Maslow’s Intellectual Betrayal of Ruth Benedict?

Early Influences

While the contributions of Abraham Maslow have been numerous, and by in large beneficial to the field of psychology, they were not entirely come upon by virtue of the particular singularity of his thought. Over his lifetime, Abraham Maslow brushed intellectual shoulders with numerous luminaries in the behavioral sciences, such as Harry Harlow, Alfred Adler, Eric Fromm, Margaret Mead, Ralph Linton, Gregory Bateson, Carl Rogers, Abram Kardiner, and Ruth Benedict. Among the most important was Ruth Benedict.

Maslow was initially attracted to behavioral and experimental psychology. Already as an undergraduate, Maslow envisioned interests in questions of the nature of human nature. Later, during his undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, under the direction of Harry Harlow, he engaged in primate research, which Maslow believed held the promise of generalizing to humans—elucidated from the remarks, “There is no reason apparent at the moment why the techniques and hypothesis that have come from the study of infra-humans may not be partially applicable to the similar scientific study of the human” (Maslow, 1940, p. 322).

During these studies, his views of the relationship between individuals and society were based on the principles of dominance and hierarchies within social groups, as well as on the influence of the work of others, such as Zuckerman and Yerkes, who conducted similar investigations into sexual behavior in other animals, which he indicated “may be interpreted as observations on dominance behavior” (Maslow, 1936, p. 262). His early view was that social behavior was dependent on the innate state of the individual, which could readily be equated with his later use of deficit needs. There is no indication in 1932, during the time when his primate research was first conducted, that he believed the environment to have elicited any sort of causal effect on the resulting social behavior of animals. It was rather an atomistic reduction of social behavior to the biological inclination of the individual and the place in society which it allowed him. According to Gellar (1982), Maslow held that “the environment plays a critical role in . . . permitting or retarding the gratification of lower deficit needs . . . but is not a constitutive principle in the logic of human development” (p. 66). It was also the first description of the “pressures” of needs directing behavior; manifested in obtaining food, individual safety, sexual behaviors, of periods of creative “play” among individuals in the group (Maslow, 1936).

Maslow began to study anthropology in 1933, while still at the University of Wisconsin where he came into contact with Ralph Linton—a later adversary of Ruth Benedict at Columbia and his wife Bertha’s professor (Heyer-Young, 2005; Maslow, 1964a). It is during this time, and later when he obtained a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University in 1935, that the greater consideration of culture and the behavior of the animal, and subsequently the behavior of people, began to take shape in the exchange of human subject, in the form of college women, for the former primate subjects in his earlier studies (Maslow, 1939). It was in these later studies that he considered the individual in the social environment even though it was not indicative of the effect of cultural and social constructs on or through the individual, but rather the frustrations within the individual because of the pressures of needs. As a consequence, the resulting social behavior was born of innate traits and personality characteristics of the individual himself.

While at Columbia, and later at Brooklyn College in New York, Maslow was among a tightly woven group of intellectuals, most of whom were émigrés as a result of the sociopolitical climate of World War II. Studying the work of Ruth Benedict, and his close contact with Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Erich Fromm, and Abram Kardiner, anthropology came to the forefront of his interpretation of individuals and their social behavior. Maslow became attracted to an approach with a focus on understanding the larger problems within society, which psychology previously had not addressed. He was particularly disturbed with the principal focus on what was wrong with individuals rather than what was right about them.

The Benedictine Disciple

For all purposes, the reasons by which Maslow became enamored with the work of Ruth Benedict and his pursuit of her as a self-actualized person are traceable not only to his early consideration of gender issues, or to the political and social climate of the times, but also to his childhood. While attributing his motivations and behavior to having had more to do with the influence of the culture and environment in which he existed, rather than to his own drive toward self-actualization, might well have been argued by Maslow as terminally incorrect and unfounded; it is still worth pursuing.

