Abstract
In this paper, I offer a detailed reconstruction and a critical analysis of Abraham Maslow’s neglected psychological reading of Thomas Kuhn’s famous dichotomy between ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ science, which Maslow briefly expounded four years after the first edition of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in his small book The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance (1966), and which relies heavily on his extensive earlier general writing in the motivational and personality psychology. Maslow’s Kuhnian ideas, put forward as part of a larger program for the psychology of science, outlined already in his 1954 magnum opus Motivation and Personality, are analyzed not only in the context of Kuhn’s original ‘psychologizing’ attitude toward understanding the nature and development of science, but also in a broader historical, intellectual and social context.
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Notes
The following abbreviations of Kuhn’s books will be used in this paper: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR), The Essential Tension (ET), and The Road since Structure (RSS). Also, the abbreviations of Maslow’s books: The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance (PSR), Toward a Psychology of Being (TPB), Motivation and Personality (MP), Farther Reaches of Human Nature (FR), Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences (RVP), and Future Visions: The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow (FV).
It is little known that Kuhn was also greatly influenced by classical Freudian psychoanalysis. As noticed by Forester (2007, 785–789; see also Andresen 1999, S59–S61), this influence was shaped by personal and family milieu, personal experience, and the intellectual climate Kuhn was part in his early years. In the first place, some of his closest family members, especially his mother and his paternal aunt, were enthusiastic about the psychoanalytic movement in America during the 1930s and the 1940s, and were acquainted with and active in psychoanalytic circles (interesting also to note, Kuhn’s youngest son was later to become a psychiatrist and psychotherapist). Further, being a “neurotic, insecure young man” with “relations with women almost nonexistent” (RSS, 280), in 1946 Kuhn entered a two-year-long personal psychoanalysis by two orthodox Freudian analysts, which however resulted with little practical help but great deepening of his own interest in the field. And finally, while being at Harvard, Kuhn had been visiting the members of The Psychoanalytic Society in San Francisco with one of his closest Harvard friends Joe Weiss, a trained psychoanalyst, and at Princeton he spent time with members of the Institute for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies, where he even gave a talk at one occasion. Kuhn himself acknowledged the influence of psychoanalysis not only on his general interest in “climbing into other people’s heads” (ibid.) but most importantly on his work as a historian of science; moreover, in his own words, “I think myself that a lot of what I started doing as a historian, or the level of my ability to do it… came out of my experience in psychoanalysis” (ibid.). The psychoanalytic provenance of Kuhn’s work is important for the present paper because of Maslow’s own partial adherence to psychoanalysis in his psychology of science.
The book was an elaboration of a paper delivered by Maslow in February 1966 as the John Dewey Lecture at the annual meeting of the John Dewey Society for the Study of Education and Culture.
Other Maslow's philosophical influences include Michael Polanyi, F.C.S. Northrop and Jacob Bronowski, but Kuhn’s work was his primary source of inspiration, and a shaping material for his psychology of science.
The review published in Boston Herald, reprinted on the back cover of 1969 paperback edition of PSR.
The only exception being Steve Fuller, who offered a brief but fair account of Maslow’s place and role in the history of the psychology of science (see Fuller 2013, 33–35).
The notion is somewhat difficult to translate, and has been variously translated as ‘community feeling’, ‘social feeling’, ‘social sense’ etc.
Although the primary purpose of this paper is not a critical assessment of Maslow’s theory itself (there is an abundance of literature on this), there are some common misconceptions of the prepotent nature of the human needs that nevertheless need to be addressed. First, the relationship between the fulfilment of human needs and our health does not function on a principle ‘all or nothing’. As Maslow was repeatedly stressing, not all possible needs at each level must be satisfied in order that a subsequent level could become a motivator. For example, Maslow roughly estimated that an average healthy person satisfies perhaps 85 % of her physiological needs, 70 % of her safety needs, 50 % of her love needs, 40 % of her self-esteem need, and 10 % of her self-actualization needs (MP, 54). The hierarchy should be thus described more in terms of “decreasing percentages of satisfaction as we go up the hierarchy of prepotency” (MP, 54). Second, the need hierarchy is often presented as if it were a rigid fixed order, but Maslow cautioned that—although for most people these basic needs apply in about the indicated order—that there could be some exceptions. For example, there are people for whom self-esteem seems to be more important than love, there are creative persons, artists most primarily, in whom creativeness emerges not as a self-actualization due to the fulfilment of the lower conative needs but apparently in spite of lack of this fulfilment, be it hunger, low self-esteem, unrecognized potentials, love disappointments, etc., and there are people who risk even their lives for values and ideals (MP, 52–53). And finally, no human behavior is motivated exclusively by a single need, but is the result of a simultaneous action of multiple needs. For example, a sexual behavior is rarely only a physiological need; for some it may represent a desire to impress a partner, to assure his or her masculinity or femininity, or a desire for closeness, safety, love, friendship or for any combination of these (MP, 23, 55–56).
