Yesterday would have been the birthday of Abraham Maslow, one of the founders of humanistic psychology. His best-known theory, the pyramid of needs, is used widely outside the field of psychology. Maslow advocated a focus on the 'bright' sides of human beings, a search for what is good and valuable in them. This was a real coup in the psychology of the 1950s, dominated entirely by deterministic orientations (psychoanalysis, behaviourism).