Notes about Sexuality and Religion

by Edward Hoffman.

Maslow began formally presenting the specific qualities he found among self-actualizers, including their frequent peak experiences, attraction for creative work, and yearnings for world betterment.

When Maslow decided on a psychology career, he was initially drawn to behaviorism. Although its American founder John B. Watson eventually left academia for advertising after a sex scandal, he attracted countless young adherents like Maslow for his bold attacks on “unscientific parenting” and broad claims that his approach could forge a new society rooted in science rather than on outdated mores and values.
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One day just after Pearl Harbor, I was driving home and my car was stopped by a poor, pathetic parade . . . As I watched, the tears began to run down my face. I felt we didn’t understand—not Hitler, nor the Germans, nor Stalin, nor the Communists. We didn’t understand any of them. I felt that if we could understand any of them, then we could make progress. I had a vision of a peace table, with people sitting around it and talking about human nature and hatred and war and peace and brotherhood . . . It was at that moment that I realized that the rest of my life must be devoted to discovering a psychology for the peace table. That moment changed my whole life. (Hoffman, 1999, p. 137)

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This epiphany led to Maslow’s groundbreaking studies of self-actualizing people—beginning with his two favorite mentors: Max Wertheimer and
Ruth Benedict. His seminal “hierarchy of inborn needs” model appeared in the mid-1940s. More than a decade would pass before Maslow began formally presenting the specific qualities he found among self-actualizers, including their frequent peak experiences, attraction for creative work, and yearnings for world betterment.

Had World War II not occurred, it seems eminently possible that Maslow would have been content to continue his research—certainly both innovative and controversial at the time—concerning emotional security (akin to self-esteem) and its relation to sexual attitudes and behaviors. Yet intriguingly, underlying Maslow’s interest in both sexually active individuals and self-actualizers can be seen a fascination with the socially dominant: those popularly dubbed today as “alpha” males and females, whom Maslow in late career called “aggridants.”
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Maslow is rightfully praised for revitalizing religious psychology in a way no American academician had done since the days of William James. Yet it is important to note that Maslow ultimately felt more comfortable studying entrepreneurs and business organizations than mystics, sages, and exalted states of consciousness. Indeed, this predilection explains the intellectual route Maslow took in his final years — and it may well have been due to the zeitgeist. Why? Because American culture in the 1960s increasingly came to associate mysticism with hedonism in a way that he abhorred. The hippies not only dismayed Maslow; they disgusted him.

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