Maslow on Higher Love

Discover how Abraham Maslow's insights into love reveal a profound distinction between deficiency love (D-love) and being love (B-love), and how these concepts can transform our relationships and self-understanding. This episode explores Maslow's research on healthy, exceptional humans and their capacity for higher love. 

• The life and influence of Abraham Maslow on psychology and personal growth 
• The hierarchy of needs and the simplified ERG theory by Clay Alderfer
• The concept of deficiency love (D-love) versus being love (B-love)
• Early attachment studies by Spitz, Bowlby, and Levy and their importance for human survival
• How love contributes to self-actualization and the well-being of exceptional individuals
• Practical applications of B-love in caregiving, relationships, and spiritual practice
• Maslow’s parallels between B-love, mystics’ love for God, and appreciation of art 
• The impact of love on self-acceptance, growth, and human potential
• Personal stories illustrating the practice of love and compassion, including rescue of wildlife 

Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction: The episode’s focus on Abraham Maslow and higher love 00:25 - Maslow’s study of exceptional human beings and focusing on what’s good 00:54 - The hierarchy of needs and Clay Alderfer's ERG theory 1:24 - How needs can be flipped and the resilience of self-actualized individuals 2:24 - Maslow’s teachings on love and its role in human development 3:22 - Maslow’s method: studying healthy, creative, high-potential individuals 3:51 - Celebrated figures studied by Maslow, including Abraham Lincoln and Albert Schweitzer 4:32 - The concept of reverence for life and compassion in Albert Schweitzer 5:24 - Eleanor Roosevelt and the importance of universal human rights 5:35 - Maslow’s insights on different types of love: D-love and B-love 6:10 - Explanation of deficiency love (D-love) and early attachment needs 7:14 - Early attachment research and the tragic findings of Spitz’s studies 8:13 - The effects of lack of maternal attachment and attachment theory support 9:55 - The role of love in survival and Maslow’s view of deficiency love as a hole 11:23 - The nature of B-love as unselfish and abundant 11:34 - Qualities of B-love: unconditional, non-possessive, and joy-giving 12:01 - The therapeutic and spiritual power of experiencing B-love 12:54 - Personal stories of practicing love in caregiving and work 14:08 - The energy and vitality gained from loving without expectation 15:15 - B-love's spiritual and aesthetic connections 16:21 - Romantic love and the differences from B-love, including anxiety and independence 17:22 - The qualities of B-love in romantic relationships: autonomy, generosity, and depth 18:22 - The “love is blind” myth explained through neurochemistry 19:34 - The concept of intra-object richness—the fascination with loved ones 20:30 - Details and love for the beloved as an expression of deep connection 21:16 - How B-love influences self-perception, acceptance, and growth 22:02 - The distinction that deficiency love (D-love) can be gratified, but B-love offers spiritual fulfillment 22:58 - Personal story about rescuing baby raccoons, illustrating D-love and compassion 24:31 - The story of rescuing raccoons and connecting it to Maslow’s ideas 27:19 - Upcoming episode on peak experiences and plateau states in exceptional humans 28:47 - Practicing higher love and starting wherever we are emotionally 29:13 - Closing remarks and gratitude

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

This is Psychology America with Dr. Alexandra. Welcome to my channel. For every life stage, we have questions. Let's enhance our lives together as we explore the things that matter most. I am excited to share with you this episode about Abraham Maslow on Higher Love. This episode is dedicated to the last resort Wildlife Refuge located in northern New Jersey. I will share a story about why I picked this nonprofit for today's episode. And we're going to talk about the psychologist that influenced me to become a psychologist, Abraham Maslow. He studied exceptional human beings. What made him different for his time is that rather than talking about, sorry, rather than studying what it is that was wrong with us, um, or what are the disorders of among human beings, he studied what was right, what was good, and what we could move toward to become the best versions of ourselves. He is best known for the hierarchy of needs. And this isn't why I loved Maslow. Um it's not the hierarchy of needs, but some of you may remember what that is. It's um five different layers, and the the basic, the most basic needs that we have is um physiological needs, and it goes all the way up to self-actualization. Um Clay Alderfer also studied this. Now he was the director of my program at Rutgers University, and in his earlier days, he studied Maslow and he studied the hierarchy of needs, and he came up with a different theory that simplified it, and he found that all that we really need as humans are three things existence, so that's the basic needs, relatedness and growth, existence, relatedness, and growth, ERG theory. And he in addition found that you didn't have to get those needs in order, it could be flipped around. Um, because you can only imagine if someone was, so to speak, self-actualized