Abraham Maslow's Eupsychian Society, Education, and Management

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Jules Evans:

"Maslow is nothing if not grand in his vision. He lays down not just a ‘new image’ for man, but a new model for society. It should become Eupsychian — a society geared towards the creation of self-actualized people.

He was interested in Eupsychian education, which meant a complete overhaul of western education to make its goal the creation of self-actualized people soaked in B-values. He was inspired by Aldous Huxley’s vision of ‘integrated education’, and the Utopian model he laid down in Island, where citizens learn not just knowledge, but the art of good sex, good aesthetics, good dancing, good mystical experiences, even the art of dying.

He also saw promise in Esalen, the human potential movement founded in Big Sur, California, in 1962. He happened to stumble in, when he and his wife were driving down Route 1. They needed a place to stay so checked into a motel. When he signed in, the receptionist saw his name and said ‘Maslow? The Abraham Maslow? Maslow! Maslow!’ It turned out he’d checked in at Esalen, where all the staff were grooving over his books. He returned and gave seminars throughout the Sixties, helping to formulate what became the human potential movement. Here he is giving a talk on self-actualization at Esalen, which he described as a ‘semi-permeable membrane, selecting out nice people’.

Such centres spread through the western world and still thrive today. As Maslow hoped, they really did become something like churches for the unchurched, disseminating a new ethic of authenticity — find the Real You, discover your vocation, follow your bliss.

Maslow was also interested in ‘Eupsychian management’ — how to help companies become places of self-actualization, where employees are treated as self-actualizing human beings who seek more than simply stability and money. He encouraged the importance of creativity, intimacy, vulnerability, and the sort of non-hierarchical intimate discussion known as the T-group or encounter session. His ideas remain hugely influential in management, especially his hierarchy of needs. You could say he helped to create what The Atlantic called the religion of Workism, based on the idea that work should be a temple of self-actualization." (https://julesevans.medium.com/abraham-maslow-empirical-spirituality-and-the-crisis-of-values-34148b775f1a)