Abraham Maslow spent his childhood rebelling against his mother, who he despised, having described her as “a horrible woman” in his journal; rebelling against his own Jewish religion; and having been bullied repeatedly as a result of his physical characteristics and the rampant anti-Semitic sentiment that permeated his youth (Hoffman, 1988). Later as an adult, he was still subjected to anti-Semitic sentiments, which limited his opportunities, but which led to his contact with the great intellectuals who shaped his thinking as a result of his position at Brooklyn College. Each of the situations he experienced through childhood, as the groundwork in his socialization, could be postulated to have influenced his desire to understand how to “transcend” beyond ones circumstances to become fulfilled and happy—a state that would not have been likely for most of his life given the interferences. In choosing those individuals too, who he thought to be self-actualized, a pattern of strife unfolded over their histories as well. It might well be that he viewed them not only as surviving their ordeals, but thriving too, in a way others had not. For this reason, the self-actualized people he chose are important. They represented the survival of the fittest—representations of the work of Sumner and of social Darwinism—which so profoundly influenced his anthropological viewpoint.

He also was witness to the destructive forces of the male-dominated collegiate atmosphere that existed at Columbia and to the personal and professional conflicts that lay waste to the aspirations of Benedict and Mead in those institutions by formidable male opponents such as Sapir and Linton (Heyer-Young, 2005). The ways in which these women were treated left a lasting impression on him as is evident in his letter to Benedict in 1939, in which he states that he no longer visited Columbia while she was gone as her “absence from it makes it an unrelieved blackness and a place not worth visiting” (Maslow, Benedict Papers, December 30, 1939).

It is not difficult to see how Ruth Benedict became an ideal of his self-actualized person, as he saw her transcend unbearable circumstances with grace and poise. We might also postulate that the formation of his hierarchy of needs came from needs he recognized in himself, which left him frustrated at various times; however, the ways in which Benedict and the Columbia anthropologists contributed to his understanding of an individual in his culture had a greater impact at least temporarily, on his theories. It appeared throughout his work to be an intellectual tug of war between Benedictine theory and Sumner’s theories. Later a synthesis of these concepts would occur for Maslow.

Benedict had long since undertaken the comparative studies of cultures, in Patterns of Culture (1934) under Boas, by the time Maslow found himself in her company. The field of culture and personality, or as Benedict preferred to describe it “the growth of the individual in his culture,” was still new with very few individuals having made progress in understanding how culture and individuals interacted (Heyer-Young, 2005, pp. 16, 320). Although it is largely believed that she was interested in describing personality, she in fact was interested in “how culture controls and shapes psychological impulses and drives and selects psychological attitudes” (Heyer-Young, 2005, 2005, p. 17).

Benedict rebuked psychology’s treatment in her second Shaw Lecture (1946),

The anthropological view of the growth of the individual in his culture sees the person developing in a cultural climate, not as in genetic psychology’s lineal studies which see the outside world impinging on the child at definite points and exclude the influence of the child’s mind and concepts and the total impressions of culture.

Benedict asserted, “Real investigation of personality and culture has not begun until it is a study of total experience as related to behavior” (as cited in Maslow, Honigmann, & Mead, 1970, p. 321).

Benedict’s concept of synergy does not appear to have been understood well, not only by others outside of anthropology and psychology but also not by some of those students who conducted research at her behest. She wrote to Mead that “even when a student faces a new problem he asks all the psychological questions before he even phrases the sociological one. . . . Instead, they come back from a field trip full of personality points they haven’t seen the background of” (Benedict, R., Mead Papers, Benedict to Mead, November 15, 1938). Benedict employed the study of cultures holistically to root out patterns of cultural relativity in the beginning, and later to understand what societal structures lead to either continuity or discontinuity, secure or insecure, high or low synergy within cultures that resulted in specific social outcomes in a given culture, through function and form—an area she referred to as “beyond relativity” (Heyer-Young, 2005, p. 93). Heyer-Young (2005) also points out that the usage of the specific term synergy appeared in Benedict’s Bryn Mawr lectures in 1941, but later disappeared, or more likely, was replaced by terms which would not relegate her theoretical concept to being one of “process,” which would have undone the roll of agency. Rather, it needed to be a “social function” as was Benedict’s intention—to include the human role in the construction of culture (p. 92). Synergy as a concept was meant to be descriptive of culture not individual personality.

