Tag Archives: Psychiatry

Jew of the Week: Abraham Maslow

Founder of Positive Psychology

Abraham Harold Maslow (1908-1970) was born in Brooklyn to Jewish-Russian immigrant parents from Kiev. Maslow grew up in poverty and faced a great deal of antisemitism. He wasn’t happy at home either, and spent most of his time at the library reading. In high school, he was the editor of the school’s Latin and physics magazines. Maslow went on to study at City College of New York, and then took up psychology at the University of Wisconsin, where he did experiments and studies on primate behaviour. He moved on to Columbia University, where he worked with Alfred Adler, then taught at Brooklyn College and later at Brandeis University. After World War II, distraught by the Holocaust and the ravages of war, he switched his focus to mental health and human potential, founding a new branch of psychology called humanistic psychology, or positive psychology. The core idea behind humanistic psychology is that every person has the innate ability to grow, heal, and attain happiness and self-actualization. The job of the therapist is only to remove the obstacles that are holding a person back from achieving those goals. As Maslow described it: “Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.” This inspired other psychologists and researchers like Carl Rogers, who pioneered client-centered therapy, and Martin Seligman, who coined “learned helplessness” and proposed Well-Being Theory. The most famous result of Maslow’s work was the Hierarchy of Needs, a pyramid that shows the five major necessities of a human being. At the bottom are the basic physiological needs which are most pressing, but provide the least happiness and satisfaction in the long term. At the top is self-actualization, living a harmonious life of purpose and meaning, which is the most difficult to attain but provides the highest degree of happiness and lasting satisfaction. In 1961, Maslow cofounded the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. His most popular book was The Psychology of Science, where he coined the well-known saying that “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Maslow was voted Humanist of the Year in 1967, and has been ranked among the top 10 greatest and most-cited psychologists of all time.

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Words of the Week

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
– CS Lewis

Jew of the Week: Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks

Oliver Wolf Sacks (1933-2015) was born in London to Jewish parents who were both doctors. His mother came from an Orthodox family and was among the first female surgeons in the UK. Following in his parents’ footsteps, Sacks became a doctor in 1960. He completed his residencies in neurology in San Francisco and at UCLA, then worked as a neurologist in New York. Based on his work at the Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, Sacks wrote the autobiographical book Awakenings, which became a bestseller and was adapted to the Oscar-nominated film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. In addition to his neurology practice, for nearly fifty years Sacks was a neurology and psychiatry professor at a number of schools, including Columbia and NYU. He has written over a dozen books and countless articles and publications – all by hand or on a typewriter. His writings, translated into over 25 languages, have won numerous awards. The New York Times described him as a “poet laureate of contemporary medicine”. He contributed immensely to the field of neurology, and is credited with inspiring many of the today’s top neuroscientists. Interestingly, Sacks himself suffered from a neurological disorder called prosopagnosia, an inability to recognize faces. Despite being well-known for his great love and compassion for others, Sacks never married, and was celibate for 35 years. He spent time as a bodybuilder (at one point setting a state weightlifting record by squatting 600 pounds), nearly died while mountain climbing solo, held 12 honorary doctorates, and had a planet named after him. Sadly, Sacks passed away last week after a battle with cancer.

Words of the Week

I love to discover potential in people who aren’t thought to have any.
– Oliver Sacks