Abraham Maslow was born on April 1, 1908 at Brooklyn, the eldest of seven children to his parents, who were uneducated Jewish immigrants from Russia. He was smart but shy, and became very lonely as a boy, and found his refuge in books. Maslow initially attended City College in New York. His father hoped he would pursue law, but he went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin to study psychology. While there, he married his cousin Bertha, against his parents wishes. He and Bertha moved to Wisconsin so that he could attend the University of Wisconsin. Here, he became interested in psychology. He received his BA in 1930, his MA in 1931, and his PhD in 1934, all in psychology, all from the University of Wisconsin.

A year after graduation, he returned to New York. He began teaching full time at Brooklyn College. From 1937 to 1951, Maslow was on the faculty of Brooklyn College. Abraham Maslow carried out his investigations into human behavior between 1939 and 1943. In 1943, Maslow published his influential paper: 'A theory of human motivation' (Psychological Review 50, pp.370-396). In this paper, he presents a hierarchy of needs, that act as motivators. As long as a more basic need is not satisfied, 'higher' needs are not acting as motivators. Maslow took this idea and created his now famous hierarchy of needs. Maslow suggested that there are five sets of goals which may be called basic needs. This theory was further elaborated in his subsequent work - "Motivation and Personality" (1954)

He arranged these into a series of different levels or the order of importance of these basic needs. Man's basic needs are physiological, for example, hunger, thirst, sleep, etc. When these are satisfied they are replaced by safety needs reflecting his desire for protection against danger or deprivation. These in turn, when satisfied, are replaced by the need for love or belonging to, which are functions of man's gregariousness and his desire to belong to a group, to give and receive friendship and to associate happily with people. When these needs have been satisfied, there is the esteem needs, i.e. the desire for self-esteem and self-respect, which are affected by a person's standing reputation, and his need for recognition and appreciation. Finally, individuals have a need for self actualization or a desire for self-fulfillment, which is an urge by individuals for self-development, creativity and job satisfaction.

"For example, if you are hungry and thirsty, you will tend to try to take care of the thirst first. After all, you can do without food for weeks, but you can only do without water for a couple of days! Thirst is a "stronger" need than hunger. Likewise, if you are very very thirsty, but someone has put a choke hold on you and you can't breath, which is more important? The need to breathe, of course. On the other hand, sex is less powerful than any of these. Let's face it, you won't die if you don't get it!"^*.

The five basic needs are:

• physiological Needs,

These are primary essentials such as as hunger, thirst, need for breathable air and so on. These needs have to be satisfied before everything else. In the words of Maslow-

"For the man who is extremely and dangerously hungry, no other interest exist but food. He dreams food, he remembers food, het thinks about food, he emotes about food, he perceives only food and he want only food (...) For our chronically and extremely hungry man, Utopia can be defined simply as a place where there is plenty of food. He tends to think that, if only he is garanteed food for the rest of his life, he will be perfectly happy and will never want anything more. Life itself tends to be defined in terms of eating. Anything else will be defined as unimportant (...) Such a man may fairly be said to live by bread alone (...) But what happens to man's desires when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled? At once other (and 'higher') needs emerge and these, rather than physiological hunger, dominate the organism".

• safety,

"If the physiological needs are relatively well gratified, then there emerges a new set of needs, which we may categorize roughly as the safety needs. All that has been said of the physiological needs is equally true, although in a lesser degree, of these desires. The organism may equally well be wholly dominated by them".

The nature of the safety needs can be studied efficiently in children and infants, but "even when adults do feel their safety to be threatened we may not be able to see this on the surface. Infants will react in a total fashion as if they were endangered, if they are disturbed or dropped suddenly, startled by loud noises, flashing light, or other unusual sensory stimulation, by rough handling, by general loss of support in the mother's arms, or by inadequate support". A child wants "..some kind of undisrupted routine or rhythm. He seems to want a predictable, orderly world. For instance, injustice, unfairness, or inconsistency in the parents seems to make a child feel anxious and unsafe. This attitude may be not so much because of injustice per se or any particular pains involved, but rather because this treatment threatens to make the world look unreliable, or unsafe, or unpredictable. Young children seem to thrive better under a system which has at least a skeletal outline of rigidity, in which there is a schedule of a kind, some sort of routine, something that can be counted upon, not only for the present but also far into the future".

On account of unsatisfied safety needs, the need for other drives recede and have lessened chances to operate. The safety needs continue to dominate, making higher needs hardly discernible.