Except being motivated with his own rich personal experience as a practicing psychologist, Maslow’s insights into the nature of ‘safety-motivated’ science were particularly inspired also by the work of Lawrence S. Kubie, whom he explicitly mentioned as one of the rare psychoanalysts of his time who had seriously taken the job of “criticizing science from the point of view of their data” (PSR, xiv), and who extensively demonstrated how unconscious factors “may exercise a profound influence on the later work of a scientific investigator, even to the extent of determining his choice of science as a career, his field of work in science, the problems he chooses, the causes he espouses, and the very experiments which he undertakes” (Kubie 1953, 611), as well as how “scientific activities of the adult can be distorted by the same unconscious childhood conflicts out of which his original interest in science may have arisen (ibid., 602; see also Kubie 1961). In fact, in Maslow’s time there was already an abundance of literature on the psychodynamics of scientists. Bush (1969, 155) concluded, in agreement with Maslow’s description of ‘safety-motivated’ science, that these studies strongly indicate how “science not only provides a setting in which many wishes, conflicts, and family dramas can be lived out, [but how] it also affords many important protective reassurances. It can serve as a self-insulating sanctuary or refuge from other painful problems and provide structural support for obsessive types of defense and coping mechanisms through the very order, precision, and rationality of science.”
According to Guilford (1950, 1967), one of the pioneers of modern research on creativity, convergent thinking is characterized by a technically oriented search for the single best answer to a well-defined question, requiring only the application of already existing and well-known ontological, logical and decision-making repertoire and no significant creativity. Contrary to this, divergent thinking results with novelty and often in fact with multiple solutions to a given but not necessarily a well-posed and clear-cut problem, it is not conditioned by the familiar and conventional but instead calls for new paths and strategies that defies the learned patterns of thought, and is inherently associated with creativity.
I am thankful to a reviewer for bringing this issue to my attention.
Interestingly enough, Maslow was in fact personally highly critical of the 1960s counterculture movement and its leaders, not of their goals but their methods. “The hippie creed does offer the highest value”, he wrote in 1969, “but these young people don't at all know how to attain these, and so, they end up destroying the very goals for which they wish” (Maslow 1996, 144). He was a hero of the counterculture but surely an ‘uneasy’ one (Hoffman 1988, 287).
In formulating his model of ‘characterologically relative’ science, Maslow was greatly influenced, not by other professional psychologists, but by a physical chemist David Lindsay Watson, particularly by his nowadays little known 1938 book Scientists are Human, in which Watson, contrary to common tacit assumption that “chief operations by which science is created are those which are performed before the footlights, in the laboratory or the study, and recorded so impressively in scientific publications“, tried to show that “what goes on within the personality of the discoverer (often without his knowledge) and in his interaction with his social setting, is just as important—sometimes much more so“(Watson 1938, xiii). In his Foreword to Watson's book John Dewey concisely summarized this intention: “Dr. Watson accomplishes a much-needed work, admirable in form and content, showing how science itself is limited, arrested, deflected, distorted, by the ‘mental world’ which reflects our social organization. He shows by direct demonstration, rather than by demonstration through argument, that the prevalence of mechanical modes of social organization has produced not merely mechanistic philosophies of science - a relatively minor matter - but a mechanism in the mind of the inquirer which stands in the way of the manifestation of his whole personality in the scientific work he does—major matter. The exclusion of the full personality from the work of the scientist takes its toll in what is scientifically accomplished—in the methods of science and the body of knowledge which is their fruit” (ibid., ix). The mentioned anonymity of Watson’s book is an unfortunate state of affairs concerning not only contemporary psychology of science but also sociology of scientific knowledge, since Watson, besides an extensive psychological analysis of science, also provided a thought-provoking argumentation for the thesis that science is relative to “beliefs, customs, prejudices, and institutions of the society” (Watson 1938, 49). Thus, while it may be true, as already noticed by Maslow himself, that Watson has suffered the faith of many forerunners who have not been “sufficiently appreciated, honored, or even noticed“(PSR, xx), his ‘strong urge’ to read and recognize Watson’s work nevertheless still remains acute for all those interested in the psycho-social dimension of science.
That seems to be still prevailing even after the substantial and long-lasting critique provided by historians, philosophers and sociologists of science. According to this critique, standard histories of science “romanticize scientists, inflate the drama of their discoveries, cast scientists and the process of science in monumental proportion… and distort history and foster unwarranted stereotypes about the nature of science“, which results not just with ordinary misconceptions of science but with myths in the literal sense (Allchin 2003, 329–330).
As put by Scharfstein in a semi-joking tone, “philosophers have long been cautioned against ‘psychologism’, which appears to repel them much as sin repels (and attracts) theologians” (1980, 45). A lively illustration of this attitude can be found, for example, in the reaction of the HPS community to the BSHS conference ‘Psychoanalyzing Robert Boyle”, held at Birkbeck College, University of London, on 12 July 1997. Commenting on the fact of a negligible number of professional historians and philosophers of science attending the conference, including the noticeable absence of several British historians who have written on Boyle, Cantor reminded us that “many historians of science are antipathetic to psychological and psychoanalytical approaches”, sharing “the abhorrence of many physical scientists for psychology (and sociology) in general and for psychoanalysis in particular” (Cantor 1999, 316).
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Gregory Feist for his interest in my work on the Maslovian Kuhn and to his valuable comments and advices, to Steve Fuller for precious bits of information about the relationship between Kuhn and Maslow, especially for informing me about the existence of the Maslow-Kuhn correspondence and for discussing its content and context, to Myles Crowley of the MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections for his complaisant assistance in accessing the mentioned correspondence in the Thomas S. Kuhn Papers, to Pavel Gregorić for his careful reading of the manuscript and his suggestions, and, last but not least, to two anonymous reviewers for providing constructive comments and suggestions that have essentially improved the quality of the paper. This work has been fully supported by the Croatian Science Foundation under the project number 5343.
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Kožnjak, B. Kuhn Meets Maslow: The Psychology Behind Scientific Revolutions. J Gen Philos Sci 48, 257–287 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-016-9352-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-016-9352-x