already, and then they hit a very difficult time and they were in poverty, it doesn't mean that they would lose all of that knowledge and ability and ability to give to others as well. So, um what I want to talk about today is specifically what Maslow learned or what Maslow taught about love and being love, and what he shared in in this book here, Toward a Psychology of Being and other research that he did. He shared what the exceptional human beings that he studied had in common about love. Now, he started his studies of these humans through identifying what he thought were very healthy, creative humans at their highest potential, so psychologically healthy, able to give back to humanity in a very special way. And he wanted to see what is it that these people have in common and then share it with all of us. One of the people that he studied, that I very much appreciate, is Abraham Lincoln, our 16th president, who brought about the abolition of slavery. He also studied Albert Schweitzer. This is a book I picked up in college. And Albert Schweitzer was a physician, also a Lutheran pastor, a humanitarian, and he is known for um well, he received a Nobel, a Nobel Peace Prize because of his philosophy on reverence for life. And he meant all of life, all creatures, and the earth even. So um, a third person he studied was Eleanor Roosevelt, who was the chairwoman of the commission that created the Declaration of Human Rights. So let us begin with what did Abraham Maslow find about love. Well, I have this book right here. Um, this book is called Toward a Psychology of Being, and I'm gonna share with you some of the things that he shared about love. He talked about two different kinds of love. One was called D-Love, and that what he meant by that was deficiency love, and another was called be love, which is being love. So let's start with de love. Um he what what he was referring to was the work that had been done so far at that time by psychologists on a type of love that was almost like an emptiness that needed to be filled. Therefore, it was a it was a deficiency of love, and you needed to fill that love in the early years of life so that you could prevent pathology, let's say. And he referred to the psychologists um Spitz, Bowlby, and Levy, who were some of the early researchers on attachment theory. I like attachment theory, and Maslow wasn't going against attachment theory, he was just differentiating this kind of love from higher level love. So let's talk about Renee Spitz. What did he do? Um, these studies are really sad to think about. He was looking, one of them is called the Foundling Studies. So he did an observational study of babies that were raised in cubicles. I know this would be really hard to even imagine, um, but he he observed what happened to them when they were raised without mothers, without caretakers, like minimum contact, and all of their nutrition needs were taken care of, and their um hygiene needs were taken care of, but they weren't really touched or stimulated or held or taken care of by by a caretaker. And he found that these babies formed something called anacletic depression. So it started with the babies crying and um calling for help basically, and then it moved into uh withdrawing, um, getting quiet and not wanting to eat. And then the third phase, you know, they would get in these like weird positions and refuse to eat, and sadly, one-third of them died. What Renee Spitz found is that well, in a different study of um women, female prisoners and their babies, is that if the babies were absent from the mom, let's say for three months, they would start to develop this anaclitic depression. But if the mom came back after not too long, let's say after three months, everything went back to normal. So his studies concluded that the attachment need to a parent was a very basic need for survival. It wasn't, we don't just need food and hygiene. Um, and the research, you know, by Bowlby and Levy also supported this idea. So as Maslow said, deficiency love is a hole which has to be filled in emptiness into which love is poured. By the way, before I go to the next section, the next section, I want to mention that I do have a podcast on attachment theory, and the episode is called Insecure in Love: Overcoming Anxious Anxious Attachment with Dr. Leslie Becker Phelps. And I also want to mention that I practiced attachment parenting with my four children and I sought to hold them as much as possible and so forth. And I love attachment parenting. Okay, now what Maslow said that in his study of exceptional human beings, he said you would think that if they have their delove or deficiency love needs met, that that would be enough, and that they wouldn't necessarily be loving people because they wouldn't need to. But in fact, the opposite is true. These folks were more loving, so they wanted to share love, and they did share love. And this love was a different kind of love, which he called being love. So let me read to you about this. Um be being love is an unneeding love and an unselfish love. Being love is beyond the shadow of a doubt, a richer, higher, more valuable, subjective experience than be love. The therapeutic effects of experiencing be love are profound and widespread. So I'm talking about if you are giving, I I believe he was talking about whether you