Here is a fact that probably unsettles almost everything a psychology textbook taught you about human motivation: the pyramid at the centre of the story was never drawn by the man whose name it carries. Abraham Maslow did not sketch the tidy triangle with self-actualisation at its peak.
And in the last years of his life, he revised the theory the pyramid supposedly captured, moving something else above self-actualisation entirely. The diagram never caught up.
Both claims tend to surprise people who have carried the pyramid around since a first-year lecture. Each undoes a different part of the received version.
The pyramid Maslow never drew
Maslow first set out his hierarchy of needs in a 1943 paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” with five levels rising toward self-actualisation. What he did not do was package it as a pyramid. That image arrived later, and from a different field.
The archival case is fairly blunt. In a 2019 Scientific American piece tracing the diagram’s origins, Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings and John Ballard wrote that “We found no trace of the pyramid in any of Maslow’s writings.” They are careful to bound that claim to their own search, but the search was not casual.
Their research points instead to management literature. Management theorist Keith Davis illustrated the hierarchy as a series of steps in a 1957 textbook. Consulting psychologist Charles McDermid published what looks like the first true pyramid in a 1960 Business Horizons article on how money motivates men. Textbook writers it seems did the rest. As Scott Barry Kaufman notes in the same piece, Maslow lived for another decade after McDermid’s pyramid appeared and never appeared to challenge it.
What Maslow actually argued in his later work
The five-level model is not where Maslow’s thinking ended up. In writings from around 1969, part of what he called Theory Z, he amended his model to place a further level above self-actualisation: self-transcendence, the pursuit of a purpose beyond the self through altruism, spirituality, and service to others.
Maslow’s own definition is expansive. Drawn from his 1971 book The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, he wrote that transcendence refers to “the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos.” That reach, out past the individual to other species and to nature, is exactly what the pyramid’s neat apex leaves out.
Perhaps, the most influential modern account of this revision comes from psychologist Mark E. Koltko-Rivera, whose 2006 paper in the Review of General Psychology argues that the conventional “self-actualisation at the top” story misrepresents Maslow’s mature thought. The distinction he draws is sharp. As Koltko-Rivera characterises it, “At the level of self-actualization, the individual works to actualize the individual’s own potential [whereas] at the level of transcendence, the individual’s own needs are put aside, to a great extent, in favor of service to others.” One stage is about becoming your fullest self. The next is about setting the self aside.
Why the revision vanished from the textbooks
If Maslow said all this, why does almost nobody learn it? Part of the answer is timing, and part is the diagram itself. The pyramid, already circulating in management courses by the 1960s, had hardened into a fixed shape with five levels and a single point at the top. A model that ends at a tidy apex does not easily accommodate a sixth level added above it. The picture won, and the picture had already stopped at self-actualisation.
The persistence continues. Writing in 2019, Kaufman observed that “many people may not realize that during the last few years of his life Maslow believed self-transcendence, not self-actualization, was the pinnacle of human needs.” Koltko-Rivera’s paper documents the same gap and considers why the older account has proved so durable. A memorable image, it turns out, can outlast the theory it was meant to serve.
Koltko-Rivera’s reading is an interpretation of Maslow’s late work, not an experimental result about how motivation is layered in the human mind. The value of the paper is historical and conceptual: it recovers what Maslow actually wrote, and asks why the field forgot.
The pyramid taught a generation that the highest human aim was to climb toward the fullest version of yourself. Maslow’s later thinking points the other way, not upward toward a private summit but outward, toward other people, other species, and something larger than the self. The tidiest part of the diagram, its single point at the top, was always the part he had left behind.
