accomplish something greater, Maslow studied mentally healthy individuals instead of people with serious psychological issues.

[30] This informed his theory that a person enjoys "peak experiences", high points in life when the individual is in harmony with themself and their surroundings.

In other words, these "peak experiences" or states of flow are the reflections of the realization of one's human potential and represent the height of personality development.

In spite of the personal significance with the plateau experience, Maslow was not able to conduct a comprehensive study of this phenomenon due to health problems that developed toward the end of his life.

[47] Maslow's hierarchy has been subject to internet memes over the past few years, specifically looking at the modern integration of technology in people's lives and humorously suggesting that Wi-Fi was among the most basic of human needs.

[48] As implied by its name, self-actualization is highly individualistic and reflects Maslow's premise that the self is "sovereign and inviolable" and entitled to "his or her own tastes, opinions, values, etc.

[53] Self-actualizing people tend to focus on problems outside themselves; have a clear sense of what is true and what is false; are spontaneous and creative; and are not bound too strictly by social conventions.

Maslow noticed that self-actualized individuals had a better insight of reality, deeply accepted themselves, others and the world, and also had faced many problems and were known to be impulsive people.

To the extent a person finds cooperative social fulfillment, he establishes meaningful relationships with other people and the larger world.

Maslow used the term metamotivation to describe self-actualized people who are driven by innate forces beyond their basic needs, so that they may explore and reach their full human potential.

[58] Maslow based his study on the writings of other psychologists, Albert Einstein, and people he knew who [he felt] clearly met the standard of self-actualization.

[61] During the 1960s Maslow founded with Stanislav Grof, Viktor Frankl, James Fadiman, Anthony Sutich, Miles Vich and Michael Murphy, the school of transpersonal psychology.

Transpersonal psychology was concerned with the "empirical, scientific study of, and responsible implementation of the finding relevant to, becoming, mystical, ecstatic, and spiritual states" (Olson & Hergenhahn, 2011).

While he rejected organized religion and its beliefs, he wrote extensively on the human being's need for the sacred and spoke of God in more philosophical terms, as beauty, truth and goodness, or as a force or a principle.

[81] Maslow's private journals in the late 1960s indicate that he took immense pleasure in seeing drug addicts die from overdoses, believing their deaths to be doing a public service to genetically superior individuals such as himself.

He also criticized advances in agriculture for developing the ability to grow more food, believing that famine and starvation were beneficial to society and that those who died of hunger were doing a great service to superior humans.

To this end, he blended his earlier work with Thorndike with influences from Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts in order to found what he referred to as his own religion based upon "peak experiences" and the use of psychedelic drugs.

[66] In 2006, author and former philosophy professor Christina Hoff Sommers and practicing psychiatrist Sally Satel asserted that, due to lack of empirical support, Maslow's ideas have fallen out of fashion and are "no longer taken seriously in the world of academic psychology".

[91] Social psychologist David Myers has pointed out Maslow's selection bias, rooted in the choice to study individuals who lived out his own values.

If he had studied other historical heroes, such as Napoleon, Alexander the Great, and John D. Rockefeller, his descriptions of self-actualization might have been significantly different.

[92] Maslow attended the Association for Humanistic Psychology's founding meeting in 1963 where he declined nomination as its president, arguing that the new organization should develop an intellectual movement without a leader which resulted in useful strategy during the field's early years.