Running head: MASLOW’S BETRAYAL OF RUTH BENEDICT?
Maslow’s Betrayal of Ruth Benedict
Rene Anne Smith and Kennetth D. Feigenbaum
University of Maryland University College
Author Note
Kenneth D. Feigenbaum Department of Psychology, University of Maryland University
College; Rene Anne Smith, School of Undergraduate Studies, University of Maryland University
College.
Correspondence concerning this paper should be addressed to Kenneth D. Feigenbaum,
Department of Psychology, University of Maryland University College, Adelphi, MD 20783.
MASLOW’S BETRAYAL OF BENEDICT?
2
Abstract
During the summer of 1938, Abe Maslow was engaged in a field study of the Northern
Blackfeet. He received a grant-in aid from the Social Science Research Councile under the
sponsorship of Ruth Benedict to study the “security needs” of the tribe. This project reflected
Benedict’s long term interest in her concept of synergic and non-synergic societies which
culminated with her publication of Patterns of Culture (Benedict, 1934). It was Benedict’s thesis
that synergic societies, such as Zuni, had most of their psychological security needs met; whereas
low synergic societies, such as the Dobu, did not. Initially, Maslow as a neophyte anthropologist
employed a questionnaire to members of the Northern Blackfoot tribe to measure psychological
security needs. However, he soon realized that the questionnaire was inappropriate and began to
utilize ethnographic interviews. Scholars have already postulated that this experience had lasting
effects upon the Maslow’s later development of such concepts as “self-actualization and “peak
experience” (Maslow, 1964, 1971; Heavy Head, 2006). However valid this is, the thesis of this
paper is that Maslow’s anthropological turn disappeared over time and his later work indicated
that he did not understand the synergic collective anthropological approach of Benedict but
rather misused the concept of synergy to promote a person centered psychological reductionist
position mostly devoid of its cultural context.
MASLOW’S BETRAYAL OF BENEDICT?
3
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
MASLOW’S BETRAYAL OF BENEDICT?
primate research was first conducted, that he believed the environment to have elicited any sort
of causal effect upon 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 (1936, pp.268275).
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 (Maslow, 1964, p.153; Young, 2005, p.156) . It is during this
time, and later when he obtained a post-doctoral 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 and the resulting social
behavior as 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 WWII. Studying the work of Ruth Benedict, and his close contact with Margaret
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MASLOW’S BETRAYAL OF BENEDICT?
5
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 focus on understanding the larger problems within society, which psychology
previously had not addressed. He was particularly disturbed with the principle 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 the political and social climate of the times, but also to his
childhood. While considering that attributing his motivations and behavior as having had more
to do with the influence of the culture and environment in which he existed, rather than 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 which permeated his youth (Hoffman, 1988). Later as an adult,
he was still subject 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 which would not
MASLOW’S BETRAYAL OF BENEDICT?
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 social
Darwinism—which so profoundly influenced his anthropological viewpoint.
He also was witness to the destructive forces of the male dominated collegiate
atmosphere which existed at Columbia, and the personal and professional conflicts which lay
waste to the aspirations of Benedict and Mead in those institutions by formidable male opponents
such as Sapir and Linton (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, where 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.
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MASLOW’S BETRAYAL OF BENEDICT?
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 (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” (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, 1969,
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 in order to root out patterns of cultural relativity in the
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MASLOW’S BETRAYAL OF BENEDICT?
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” (Young, 2005, p.93). 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 than as “social function” as was
Benedicts 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 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
something which 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
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MASLOW’S BETRAYAL OF BENEDICT?
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” and positioned people in hierarchies of social dominance while focusing on
“dominance-feeling” and it’s 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; Young,
2005, pp.174-176). 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, p.411). 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-aide 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 which also included Lucien Hanks and Jane Richardson (Maslow, 1943, p.2). 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
(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
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MASLOW’S BETRAYAL OF BENEDICT?
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 we see a temporary reformulation of social behavior in effect, as a 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 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.
Benedict commented negatively on atomistic foci as end points, of the fieldworkers in her
letters to Mead (Young, 2005). It becomes evident that Benedict was not entirely pleased with
his 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
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MASLOW’S BETRAYAL OF BENEDICT?
11
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
which 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.
The 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
MASLOW’S BETRAYAL OF BENEDICT?
isolable variation in one or a few dimensions of personality” (Maslow, 1940, p.322). In this
paper 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 (1940, p.321).
Regarding the use of synergy, in Synergy in the Society and in the Individual (1964), he
utilized synergic principles to describe American business organizations (p.161). 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 upon his
personality. Moreover, while 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 upon
the behavior of the person rather it becomes a false self, or social self image (Young, 2005,
p.185), 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, 1964, 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 (Young, 2005).
Maslow has reduced the concept of the relation of mutually beneficial cultures, to a relationship
between an individual and an institution which has already been accounted for under Benedict’s
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MASLOW’S BETRAYAL OF BENEDICT?
principles of symmetrical and non-symmetrical behavior between an individual and an
institution, or put another way, individual variance (Young, 2005). While 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, 1964, p.208). Likewise in
Further Notes on the Psychology of Being (1964) he 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...
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”(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 (1964) he returned to concepts of Freud
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MASLOW’S BETRAYAL OF BENEDICT?
and Adler placing many needs into the realm of unconscious motivation. Further Maslow (1964)
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.
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 (1964) 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
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MASLOW’S BETRAYAL OF BENEDICT?
those in close contact to him”. To delineate this thinking is almost absurd in that, 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, but 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 paper, 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).
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MASLOW’S BETRAYAL OF BENEDICT?
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, the 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? While
Maslow’s B-motivations included pro-social behavior, it was on an individual basis. 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, 1964). Yet, according to Benedict’s studies “Mental illness
itself was a culturally defined state” and that “abnormal is not a consistent category crossculturally but is variable and culturally defined, just as normal is culturally variable” (Young,
2005, p.179). Further, 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 which Benedict might have offered as a way to understand individuals in their culture.
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MASLOW’S BETRAYAL OF BENEDICT?
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 which
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.
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