"The healthy, normal, fortunate adult in our culture is largely satisfied in his safety needs. The peaceful, smoothly running, 'good' society ordinarely makes its members feel safe enough from wild animals, extremes of temperature, criminals, assault and murder, tyranny, etc. Therefore, in a very real sense, he no longer has any safety needs as active motivators. Just as a sated man no longer feels hungry, a safe man no longer feels endangered. If we wish to see these needs directly and clearly we must turn to neurotic or near-neurotic individuals, and to the economic and social underdogs. In between these extremes, we can perceive the expressions of safety needs only in such phenomena as, for instance, the common preference for a job with tenure and protection, the desire for a savings account, and for insurance of various kinds (...) Other broader aspects of the attempt to seek safety and stability in the world are seen in the very common preference for familiar rathr than unfamiliar things, or for the known rather than the unknown. The tendency to have some religion or world-philosophy that organizes the universe and the men in it into some sort of satisfactorily coherent, meaningful whole is also in part motivated by safety-seeking".

• love,

"If both the physiological and the safety needs are fairly well gratified, then there will emerge the love and affection and belongingness needs, and the whole cycle already described will repeat itself with this new center. Now the person will feel keenly, as never before, the absence of friends, or a sweetheart, or a wife, or children (...) In our society the thwarting of these needs is the most commonly found core in cases of maladjustment and more severe psychopathology (...) love is not synonymous with sex. Sex may be studied as a purily physiological need. Ordinarily sexual behavior is multi-determined, that is to say, determined not only by sexual but also by other needs, chief among which are the love and affection needs. Also not to be overlooked is the fact that the love needs involve both giving and receiving love".

• esteem,

"Next, we begin to look for a little self-esteem. Maslow noted two versions of esteem needs, a lower one and a higher one. The lower one is the need for the respect of others, the need for status, fame, glory, recognition, attention, reputation, appreciation, dignity, even dominance. The higher form involves the need for self-respect, including such feelings as confidence, competence, achievement, mastery, independence, and freedom. Note that this is the "higher" form because, unlike the respect of others, once you have self-respect, it's a lot harder to lose!"^*

"All of the preceding four levels he calls deficit needs, or D-needs. If you don't have enough of something -- i.e. you have a deficit -- you feel the need. But if you get all you need, you feel nothing at all! In other words, they cease to be motivating. As the old blues song goes, "you don't miss your water till your well runs dry!"^*

• self-actualization or self-fulfillment.

Maslow has used a variety of terms to refer to this level: He has called it growth motivation (in contrast to deficit motivation), being needs (or B-needs, in contrast to D-needs), and self-actualization. The need represents the desire to realise one full potential for self-development on a continued basis. One longs to become what one is capable of. It is a the final level where one's ambition can logically aspire him to reach."They involve the continuous desire to fulfill potentials, to "be all that you can be." They are a matter of becoming the most complete, the fullest, "you" -- hence the term, self-actualization."^*

"Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimatelt happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization".

Only a few persons would be able to safisfy this need."Now, in keeping with his theory up to this point, if you want to be truly self-actualizing, you need to have your lower needs taken care of, at least to a considerable extent. This makes sense: If you are hungry, you are scrambling to get food; If you are unsafe, you have to be continuously on guard; If you are isolated and unloved, you have to satisfy that need; If you have a low sense of self-esteem, you have to be defensive or compensate. When lower needs are unmet, you can't fully devote yourself to fulfilling your potentials.

"It isn't surprising, then, the world being as difficult as it is, that only a small percentage of the world's population is truly, predominantly, self-actualizing. Maslow at one point suggested only about two percent!

"The question becomes, of course, what exactly does Maslow mean by self-actualization. To answer that, we need to look at the kind of people he called self-actualizers. Fortunately, he did this for us.

"He began by picking out a group of people, some historical figures, some people he knew, whom he felt clearly met the standard of self-actualization. Included in this august group were people like Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, William James, Benedict Spinoza, and others. He then looked at their biographies, writings, the acts and words of those he knew personally, and so on. From these sources, he developed a list of qualities that seemed characteristic of these people, as opposed to the great mass of us."^*

^*Dr. C. George Boeree, Shippensburg University,Psychology Department. Article on Abraham Maslow in the series titled "Personality Theories" in his electronic book URL - http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/maslow.html

The Needs Theory is compatible with the economic theory of demand. The urge to fulfil needs is seen as the prime engine or motivator of people in pursuit of specific activities. Human needs are multiple, complex and interrelated. Needs set objectives and further resulting in the pursuit of a course of action. The theory seeks analyse human behaviour with reference to the motivating factors that act as the driving force. The theory provides a convenient conceptual framework for the study of motivation.