Maslow, Sci-Fi, and the Sense of Wonder

As Maslow’s biographer, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that he was an avid sci-fi reader. I knew, of course, that he had enjoyed novels since boyhood, and assumed mainly that he viewed sci-fi as a source of relaxing escapism—the way some people consume detective stories after a hard day at the office. True enough, Maslow had contended in his private journals that sci-fi was the only contemporary literary genre concerned with new ideas, but he never amplified this intriguing comment in his published writings or lectures.

Recently, however, as guest editor for a special issue of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology devoted to Maslow’s concept of eupsychia (his paradigm for the best possible human society), I began to suspect that his attraction for sci-fi involved a lot more than escapism—and also more than purely intellectual stimulation. And, when co-authoring an article with Tass Bey for that issue on Aldous Huxley’s influence on Maslow, I became convinced that I was correct. That is, reading sci-fi may have strengthened Maslow’s sense of wonder and creativity: vital to his self-description as a “reconnaissance man” of human potential, in ways that he may not have even recognized.

How do I mean? From the outset of Maslow’s pioneering work on peak experiences, he found that feelings of joyful amazement were often present. As he wrote in “Cognition of Being in the Peak-Experiences” published in 1956 (reprinted in his book Toward a Psychology of Being), “The emotional reaction in the peak experience has a special flavor of wonder, of awe, of reverence, of humility and surrender before the experience as before something great.” For the rest of Maslow’s life, he emphasized the sense of wonder as vital to human realms as diverse as romantic love and intellectual activity. For example, in his book The Psychology of Science, Maslow stated that, “Not only does science begin in wonder, it also ends in wonder.”

After Maslow’s major heart attack in 1967, his own sense of wonder intensified greatly. As he reported to an interviewer: "My attitude toward life changed. The word I use for it now is the postmortem life (and) …. one very important aspect … is that everything gets doubly precious … Everything seems to look more beautiful rather than less, and gets the much-intensified sense of miracles.”

But it’s important to note that Maslow regarded wonderment as not merely a tool for aesthetic delight, but as crucial for creativity, and ultimately, self-actualization. Why? Because wonderment enables us to perceive what he called our “godlike possibilities” and thereby overcome the inertia that impedes our personal growth. Indeed, Maslow identified wonderment as the cure for what he called the “Jonah complex: the tendency to evade our potentialities for great achievement in life." In this context, Maslow provided a concrete example by describing Huxley’s capacity to “accept his talents and use them to the full … by perpetually marveling at how interesting and fascinating everything was … by saying frequently, `Extraordinary! Extraordinary!’”

How did Maslow satisfy his own thirst for wonderment? We know from his private journals that nature had this effect (including listening to recordings of birdcalls), but apparently, so too, did reading sci-fi, or what’s broadly termed today “speculative fiction.” In this light, Huxley’s final novel, Island, depicting a utopian society on a contemporary, imaginary Pacific island called Pala, strongly influenced Maslow. He found Huxley’s vision, particularly of Pala’s educational system, so compelling that he assigned Island to his Brandeis University students and later published his course handout about it—in his book The Farther Reaches of Human Nature.

“Just before he died, Aldous Huxley was on the brink of an enormous breakthrough, on the verge of creating a great synthesis between science, religion, and art,” Maslow effusively wrote in this same book. It was the highest praise that he bestowed on no other thinker of the time.

Maslow’s private journals identify many sci-fi works that he found provocative, but Odd John by the British philosopher Olaf Stapledon, and Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein exerted major impact. In Odd John, Stapledon portrayed the life of an individual gifted with extraordinarily high intelligence (not a super-hero), struggling to develop and hide this talent from those who would destroy him. In Stranger in a Strange Land and other Heinlein novels that Maslow admired, futuristic depictions of planets, new inventions, and radically different social mores catalyzed his awareness that great, unused possibilities exist within each of us—and humanity as a whole.