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Maslow 's Motivation And Personality

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According to Robert Frager, editor of the third edition of Maslow’s Motivation and
Personality, the theorist Abraham Maslow was born in 1908 in Brooklyn, New York. He was the first of seven children born to Russian
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Jewish immigrants. While Maslow’s father was uneducated, he pushed his son academically and encouraged him to become a lawyer. Maslow began his extensive education at City College of New York but later told his father that he did not want to study law. In 1928, after marrying his wife Berta, he transferred to the University of
Wisconsin to st udy psychology under the guidance of Harry Harlow. Two years later he obtained his Bachelor’s degree and having always been an astute student with a deep passion for learning,
Maslow continued at the University to receive his Master’s degree in 1931, and t hen his
Doctorate in 1934. Maslow described himself (Frager 1970, p. xxxvi) as, “...the little Jewish boy in the non
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Jewish neighborhood...I was isolated and unhappy. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.” At the beginning of his college career, Maslow studied behavior psychology, also called behaviorism. This is a type of psychology based upon the idea that all behaviors are acquired through conditioning. Maslow later became interested in a more humanistic view in psychology wh ich states that the whole person should be studied along with the uniqueness of that individual (McLeod, 2007). He believed that the development of human

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