Under the hammer

By Mukul Sharma

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” wrote psychologist Abraham Maslow — meaning, with limited tools at their disposal, single-minded people apply them arbitrarily. It also means that if a person is familiar with a certain single area of expertise, they may be biased to believe it’s the answer to everything. In an oblique way, Maslow was referring to the emphasis that other behavioural scientists laid on the potentially negative aspects of people.

It seemed to him that starting with Freud, the psychiatric community was constantly concerned with how behaviour could take a turn for the worse under almost any kind of circumstance or situation. And owing to an overdependence on this model, healthy human beings were always being viewed as sick. Maslow, on the other hand, stressed the importance of focusing on the potential for positivity in people, as opposed to treating them like a “bag of symptoms” that needed to be taken care of.

He coined the term “peak experience” that he described as a transcendent moment of pure joy and elation — one that stood out from everyday events. The memory of such events is lasting and people often liken them to a spiritual experience, possessing even mystical overtones.

“Think of the most wonderful experience of your life,” he wrote in Toward a Psychology of Being. These make up the happiest moments that come “perhaps from being in love or from listening to music or suddenly ‘being hit’ by a book or painting, or from some creative moment” . If you do that, the hammer vanishes and all the nails become real things.