Within a matter of hours, the death of Nelson Mandela attracted tributes ranging from the trite and prepackaged to the heartfelt and memorable. His achievements in the face of adversity notwithstanding, psychology will remember him for a less mainstream reason. Like a select few before him, Mandela will go down in history as someone who may have scaled the summit of mental prowess – a term psychologist Abraham Maslow referred to in the 1940s as "self-actualised".

According to Maslow’s theory, humans face a number of challenges in life, from the most basic needs (such as food and sleep), to safety, love, esteem, and ultimately self-actualisation. Only once a person’s circumstances and attitude have allowed them to pass one of the lower stages can they ascend to the next. For Maslow and the generations of humanistic psychologists who followed in his tradition, the self-actualised individual is someone who transcends all lower needs to achieve a state of complete personal and intellectual fulfillment.

Most of us never reach the top of Maslow’s pyramid – instead we spend our lives thrashing it out in the lower tiers, searching for love, money, or social status; or if we’re less fortunate, simply struggling to survive. The pinnacle is a privileged and lonely place, not that the self-actualised person who reaches it will mind. These fortunate few are cast as psychological demigods: fully secure at all lower levels while also being compassionate, creative, in complete control of their impulses, comfortable in solitude, socially harmonious, naturally powerful, beyond needing the approval of others, and highly aware of their own thoughts and the world beyond. And, just as Mandela did in prison, the self-actualised person is thought to find meaning and purpose from life under even the most grievous suffering.

Mandela wasn’t the only famous figure to be regarded as self-actualised. Other examples have included Gandhi, Beethoven, Mother Teresa, and Eleanor Roosevelt. But until yesterday, Mandela may well have been one of the few who was publicly prominent and still alive.

Maslow’s theory is intriguing, but is it scientifically valid? Over the years the "hierarchy of needs" has encountered a steady stream of criticism, being labelled as a flawed combination of science and morality, socially and culturally prejudiced, partisan, and elitist. A prominent critique in the 1970s concluded that there was little empirical support for such a hierarchy, despite ample evidence of how we are motivated by drivers such as survival, sex and social status.

Even psychologists who see value in the theory have realised that modern understanding of biology calls for Maslow’s pyramid to be renovated and rebuilt without self-actualisation. Like Roosevelt or Gandhi (or your mate Dave), Mandela couldn’t escape fundamental limits of neurobiology - for instance, that much "high level" neural processing is invisible to our own awareness, stemming from impulses that are beyond our conscious control. The pyramid of needs, if it exists at all, must be far more interactive and complicated than Maslow envisaged.

Whatever the truth of Maslow’s hierarchy, Mandela’s death will give some psychologists pause to wonder whether he really was – as many believe – a living manifestation of psychological perfection. From the perspective of a cognitive neuroscientist trained to see humans as accidental meatbags carrying sophisticated computers, the danger in viewing people like Mandela as saints (or "self actualisers") is that we paint their accomplishments as unachievable by lower-ranking mortals. By worshipping superhumans we risk settling for a future of lesser ideals and more modest ambitions, waiting for another Mandela before attempting barriers that he himself proved could be overcome.