People (Births)

• 1908 – Abraham Maslow, American psychologist and academic (d. 1970).

People (Deaths)

• 1922 – Hermann Rorschach, Swiss psychologist and author (b. 1884).

Abraham Maslow

Abraham Harold Maslow (01 April 1908 to 08 June 1970) was an American psychologist who was best known for creating Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualisation.

Maslow was a psychology professor at Brandeis University, Brooklyn College, New School for Social Research, and Columbia University.

He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a “bag of symptoms”.

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Maslow as the tenth most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Hermann Rorschach

Hermann Rorschach (08 November 1884 to 02 April 1922) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

His education in art helped to spur the development of a set of inkblots that were used experimentally to measure various unconscious parts of the subject’s personality. His method has come to be referred to as the Rorschach test, iterations of which have continued to be used over the years to help identify personality, psychotic, and neurological disorders.

Rorschach continued to refine the test until his premature death at age 37.