are giving the bee love or you are a recipient of be love, and that would make sense. But when I I'm I'm gonna share that when I worked at Newton Medical Center, I worked in a group home for um severely mentally ill adults, and this was before I went to grad school. In the beginning, I found it to be exhausting, truly. Um, and I thought, I don't think I'm gonna go into this field. This sucks the life out of me. I can't do this. But I hit a point where I made a decision that, and this was spiritual, I saw this as spiritual, I made a decision that I was going to put on love as if it was, as if like I was putting on like an invisible shield of love, and I was going to push love outwards. And I think at the time I saw it kind of like as an invisible shield that would protect me from what was exhausting me about my work prior to that. But what I found is that once I started to do this, and it was basically loving without expecting anything in return, which I don't think I consciously was prior, but it was just a different way of going about the work I did. I found that I gained energy. I found it to be energy. Well, that's repetitive, but I loved it. Once I started to do that, it completely changed my experience of the work. Um and in addition, this is what this is aligned with Dr. Robert Enright's work on agape love and forgiveness. He finds that if you practice agape love, which is the highest form of love, and there is a podcast episode on that topic on my show too, you will receive energy back. And it's paradoxical because you expect nothing back in return. You may even get a slap back, but yet you do it anyway, and it is energy giving. Back to this book and what Maslow said about it. Be love is welcomed into consciousness and is completely enjoyed. It's non-possessive and it is admiring rather than needing. It makes no trouble and is practically always pleasure giving. I'm gonna talk, I'm gonna share a little bit about. See, B Love is not necessarily romantic because he talks about it that the mystics experience this with their God that he studied. Um in fact, he compared it to the effects of the aesthetic experience of beautiful art. Um but let's talk about what he said about be love as it relates to romantic love a little bit. Here he says, be love, in be love, there is a minimum of anxiety and hostility for all practical human purposes. It may even be considered to be absent. There can, of course, be anxiety for the other, but with delove, one must always expect some degree of anxiety and hostility. And that's, you know, one of the psychologists he I was referring to, um, that Maslow referred to earlier that studied delove. If you look at the work of Levy, he does talk about a little bit of that anxiety and hostility and even manipulativeness, that's the word he uses, of people that did not experience um the fill of that delove when they were younger and how it affects them later. Be lovers, so now we're talking romantic. Be lovers are more independent of each other, more autonomous, less jealous or threatened, less needful, more individual, more disinterested. And he means that they're not getting overly involved in a bad way, right? But also simultaneously more eager to help the other toward self-actualization, more proud of his triumphs, more altruistic, generous, and fostering. The truest, most penetrating perception of the other. So this is one lover's perception or view of the other, is made possible by be love. So impressive is this, and so often validated by other people's later experience, that far from accepting the common platitude that love makes people blind, I, Abraham Maslow in this book, become more and more inclined to think of the opposite as true, namely, non-love makes us blind. Let's talk about this. Um I I did an episode on the honeymoon phase of love. Now, the saying that love is blind does apply to the honeymoon phase of love, I would say. And that has to do with the cocktail of neurotransmitters that are released during the honeymoon phase. So I like to give the advice that people who are dating should really pay attention at the beginning to all the signs because all the signs are there that you need to notice. Um, they'll just be bigger and worse later. But umce that honeymoon phase kicks in, I do believe that people are blind for six to twelve months, and then they can more uh see reality after that. However, however, uh long-term couples can get those honeymoon feelings again through doing new things together. But with that said, I know what he's saying here as far so during the honeymoon, lovers are extremely interested in the details of their lover. Okay, and then it fades. But he's talking about in be love being truly interested in your in all of the details of your lover and never getting tired of it. So later in this book, he says, he describes it as the repeated fascinated experiencing of a face that we love or a painting that we admire makes us like it more and permits us to see more and more of it in various senses. This we may call intra-object richness. So, you know that song, the Pina Calada song from the 1970s. Um there's a line and it says, I knew her smile in an instant. I knew the curve of her face. When you really love someone or something, you don't get bored of all of those details, right? And and for those animal lovers, think about