Benedict did describe behaviors of individuals and character structures; however, it was done so as to “study [the] different pressures put upon an individual in his life experiences,” which would lead to certain behaviors and that revealed “in an operational sense culture is located in the individual and his habits”—Benedict (as cited in Heyer-Young, 2005, pp. 324-325). Benedict went further to indicate

institutions are the way in which the individual learns the patterns of the culture; . . . the pattern of institutions, are the way in which the individual learns and grows in relation to the experiences shared in the culture.

Synergy was simply put as something that occurred as a result of an individual and his culture.

For comparison, beginning in 1936, with Maslow’s paper on the study conducted at Vilas Park Zoo, we see a strictly behaviorally and biologically inclined investigator who described in great detail social hierarchies and behaviors in primates, but who attributed no influence of the social environment on the manifested behaviors, other than that one’s status in the hierarchy directly “determines to a very large extent the satisfaction of his bodily needs” (Maslow, 1936, p. 275). This study predated his field work under Benedict and can be seen as devoid of her influence but the social Darwinism element appears to be the prevailing interpretation.

By 1937, when Maslow published “Dominance-Feeling, Behavior, and Status,” his attention had turned to humans and he then made the distinction between “high-dominants” and “low-dominants.” He positioned people in hierarchies of social dominance while focusing on “dominance-feeling” and its reciprocal nature in regard to place on the hierarchy—which by his descriptions can be directly translated into Benedict’s notion of the “sense of being free among all members” and the institutional structures which provide for it (Maslow, 1937, p. 410; see also Heyer-Young, 2005). Maslow also related the experience of the individual within his culture as compared with the social environment as being important to the sense of feeling dominant (Maslow, 1937). In this way, society provided for some aspect of the individual to be salient, rather than having actually contributed causally to it.

In 1938, Maslow received a grant-in-aid from the Social Science Research Council for fieldwork with the Blackfeet Indians, which Ruth Benedict helped him to secure, as member of a field group that also included Lucien Hanks and Jane Richardson (Maslow & Honigmann, 1943). Selected as part of Ruth Benedict’s culture studies to use a holistic and professionally diverse treatment of the Blackfoot people and their culture, he spent an entire summer living among them. Dr. Maslow through great personal sacrifice undertook such a study of these people and their culture. He had to leave his family and endured harsh living conditions. He had genuine empathy and respect for the various members of the Blackfoot Community. In his unpublished manuscript, Blackfoot Culture and Personality (Maslow & Honigmann, 1943), his words could be transposed with Benedict’s, in his description of personality and culture. Maslow and Honigmann (1943):

It is apparent that culture and personality are merely two facets of a single totality. We abstract the patterns of the ideas of a number of personalities and call the abstraction culture. The dynamics of human behavior are therefore fundamental for predicting the dynamics of culture. In this case we see that secure people give rise to secure culture which will again produce secure people. No one need be reminded that comparable to such ‘beneficent circles’ there are also “vicious circles” in which cultural patterns transmit insecurity.

Here is seen a temporary reformulation of social behavior in effect, as dynamic and interdependent on the social structure, which already exists as created by individuals through selectivity of traits in a given culture. However, in “phrasing it a different way,” he decided that society’s part was minimal and influential only in the aspect of frustrating or supporting the fulfillment of needs. Benedict’s premise was that any culture is a representation of selection and reinforcement of those selected items by individuals who then reproduce children; who then also through a process of learning, select, and reinforce given traits of their culture, either in a normative agreement or aberrant disagreement with the status quo. Maslow’s interpretation of Ruth Benedict’s view of culture and individual were not relativistic at all but rather a premise of survival of the fittest within a particular culture. That is, some traits that were not beneficial to social survival died out as individuals constantly adapted to an ever-changing culture and environment through dissemination of culture. He negated the role of self-agency in this regard, something that Ruth Benedict saw as ever important to how cultures come to be or change over time.

Benedict commented negatively on the atomistic foci as end points, of the fieldworkers in her letters to Mead (Heyer-Young, 2005). It becomes evident that Benedict was not entirely pleased with Maslow’s efforts on the project, even though his field notes were used by her later in her descriptions of the Blackfeet. In a letter to Maslow, Benedict states,

I remember the section on secure and insecure institutions, it seemed to me a mixture of defensible and indefensible sentences. . . . I was disappointed in your project for the SSRC. Why didn’t you spend more time on it . . . for if you were going over that, and really going to trace “the evolution of a secure individual” . . . you’d have to say what investigation of the boarding school you were going to make. That’s certainly not something you can omit from a study of children, not if you’re tracing their development into adulthood. . . . Those projects shouldn’t be dashed off in a free hour . . . (Benedict, R., Benedict Papers, Benedict to Maslow, February 5, 1940).

