"What can you do if you're thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss—absolute bliss—as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon?" asked Katherine Mansfield in her memorable story Bliss.

The early 20th-century writer was herself age 30 at the time, and, though she lived only four more years, her life was vibrant with dazzling moments. It's likely that Mansfield would have appreciated Abraham Maslow's scientific quest to uncover their value for our emotional, and possibly even physical, well-being.

As Maslow's biographer, I've found no evidence that Mansfield's widely read stories influenced his founding of humanistic psychology—but an even more popular British writer may well have done so: namely, H.G. Wells. As I've noted in a previous post for Psychology Today, Maslow was an avid sci-fi reader whose private journals reveal his admiration for such modern luminaries as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, and others. Maslow even asserted that sci-fi was the only literary genre interested in new ideas about humanity—especially its strengths and future capabilities. In this light, it seems no historical accident that Maslow co-launched the still-extant Journal of Humanistic Psychology to chart a new vision of human potential, just as the fledgling Space Age was amassing huge popular excitement.

Maslow's concept of peak-experience remains one of his most important and enduring formulations, becoming the foundation for his entire system of humanistic psychology. But where did he get this seminal notion? We know that his mentors Ruth Benedict and Max Wertheimer in New........

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