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Mentorship is a vibrant relationship that needs more exploration in psychology.

Early founders of humanistic psychology saw its importance.

They sought to differentiate growth-based mentoring from skill-training.

Research shows that both mentors and mentees gain from this mutual bond.

Have you ever been a mentor or been mentored by someone on your career path? If so, you're fortunate, as mentorship is a uniquely important human relationship spanning millennia and cultures. Even a casual perusal of art, music, literature, and science shows how mentorship has nurtured creativity and inspiration. Although many people go through life without ever experiencing this special bond, mounting evidence shows major psychological benefits for both participants.

Mentees gain greater self-esteem, career focus, well-being, and leadership capability. They may also find their sense of calling validated and strengthened. Evidence exists concerning financial and promotional benefits for recipients of mentoring in diverse fields. As for mentors, they experience gains in generativity and in many capacities and professional development. Yet, undoubtedly reflecting the individualistic bias of American psychology, mentorship has been largely ignored by researchers until relatively recently.

To be sure, the cofounders of humanistic psychology had a keen interest in this dyad. As Maslow's biographer, I discovered that his private journals and letters were filled with fond remembrances of mentors such as Alfred Adler, Ruth Benedict, Max Wertheimer, and other social science luminaries. In Rollo May’s homage to his mentor, theologian Paul Tillich, May poetically stated: “A great teacher, like a good therapist, changes with (one’s) students. A person finds the human beings (needed) to guide to (be an) influence, to push (one) toward what (one) needs to become.”

Although Carl Rogers insisted he never had a mentor, he pioneered a theory that has been a model for healthy mentoring, even to this day. Rogers viewed counseling as a reciprocal relationship involving acceptance, honesty, empathy, and unconditional positive regard. These are all necessary for healthy interpersonal relationships, and especially mentoring. And in Clark Moustakas’s influential writings on the avocation of teaching, he stressed the salience of authenticity as a vital feature of education.

By the late 1980s, as the topic of mentorship spread from the corporate world to that of educational administration, perceptive educators noted a debasement of the concept. Beverly Hardcastle coined the phrase “significant mentorship” to differentiate “intimate, long-lasting, authentic, and life-changing relationships from those that are currently labeled (and exist merely) to ease entry into new situations or improve morale and or production.” Similarly, Nathalie Gehrke decried the trend to commodify this relationship in education through such anti-humanistic phrases as “shopping for a mentor” and “deciding when to cut your losses (with a mentor).”

Unfortunately, this reductionism in conceptualization still dominates fields ranging from psychology to medicine. As a pediatric resident confided to me about her “mentorship program” at a large East Coast hospital, "My assigned mentor, a staff pediatrician, was matched to me by ethnicity, as we're both originally from South America. Although helpful in guiding my daily tasks successfully, she herself is much too busy with her own workload to nurture my career plans and goals, let alone my personal development."

At the time of Maslow's sudden death, he sought to apply Daoist notions to a variety of helping relationships, including teaching, counseling, psychotherapy, and even parenting. In this light, he implicitly differentiated what might be called growth-centered mentorship from skill-centered mentorship. The former aspects include:

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incorporating and fostering the far goal of self-actualization

guiding mentees to better recognize their calling by identifying peak and foothill experiences

helping mentees to overcome what he termed the Jonah complex, as well as what later researchers have dubbed the imposter syndrome

recognizing the mutuality of growth for both participants, potentially leading to synergy

Reflecting on Mentorship in Your Life

In our increasingly atomized workplace, mentorship may soon become a rarity. But many of us have at least partly experienced it with an inspiring teacher or professor. Here are three questions to catalyze your thinking on this topic:

Can you name someone who gave you greater self-confidence, direction, encouragement, or emotional support educationally? If so, relate an anecdote that exemplified this uplifting effect. The popular writer Kurt Vonnegut urged graduating college students to do a life review, to better appreciate what education really entails. If you've ever served as a mentor, can you recall a fulfilling episode—perhaps even a peak experience in guiding your mentee?

Lastly, in your view, how can today's workplace forge the growth-centered mentorship that Maslow cherished?

Compton, W.C. & Hoffman, E. (2024). Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness and Flourishing, 4th edition. Sage Publications.

Gehrke, N. (1988). Toward a definition of mentoring. Theory into practice, 27(3), 190-194.

Hardcastle, B. (1988). Spiritual connections: Proteges’ reflections on significant mentorships. Theory into practice, 27(3), 201-208.

Hoffman, E. (1999). The Right to be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow. McGraw-Hill.

Hoffman, E. (2024). New light on Maslow’s discovery of Daoism: A reaction paper. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 64(1), 158-161.

Hoffman, E., & Compton, W. C. (2026). The Dao of Maslow: A new direction for mentorship. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 66(2), 295-314.

May, R. (1973) Paulus: Reminiscences of a Friendship. Harper & Row.

Moustakas, C. (1966) The Authentic Teacher: Sensitivity and Awareness in the Classroom. Doyle.

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