01 APRIL, 2013 By: Maria Popova What 1960s counterculture had to
do with the timeless quest for self-actualization. Legendary
American psychologist Abraham Maslow, born on April 1, 1908, is
best-known for creating the famous Maslow hierarchy of needs and
endures as the founding father of humanistic psychology — the
movement to focus on people’s capacity for goodness and
transcendence, rather treating them as a pathological “bag of
symptoms,” which blossomed into the Human Potential Movement and
eventually gave rise to positive psychology. “The new age which
is already upon us is essentially the product of the turning
inward to the self,” he famously observed, echoing Anaïs Nin’s
insistence on focusing on individual psychology and presaging
Martha Nussbaum’s championing of inner life. In Encountering
America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping
of the Modern Self (public library), cultural historian Jessica
Grogan weaves a dramatic narrative tracing the origins of
humanistic psychology in t