Book Review: Personality and Growth: A Humanistic Psychologist in the Classroom by Maslow,A.

Latinx ¹ peoples are becoming an increasingly visible population in the United States. Unfortunately, many Latinx individuals are struggling to integrate and deepen their cultural experience for a variety of reasons, including lack of awareness and insight concerning their own experiential processes, negative and traumatic histories related to discrimination, racism, and prejudice, and their detrimental notions of culture.

As a humanistically oriented psychologist of Mexican background who teaches intercultural competencies, I regard Personality and Growth as an excellent resource. I have personally benefited from Maslow’s views on self-actualization and its application for someone from a collectivistic and highly relational culture (Ortiz, 2018). Similarly, his lectures in this volume will help Latinx individuals more fully experience their culture, externally and internally, and better overcome any the maladies that may impede their development of intercultural intelligence. In this review, I will first describe Maslow’s pedagogy and then prescribes a cultural curriculum derived from it. Clearly, Maslow’s pedagogy is based on dialogue, echoing Paulo Freire’s pedagogy; as Freire (2005, p. 80) asserted, “through dialogue . . . the teacher is no longer merely the one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach.” They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In Freirean-like dialogue, Maslow (2019, p. 106) consistently invited his students to create experiential learning: “Can you describe the feeling? Do you have any body feelings, for instance? Does anything happen to your insides—your heartbeat or your skin?” He skillfully prompted his own students to avoid “intellectualizing” and to attain “experiencing” (p. 195). Similarly, as Freire (2005, p. 81) observed in his approach, “The students—no longer docile listeners—are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher.” This dialogical (“plática”) methodology, a facilitated conversation and respectful dialogue, is favored by Chicana/o scholars and researchers because it honors rich cultural traditions of communicating and transferring cultural knowledge and wisdom while participants co-create meaning and experience (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016).

If Maslow’s class as presented in this book had comprised any Latinx hombres, they would have found themselves invited to expand their consciousness of manhood beyond machismo to embrace the dimension of fatherhood and “a father-love on having a baby” (Maslow, 2019, p. 71). Maslow was adamant that we all need to humanize our conceptions of masculinity and femininity, particularly those detrimental to our self, as in “men who use prostitutes—for instance, in Mexico, where most young men start their sexual lives with prostitutes” (Maslow, 2019, p. 228). Similarly, Maslow encouraged his students to reflect on those Latinx immigrant men who had left their homeland and their families, and the resulting trauma they experienced.

In the Latinx culture, the parallel to machismo is marianismo, a conception of femininity modeled on the traditional Roman Catholic description of the Virgin Mary: namely, one who exemplifies self-abnegation, docility, and spiritual strength while undergoing suffering and sacrifice. ² Traditionally in Latinx culture, the highest feminine value is one that celebrates the Virgin Madonna, and she becomes a model for some Latinx families for as Maslow (2019, p. 250) observed, “no culture is absolutely univocal about everything.” The Maslovian invitation authentically experience these values, not merely intellectualize them.

Are some of these traditional notions detrimental? In the case of the Latinx Madonna and marianismo, Maslow (2019, p. 184) commented,

if you read the literature about the Madonna-prostitute complex, which you’ll find in most Western cultures, rather commonly you’ll find that there are many men who can’t sleep with a woman that they respect. The woman that they respect becomes holy, pious, beautiful, and so on.

In this book, Maslow inspires us to transcend abstract religious symbols and instead immerse ourselves into their experiential essence, such as fatherhood or priesthood. As Maslow (2019, p. 88) noted “religious people can get that feeling particularly about a priest. For the Catholics, the priest is clearly not one particular male person. He stands for something which is far beyond himself.” Maslow (2019, p. 241) likewise stated, “Seeing a man in the B-way means seeing him also in his ultimate, ideal possibilities . . . as God the Father, as all powerful . . . ” In other words, we need to go beyond symbols, metaphors, and linguistic categories to uncover experientially their Platonic essence.

As evidenced in this book, Maslow was genuinely interested in creating a conversational plática (Fernando, what does this word mean, please explain) and, in his view, this outlook is facilitated by exploring “what’s going on in your gut” and being able “to strike below the words, the categories which were ready-made for us. We can also try to strike below the behavior which is only partially determined by our insides, our deepest impulses and thoughts” (Maslow, 2019, p. 273). He deconstructed how linguistically we express this universal experience, for example, observing that “the Latin Americans who embrace each other when they greet have a word for it—abrazo” (Maslow, 2019, p. 264). Rather than perpetuate such useless cultural binaries as machismo versus marianismo, Virgin versus Madonna, unacculturated Hispanic versus Anglo, Maslow’s approach can guide us toward “the transcending of dichotomies, polarities of opposition, of the ‘either-or,’ ‘A-not-A’ type of thing, the ‘black-and-white kind of opposition’” (Maslow, 2019, p. 170). As Hoffman (1999, p. 217) noted,

the issue of masculinity and femininity in relation to self-actualization occupied much of Maslow’s attention . . . he was particularly interested in whether we experience growth and self-fulfillment differently depending on our gender; and, if so, whether this influence is due to cultural or innate forces.

For academicians interested in Maslovian pedagogy, this work provides a much needed roadmap, for example, by encouraging Latinx students to examine their peak experiences with important questions concerning their identity: “How do you look different to yourself, in what respect has the self changed? . . . How does the world look different”? (Maslow, 2019, p. 145). That is, Latinx students can be encouraged to uncovering the layers and categories on the path to B-cognition, “seeing you’re the persons, through the masks, through the pretension” because “we are all embedded in a moment in history in a particular culture” (Maslow, 2019, p. 85). Maslow’s vision for the transformed Latinx is one who transforms himself or herself by experiencing “serene B-cognition” and who embodies “a new correction of vision—a new perceiving of something that was there all the time” (p. 82).

In my view, Personality and Growth can accompany any training program or college course devoted to developing intercultural competencies. That is, an interculturally competent and intelligent individual is someone who profoundly knows culture, is aware of cultural experience, and translates such awareness into respectful and sensitive cultural practices. Such an approach would comprise three aspects:

As an academician who teaches the development of intercultural competencies, I plan to use Personality and Growth, based on Maslow’s dialogical pedagogy, to deepen my students’ multidimensional sense of cultural identity. This book provides an admirable resource to accompany any textbook on cultural psychology and stimulate discussions into experiential dialogue.