Maslow, Abraham H.

In its first edition, Abraham Maslow's "Toward a Psychology of Being" (1962) sold more than 100,000 copies. Like R. D. Laing, Maslow questioned the old psychoanalytic notions of being well or ill "adjusted" to the world and spoke from a broadly human base. Human nature---the inner nature of every individual which is uniquely his or her own---"seems not to be . . . necessarily evil; . . . the basic human capacities are on their face either neutral, premoral or positively good." What we call evil behavior appears most often to be a secondary reaction to frustration of this intrinsic nature." On