In "Toward a Psychology of Being," Abraham Maslow lays the philosophical and empirical groundwork for what he called the "Third Force" in psychology—a humanistic alternative to both behaviorism and psychoanalysis that takes seriously the human capacity for growth, creativity, self-actualization, and what he dared to call peak experiences. Published in 1962 and revised in 1968, this book remains one of the most quietly revolutionary texts in the history of psychology. Maslow's core argument is disarmingly simple: a psychology that studies only illness, dysfunction, and deficit can never produce an adequate understanding of human nature. To understand what humans are capable of, you have to study health, excellence, and the furthest reaches of human experience—not just the basement but the penthouse.

What makes this book essential for IMHU's mission isn't just its historical importance, though that's considerable. It's that Maslow identified, with remarkable precision, the blind spots that continue to limit mainstream psychology and psychiatry more than sixty years later. His insistence that peak experiences—moments of ecstasy, wonder, transcendence, and profound meaning—are natural human phenomena deserving scientific study anticipated the entire field of research on spiritual experience that IMHU draws upon. His concept of self-actualization provided a framework for understanding human development that includes but far exceeds the absence of pathology. And his willingness to study the healthiest, most fully functioning people he could find—rather than exclusively studying those in distress—opened a door that psychology is still, decades later, only beginning to walk through.

Maslow's critique of mainstream psychology begins with a devastating observation: a discipline that draws its understanding of human nature primarily from the study of neurosis, psychosis, and dysfunction will inevitably produce a distorted picture of what human beings are. Imagine trying to understand music by studying only tone-deaf people, or trying to understand vision by studying only the blind. That's roughly what psychology has been doing, Maslow argues, by building its theories almost exclusively from clinical populations. The result is a psychology that can describe illness with considerable sophistication but has almost nothing to say about health, growth, meaning, creativity, love, or the experiences that make life feel most worth living.

This isn't just an academic complaint. The deficit orientation has practical consequences for how people are treated. When the only framework available is pathology, every human experience gets filtered through a diagnostic lens. Intense joy becomes mania. Deep grief becomes depression. Spiritual experience becomes psychosis. Passionate commitment becomes obsession. The rich, complex texture of human inner life gets flattened into symptom categories, and the possibility that people might be experiencing something valuable, meaningful, or developmental—rather than merely disordered—never enters the clinical picture. Maslow argued that psychology needed to expand its foundations, not by abandoning the study of pathology but by complementing it with an equally rigorous study of human flourishing. The question isn't just "What goes wrong?" but "What does it look like when things go right?"—and that question remains as urgently relevant today as when Maslow first posed it.

Maslow's research on peak experiences—moments of intense joy, wonder, transcendence, and self-forgetfulness—was groundbreaking in its willingness to take these experiences seriously as data rather than dismissing them as anomalies or pathology. Through extensive interviews with self-actualizing individuals, he found that peak experiences shared consistent features: a sense of unity or wholeness, a feeling of effortlessness and grace, the loss of ordinary time awareness, a profound sense that reality is good and beautiful, and the temporary transcendence of the individual ego. These experiences, he reported, were consistently described as among the most valuable and meaningful moments of people's lives.

The parallels with mystical experience are obvious, and Maslow was explicit about the connection. He argued that peak experiences were the natural, secular equivalent of what religious traditions describe as mystical union, satori, samadhi, or divine encounter. By stripping away the theological interpretations and studying the experience itself, Maslow showed that transcendence is a natural human capacity—not the exclusive property of saints, monastics, or the religiously devout. This democratization of spiritual experience was radical in 1962 and remains radical in how IMHU approaches its work. If peak experiences are natural, universal, and among the most meaningful events in human life, then a mental health system that ignores, pathologizes, or has no framework for understanding them is failing at a fundamental level. Maslow gave the field permission to take these experiences seriously. That permission has still not been fully accepted.

Maslow's concept of self-actualization—the process of becoming everything one is capable of becoming—provided psychology with something it desperately needed: a positive model of human development that extends beyond the mere absence of disorder. Self-actualizing people, as Maslow studied them, weren't just healthy in the sense of being free from neurosis. They were creative, spontaneous, deeply ethical, capable of profound relationships, comfortable with solitude, democratic in their attitudes, resistant to cultural conformity, and regularly moved by peak experiences. They were, in Maslow's assessment, more fully human than most people, not because they were extraordinary in their circumstances but because they had fewer internal blocks to their own growth.

This idea that psychological health has a positive dimension—that it's not just about removing problems but about actualizing potential—has enormous implications for how we think about mental health care. A system oriented only toward reducing symptoms can bring people from negative to neutral, from suffering to functional. But Maslow was pointing toward something beyond functional: a way of being in the world characterized by vitality, authenticity, meaning, and connection to one's deepest nature. This vision of human potential aligns closely with what many spiritual traditions describe as the aim of practice—not just the absence of suffering but the full flowering of human consciousness. For IMHU, Maslow's work provides historical precedent and psychological legitimacy for the claim that mental health care should aim higher than symptom management—that it should support the full development of the human being, including their spiritual and transcendent capacities.

In what may be the book's most philosophically daring section, Maslow describes what he calls "Being-values" or "B-values"—the values that self-actualizing people tend to gravitate toward and that peak experiences seem to reveal as inherent in reality itself. These include truth, goodness, beauty, wholeness, aliveness, uniqueness, perfection, justice, simplicity, richness, playfulness, self-sufficiency, and meaningfulness. Maslow argued that these aren't arbitrary cultural preferences but intrinsic values—qualities that human beings at their healthiest and most developed consistently recognize as real and important.

This is a bold claim with significant implications. If B-values are discovered rather than invented—if the most psychologically healthy people consistently converge on the same values not because of cultural conditioning but because those values reflect something real about the nature of reality—then psychology borders on philosophy and even theology. Maslow was aware of this implication and didn't shy away from it. He suggested that peak experiences provide a kind of cognitive access to reality's deeper structure, revealing values and truths that ordinary consciousness misses. This isn't far from what contemplative traditions have always claimed: that certain states of consciousness provide genuine knowledge about the nature of reality that is inaccessible from ordinary waking awareness. Maslow wasn't interested in religious metaphysics, but his empirical observations kept pointing toward conclusions that intersect with spiritual wisdom—a convergence that IMHU's work continues to explore and develop.

Maslow knew that his work was incomplete. He described "Toward a Psychology of Being" as a series of explorations rather than a finished system, and he acknowledged that the methodological challenges of studying peak experiences and self-actualization were formidable. His reliance on self-selected samples, his tendency toward idealization of self-actualizing people, and his limited attention to cultural and gender diversity are all legitimate criticisms. The positive psychology movement that emerged decades later addressed some of these methodological concerns while building on Maslow's foundational insights, though it often did so while stripping away the more radical and spiritually resonant dimensions of his work.

What endures from Maslow's contribution is something more fundamental than any particular finding: a vision of what psychology could be if it took the full range of human experience seriously. He imagined a discipline that studied love as rigorously as it studied anxiety, that investigated creativity with the same precision applied to cognitive deficits, that explored transcendence with the same empirical commitment devoted to psychopathology. That vision remains largely unrealized within mainstream psychology, which continues to be overwhelmingly oriented toward disorder, dysfunction, and deficit. For IMHU, Maslow stands as a founding figure—someone who saw, with remarkable clarity, that human beings are capable of far more than our clinical categories suggest, and that a psychology worthy of its subject would need to expand its boundaries to include the spiritual, the transcendent, and the ultimately meaningful. The psychology of being that Maslow pointed toward is the psychology IMHU is still working to create.