Accidental revolution

Abraham Maslow's role as revolutionary was accidental (Cox, 1987)—and the dismissal of his ideas may have been premature (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000; Wilber, 2000). Maslow initially attempted to synthesize Freudian and behaviorist models of human development. Instead, his theories of human motivation and self-actualization presented "a positive model of human experience" (Cox, 1987) that created a revolutionary "third force psychology" (1968, p. iii) that overthrew the mechanist perspective that had dominated psychology in the first half of the 20th century.

Maslow rejected the "first force" Skinnerian view of humans as passive pawns of their environment to stress the "profoundly holistic nature" of the human being (1987, p. xvii). Maslow's "holistic-dynamic" perspective saw the human as a purposeful organism that dynamically controls and reacts to situations to progress toward potential. Maslow also proposed to build on the "Second Force" Freudian perspective, which "supplied to us the sick half of psychology" (1968, p. 5) and that "captured humanity's dark side, that part of our animal heritage" (Rogers, 1995, p.