While it can be taken as a simple critique of poorly applied work, it appears that her specific use and emphasis of the words “the evolution of a secure individual” were offensive to her sensibilities, as her use of synergy was one of holism and a concept she felt that could not be reduced to a single individual. It is clear through her words that she understood that Maslow was deterministic in his idea of culture and individuals. Yet in Maslow’s want to spend a second summer studying the evolution of a secure individual, he in fact was adopting an atomistic view that separated the inseparable into distinct entities—the individual from his culture. This is the beginning of his distortion of her concept of synergy and the relation of synergy to his later development of the theory of self-actualization.

Maslow had hoped to spend a second summer on the reservation in order to study the development of the children within the culture. Although Benedict is not given appropriate credit for the consideration of children within cultures, any in-depth look at her work and her lectures reveal that she and Maslow both understood the importance of development from birth and throughout the life span. Communication regarding the grant-in-aid from the SSRC (SSRC, Benedict Papers, SSRC to Ruth Benedict, Grant-In-Aid correspondence, January 1940), sent to Ruth Benedict indicates that not only did she oversee the field studies related to culture; but that the Councile questioned whether or not Maslow could effectively add to the existing work which Lucien and Hanks had already undertaken in the previous 2 years. He was never able to complete this project and spend a second summer on the reservation with the Blackfoot people, although the Councile was impressed by the high quality of his work.

The Intellectual Betrayal

There is clear divergence between Benedict’s concept of synergy and the way Maslow interpreted it. The first indication of Maslow’s reductionist reversion came in “Dominance Quality and Social Behavior in Infra-Human Primates” (1940), just after he had completed his study with the Blackfeet in 1938. He states, “Since dominance as a function of the individual . . .” could be studied experimentally, “ . . . we may yet be able to lay bare on a scientific basis the psychological and physiological basis of sociological science,” and that, “It is at least conceivable that differences in human cultures may be significantly correlated with some isolable variation in one or a few dimensions of personality” (Maslow, 1940, p. 322). In this article, he also retained the idea that even though there were individual differences within the group, that they were “less important than the wide and important differences between two main groups” a remnant of Benedictine influence, but also “proof” to Maslow of the selection of certain aspects of culture (Maslow, 1940, p. 321).

Regarding the use of synergy, in “Synergy in the Society and in the Individual” (Maslow, 1964b), he used synergic principles to describe American business organizations. In doing so, one very large mistake he made was to ignore that any individuals within an organization were not socialized to their culture primarily through that organization; such that, by the time an individual reached an organization, the effects of his culture were already evident on his personality. Moreover, although an individual may adapt his behavior to fit within the norms for the period of time while operating within that hierarchal structure, it is not an overall change on the behavior of the person; rather, it becomes a false self, or social self-image (Heyer-Young, 2005), because it is just one institution within the broader structure of his culture. The organization cannot be named as synergic as such because it is not a culture, but rather an institution within a culture. Although it could, however, be an institution within a synergic culture. He also goes on to state that “our own [meaning American] society is one of mixed synergy. We have high-synergy and low-synergy institutions” (Maslow, 1964b, p. 160).

As such, synergy was something that happened as a result of the way societies were structured to provide “mutual advantage” or for “mutual opposition,” as a result of a configuration of their institutions, not of or occurring within a singular institution (Heyer-Young, 2005). Maslow has reduced the concept of the relation of mutually beneficial cultures, to a relationship between an individual and an institution that has already been accounted for under Benedict’s principles of symmetrical and nonsymmetrical behavior between an individual and an institution, or put another way, individual variance (Heyer-Young, 2005). Although he might have intended to view this as a culture, existing within an institution, it cannot be so, even though he bolsters support of this notion by referencing Likert’s “influence pie” (Maslow, 1964b). Likewise in “Further Notes on the Psychology of Being,” Maslow (1964a) indicated incorrectly that

social synergy was used first by Ruth Benedict to apply to the degree of health of the primitive culture she was studying meant essentially that a synergic institution was one that arranged it so that a person pursuing selfish ends was automatically helping other people. (p. 45)

However, Ruth Benedict never mentioned a synergic institution at all.

