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Perhaps Abe Maslow missed this possibility because he was such an idealistic intellectual. He was born in the early twentieth century, the first of seven children of illiterate but ambitious Russian Jewish parents who pushed him into being an academic success. He turned out, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be a lonely, bookish lad who reluctantly entered the study of law. But then he found his metier and transferred to studying psychology under his first mentor, Professor Harry Harlow, at Wisconsin University, where he began investigating primate dominance and sexuality, which back then was an academic discipline rather than a couple of hours spent watching Big Brother. After that he moved to Columbia University to pursue similar studies and found another mentor in Alfred Adler, one of Freud’s early followers.

Subsequently he moved to New York’s Brooklyn College where he found two more mentors, the anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer. He was so impressed by them professionally and personally that he began to take notes about the pair’s behaviour. These ‘wonderful human beings’ provided the basis of his research into mental health and human potential, and became his models for ‘self-actualised humans’, the epitomes of fully resolved people. Maslow generalised that among other characteristics, self-actualising people tend to focus on problems outside of themselves, have a clear sense of what is true and what is phoney, are spontaneous and creative, and are not bound too strictly by social conventions. What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualisation, Maslow explained.

Thus Maslow’s idea of the pinnacle of human existence was based on his bordering-on-creepy admiration for the sort of scruffy, convention-shunning, non-materialistic liberal intellectuals who had so kindly moulded his fate for the better rather than the status-obsessed, surface-only, thrill-seeking celebrities and politicians whom our society now holds as the prime exemplars of homo expetens potential.

Excerpted from pages 188 to 189 of Enough: breaking free from the world of excess by John Naish