Abraham Maslow

During the fall of 1935, Adler began serving as mentor to a tall, outgoing young psychologist who would later exert great impact on the discipline: Abraham Maslow. Born and raised in Brooklyn to Russian-Jewish immigrants, he had recently completed doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin. After an unhappy year struggling financially through the Depression, he and his Russian-born wife, Bertha, had just arrived back in New York City. There Maslow was serving as a postdoctoral research assistant to the venerable Edward L. Thorndike, an educational psychologist at Columbia's Teachers College.

It may have been through his acquaintance, Heinz Ansbacher, now pursuing graduate psychology at Columbia that Maslow first heard about Adler's Friday evening meetings at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Quite familiar with individual psychology through his doctoral training at Wisconsin, the twenty-seven-year-old Maslow soon became a regular visitor to Adler's informal classes and, eventually, spent increasing time with him socially as well.

Indeed, Maslow had conducted his doctoral dissertation at Wisconsin to compare experimentally Adler's versus Freud's theory of the basic driving force to adult personality. Since Maslow's behaviorally oriented department permitted only animal research, Maslow contrived an elaborate study that succeeded in showing that the dominance position of monkeys in their social hierarchy determined their sexual behavior - and not the other way around, as Freud might have argued. Also, the incessant heterosexual and homosexual mounting that monkeys displayed often seemed to be a form of dominance-submissive behavior. Maslow found that among monkeys, "Sexual behavior is used as an aggressive weapon often, instead of bullying or fighting, and is to a large extent interchangeable with these latter power weapons."

From such observations, Maslow advanced an original theory of primate sexuality. He contended that within the monkey social order there exist two distinct but related forces that culminate in sexual relations among individuals: the hormonal urge to copulate, and the need to establish one's dominance with respect to overlords and subordinates. Based on these intriguing findings, Maslow excitedly planned to obtain data through primate research that might enable him to look at human sexuality, such as marital relations, in a new way. He ended one published paper by recommending that Adler's notion about sex and power be reassessed in view of this primate research.

During this period, Adler exerted a strong influence on his younger colleague. He played the role of mentor well, offering encouragement and advice as requested. Adler also turned Maslow's attention to the idea of social feeling as a basic human trait.

Adler found such research fascinating as an empirical validation of his own theories, and proudly published one of Maslow's research articles in the International Journal for Individual Psychology. He was intrigued by Maslow's determination to shift his study of dominance and sexuality to human relations; after all, sexology was a taboo subject in American universities of the time. Maslow's plan was to interview college women about their sexual feelings and experiences, and relate these to personality aspects, specifically, to what he called dominance-feeling (self-esteem).

By January 1937, Maslow had completed work with about one hundred women and fifteen men. That month, based in part upon discussions with Adler, he submitted for publication the first of several papers on his emerging findings: essentially, that the higher a woman's self-esteem, the more active and varied her sexual behavior. Conversely, women with low self? esteem tended to be sexually shy and inhibited. Although American sexual mores have obviously changed since the late 1930s, Maslow's observations seem fundamentally valid today.