Motivation and Personality

Motivation and Personality sets out Abraham Maslow's humanistic account of human striving, organized around the hierarchy of needs. Its central claim is that human motives form a developmental order: once physiological, safety, belonging, and esteem needs are met, the person is drawn toward self-actualization, the realization of one's fullest potential.

Rather than building a theory from pathology, Maslow studies exemplary, flourishing individuals and infers the conditions of psychological health from them. He describes self-actualizing people and their "peak experiences"—transient states of unity, heightened meaning, and transcendence—treating such states as legitimate objects of psychological inquiry rather than anomalies.

The book became a founding text of humanistic psychology, the "third force" positioned against behaviorism and psychoanalysis, and a bridge toward the transpersonal turn Maslow later took. Its language of growth, potential, and peak states supplied the human potential movement with a scientifically framed vocabulary for older aspirations toward transformation.