The institution may have a hierarchal structure, and a siphoning or funneling system of distribution, a symmetrical/segmented or hierarchal/complementary scheme of operation; but a culture is not found on such a small scale, in one place, by virtue of structure or form alone. Benedict would have likely agreed, as she stated in the second Shaw Lecture that “Institutions in their functional aspects are shared, geared-in habits of individuals in group participation, shared interactive and reactive habits” and are “organized systems of activity governed by formal rules” and that “institutions are the ways in which interpersonal relations are carried out” (Heyer-Young, 2005, pp. 241-243).

In addressing further his distortion of synergy, self-actualization has to be undertaken because it is by far the most egregious example of his betrayal of her theory as he refers to it in his papers. In “Further Notes on the Psychology of Being” (1964a), he returned to concepts of Freud and Adler placing many needs into the realm of unconscious motivation. Furthermore, Maslow (1964a) went on to confuse symmetrical behavior for synergy by asserting that

two separate sets of needs become fused into a single set of needs for the new unit . . . or when the differentiation between the word “other” and the words “my own” have disappeared, where there is mutual property, where the words change into “we,” “us,” or “ours.” . . . One might say it means in certain respects different people can be treated as if they were not different, as if they were one, as if they were pooled, or lumped, or fused into a new kind of unit . . . fusing their separateness. (p. 46)

The problem is that he reduced a human being with individual agency into being but a function of an institution of the couple. A couple can act in symmetrical ways, but they are still separate people, and still synergy cannot be reduced to the behavior of a man and wife, as part of a couple. Rather, according to Benedict’s philosophy, individuals in a marriage are acting according to the institutional form of marriage, which is structured within a given culture and which elicits a set of norms, to which these individuals react behaviorally and give meaning. Thereby, the couple either supports those cultural norms or reinterprets them. However, the institution of marriage could function as stabilization in a culture to provide for offspring and security and to also secure the larger culture as one of many institutions. Synergy, in Benedictine terms, cannot happen in marriage itself, but marriage can add to the ability of a culture to be synergic.

Maslow (1964a, p. 46) also made the statement that “. . . I prefer the more sophisticated way of saying it, the action is synergic. That is what is good for the child is good for me” and, “whatever improves one human being at any point tends to improve all other human beings, especially those in close contact to him.” To delineate this thinking, not only was this his description of a synergic individual or act, but also it is very easy to think of countless ways, that what is good for me is not good for other human beings. Also, that by his estimation of synergy, the moment I do something which would be bad for another human but good for me, I have not acted in synergy. Of course again, he is confusing symmetrical behaviors and carrying too far what synergy means culturally—a reductionist position to the individual, which is in direct opposition to Benedict’s holistic methods and theoretical orientation.

Leonard Gellar’s (1982) critique of Maslow’s self-actualization theory is supportive of the assertions, in this article, of Maslow’s reductionist viewpoints distorting Benedict’s synergy concept in ways that invalidate his conception of it as beneficence to society. Gellar (1982) asserts that Maslow attributes needs to being innate, inborn elements and that

they exist independent of experience but require the occasion of experience in order to appear in human life. . . . They are transhistorical and transcultural. . . . [But] if a need is intrinsically cognitive and symbolic, it could have come into being only through the interaction with others. . . . Needs are always the needs of persons, selves, who, through existing within a particular sociohistorical context, can withstand acculturation, can subject their desires to critical appraisal, and can control and shape their desires in response to conditions in their social world. (p. 68)

This is aligned with Benedict’s notion of an individual growing within his culture and that “the function of activities is not to meet certain human needs, but rather to promote certain necessary conditions of human existence” (Benedict, 1947, as cited in Heyer-Young, 2005, p. 318).