how you know that this paw is a little more white and this paw is a little more of the honey color. Those details will never bore you. Um be love is a profound but testable sense, and it creates the partner, says Maslow. What he's saying is be love can make the partner receiving it feel a certain way, and that it shapes them. And in his words, it gives him a self image, it gives him. Self-acceptance, a feeling of love worthiness and respect worthiness, all of which permit him to grow. But it's a real question whether the full development of the human being is possible without it. Well I want to point out that Maslow didn't say that de love uh can't be gratified. He says de love, deficiency love, can be gratified. I just realized that I forgot to tell you the story of why I dedicated this show to the last resort wildlife refuge. And I think it relates to D Love. When I shared the story about Renee Spitz and those really sad little babies that were put in cubicles, um I recently experienced some baby raccoons in my yard. So in New Jersey, in this region, a raccoon is a nocturnal animal. It shouldn't be out, in other words, during the day. If they are out during the day, they might have rabies, and you don't want that. So we tend to be scared if you see a raccoon that's out. I was in the back of my house and I saw a little raccoon out, and it scared me. The next day I saw a baby raccoon dead on the street right in front of my house, and it made me so sad. And I picked it up with a shovel and I put it to the side. It didn't look like it had been run over, but it was dead, and I just didn't want it to be run over again. So I put it to the side. Then it was rainy, and the next thing I knew, I see another baby raccoon out in the front yard, and it's crying and crying and crying. And I said, Oh my goodness. I got on my phone to look up wildlife rescues, and there were several choices, and I just said, Okay, this one. And it was something called the last resort wildlife refuge. I write them and I very quickly received a phone call from a woman named Sally who was asking about it, and she said to me, That's probably because the mom died, they would not be out unless they were desperate. So she said, Can you please go out and catch the raccoon? I said, No, I cannot do that. You need to find someone, like that is not something I can do. She said, No, no, you can do it, you can do it. I went out there with my laundry hamper, and that little raccoon was out, and um it actually approached me. And I had this woman, Sally, in my AirPods, and she's encouraging me. And um, I'm a little scared as it as it's approaching me, and I tried to move toward it with the laundry basket, and then it would back up a little bit, and then um, you know, I would move toward and it would back up, but then it would walk toward me again. And finally I was able to put the laundry basket over it and catch it. And I was so scared as I did it, and it's going and I called my daughter. I was like, get over here, please, get me a towel. And we actually caught that little baby raccoon. And then someone from a different woman from the last resort wildlife refuge arrived, picked up that little baby with her hand, and actually she was wearing thick gloves, and then took it for safe care. And this woman, Sally, said, watch out because there's probably a den, and there may be others, and please try to catch the others if they come out. The next day there was another one. And this time I called them. And because it was kind of in a rocky area, um, a different woman from the same organization, she showed up to get the baby, and with this one with her bare hands picked up that baby raccoon, and she said, I'm not worried. When they're about this young, they hardly have teeth, and with their bare hands, saved that baby and took good care of them. So I just thought about them losing their mama and how desperate they were to come out, and I'm so grateful to that organization for taking good care of them. So thank you for being a part of this show and allowing me to share with you about B Love and Abraham Maslow, who is so special. Um the next episode is going to be about Maslow again, and it's gonna be about his um concept of peak experiences, which is one of the things he found in common in exceptional people that he studied. Um, and something called plateau experiences, um, which I only learned about last year at the American Psychological Association from a doctor, Stanley Krippner, who um saw Maslow give his last speech on that topic. Actually, I'm gonna call it high plateau experiences. So if you want to share that you have ever had a peak experience, then please text or leave a voicemail with the show, um, which you can do it. You you can, you know, however you got this podcast, um, not the video on YouTube, you will see a little link there for how you can share about um if you've had a peak experience, and that will help me with the next show. So thank you. And I hope that we can all think about being love, which can also be called in my mind agape love. Um how we can apply it to our life. And I want to say that I don't think that we have to have all of our delove met before we can practice being love. I believe that we can practice being love wherever we're at. Thank you for um being a part of the show. Thanks for listening. Bye.