If according to Benedict, what makes a society healthy is that holistically it is structured and functions for mutual benefit of the individual and the larger society, then it would be easy to argue that self-actualization takes away energy from the whole for the good of the one, and thereby would not produce a synergic culture or society on a large scale if most of the society were so self-engaged. An individual and society has to gain; but what does society gain if each member is relegated to strive primarily for self? Would such a culture be synergic? Although Maslow’s B-motivations included prosocial behavior, it was on an individual basis. In reality, the larger culture would effectively produce more influence on the individual than the B-motivations of an individual could produce on culture in return.

Maslow asserted that self-actualization transcends the dichotomy of selfish and unselfish pursuits, and also that if an individual sees such a dichotomy to exist then he is exhibiting signs “mild psychopathology” (Maslow, 1964a, p. 46). Yet according to Benedict’s studies “mental illness itself was a culturally defined state” and that “abnormal is not a consistent category cross-culturally but is variable and culturally defined, just as normal is culturally variable” (Heyer-Young, 2005, p. 179). Furthermore, as Gellar (1982) indicates, a self-actualizing person would be considered an “atomic individual” and that “an integral part of the road to self-actualization bears a striking resemblance to dehumanized forms of interaction,” and also that “just as the dehumanized personality can form only instrumental relationships with others, so the self-actualizing personality must use others as vehicles for self-actualization” (p. 71). In this regard, Maslow’s concept of altruism through selfishness cannot truly be altruistic as it uses others as a means to a selfish end.

At best, the distortion of synergy on such an atomistic level had to be offensive to the holism that Benedict might have offered as a way to understand individuals in their culture. Maslow became very reductionist over time so much so that even though he used the term synergy to describe individuals, their activities, and institutions, the term had lost its original and important implications. Benedict’s notion of synergy has seemingly always been misunderstood, but it strikes at the heart of nature and nurture, and how as a society real change might be produced which could end so much of the suffering that exists. Maslow, although a student of Benedict’s and a person who placed her onto a pedestal among his other humans, clearly misunderstood the intellectual gifts offered to him through her teachings. On a personal level, it is clear that they liked each other and enjoyed frequent communications and the company of mutual intellectual friends such as Mead, but professionally, he betrayed everything that she was trying to escape in the old regime of understanding personality and culture. By the end of his career, he completely rejected the notion of cultural relativity.

In a reversal of Benedictine assumptions, Maslow came to view those self-actualized individuals, such as Benedict, as having within them some possible biological quality that allowed them to transcend the circumstances of their culture and socialization, for they had emerged from the most dire circumstances of culture intact and with a propensity toward rather than a reactive withdrawal from their fellow man. What was it about particular individuals that caused them to thrive while most succumbed? For Maslow, surely it was something they had that others had not—a possible biological adaptive mental set. How could he cause some adaptation to occur in the masses such that in effect all of society might be beneficent? For Benedict, such beneficent ends could only occur when society could adapt, to allow individuals to flourish. Maslow’s ideology was individual determinism, whereas Benedict’s was one of a dynamic cultural interdependency.

While this article can be understood to critique Dr. Maslow’s treatment of Ruth Benedict’s synergy theory, it in no way is meant to devalue the wealth of contributions he has made to the field of psychology or to determine the correctness of his theoretical positions. Merely, he was exposed to Ruth Benedict’s theories and later used them as a base for his own. Although he had never previously referred to function of behavior, it is clear that he used Benedict’s anthropological approach when he wrote about her work in “Synergy in the Society and the Individual” (1964b), “. . . finally what did work was what I can only call the function of behavior . . .” (p. 154), and in the same article, “I am using my notes, which are 25 years old; and I must apologize for not knowing which is Benedict and which is my own thinking (p. 156).

He began his career with a biological standpoint, which was the same basis with which it ended. Of significance is the aspect of the anthropological influence, although temporary, which permeated his work for a small period of time. As with all intellectual interaction, the basis of growth in the field of psychology relies on a “building upon” of the work of others. It is true that Dr. Maslow, as with most of mankind, borrowed ideas of others and stamped on them his own theoretical implications. This does not negate nor support them, only it must be understood how such great intellectual minds use existing information to create the theories, which, as much of Maslow’s work has done, shape institutions and individuals within society in a positive manner.