Biography Category
Name :
Alfred Adler
Date :
Views :
10680
Category :
Birth Date :
07/02/1870
Birth Place :
Vienna, Austria.
Death Date :
Not Available
Not Available
[b]A CHILD OF WELL-TO-DO FAMILY[/b][br /]
[br /]
Alfred Adler was born at Penzing, a suburb of Vienna, in a house that was literally the last house of the city. The whole Adler family was exceptionally musical. One of Adler’s brothers played and taught the violin, his sister Hermine was an excellent pianist. Adler himself had so beautiful a tenor voice that he was constantly urged in his youth to give up science for an operatic career. He had all the gifts needed for a great singer : an infallible memory, a perfect ear, and tremendous dramatic power, but he never thought to give up science for music.[br /]
[br /]
At the time of his birth, his family were well-to-do. His immediate family consisted of four brothers and two sisters. His youngest brother, Richard adored Alfred and clung to him throughout the life. At the time of Richard’s birth, the sudden poverty of his parents checked his education and darkened his prospects. While all the elder brothers and sisters had enjoyed a prosperous childhood, and a good start in life, except him, so that he had the bitterness of contrast to add to the difficulties of his fate. Adler tried in every way to release and strengthen this favorite youngest and helped him both materially and spiritually all his life.[br /]
[br /]
[b]FAVORITE CHILD OF HIS FATHER[/b][br /]
[br /]
Adler looked like his mother. He was broad, short and very vigorous, with a massive thinker’s brow, and the most bright and lively eyes.[br /]
[br /]
His father was a very free and happy personality, tremendously proud, with the strength of will and aim to make his pride tell. He was a handsome man with a fine figure, and cared greatly for his personal appearance, brushed his clothes and always cleaned his boots so that they shone like glass. He appeared invariably as if dressed for a party. Nothing ever prevented him from going his own way, if he were walking downstairs, he never moved aside for any one walking up. When he saw people with his walking stick, saying politely, with a charming smile, ‘I do not like to clean my trousers on your shoes as I pass !’ He insisted on his children being allowed great personal freedom. Adler was his father’s favorite child. His father often said to him upon their early morning strolls, ‘Alfred never believe what any one tells you !’[br /]
[br /]
[b]TEACHER’S ADVICE[/b][br /]
[br /]
Once, his teacher suggested that his father take Adler out of school work, and apprentice him to a cobbler, since he never would graduate anyway. His father only scoffed at the teacher and expressed his disapproval of him to his son. At the time, Adler lost interest in school and failed in mathematics. Then he decided to show the teacher what he could do ! In a short time, he ranked first in his class in mathematics and never again experienced difficulties in his studies. With such passion, he acquired his M.D. degree from the University of Vienna in 1895.[br /]
[br /]
[b]YOUTH AND ROMANCE[/b][br /]
[br /]
Adler said of his boyhood, ‘I always had tunes running through my head. When I began to read as a student, they stopped but while I was a young boy tunes came to me instead of thoughts.’ Adler was an intensely active man with an extremely tender heart and lively social manners. He was never handsome, but his early photographs show a strong attractive face with an open engaging expression. He was always a true friend to women and deeply respected them as human beings. He met once a young and most attractive girl, who traveled alone with Adler to a foreign country, acting as his interpreter and secretary. This girl and her parents had an absolute confidence and security in[br /]
[br /]
attitude, a confidence and a security, which were fully justified. Another young girl equally attractive was also at one time put in his charge, and was constantly with him over the space of months. She was an efficient shaker of masculine vulnerability, but later she admitted that with Adler, she had not succeeded. Adler never loved any woman as he loved his wife and his most happy and successful friendships were with men. He often quoted Shakespeare’s dictum, ‘He never loved, who loved not at first sight.’[br /]
[br /]
‘Love’, Adler used to say, ‘is a task for two. A task in which two persons must be engaged has its own special form and cannot be successfully performed if it is treated as a task for one person alone.’ Raissa was an intellectual and social activist, who had come from Russia to study in Vienna. When Alfred married to Raissa in 1897, the first his family knew of his love affair was a telegram, `Am married, returning with bride, find home for me’. After marriage, eventually they had four children, two of whom became psychiatrists.[br /]
[br /]
[b]BIRTH ORDER & CHILDHOOD[/b][br /]
[br /]
Adler must be credited as the first theorist to include not only a child’s mother and father and other adults as early influence on the child, but the child’s brothers and sisters as well. His consideration of the effects of siblings and the order in which they were born is probably what Adler is best-known for.[br /]
[br /]
The only child is more likely than others to be pampered, with all the ill results we’ve discussed. The first child begins life as an only child, with all the attention to him – or herself. Sadly, just as things are getting comfortable, the second child arrives and "dethrones" the first.[br /]
[br /]
The child may battle for his or her lost position. The second child is in a very different situation : He or she has the first child as a sort of "pace-setter", and tends to become quite competitive, constantly trying to surpass the older child. They often succeed, but many feel as if the race is never done, and they tend to dream of constant running without getting anywhere.[br /]
[br /]
Other "middle" children will tend to be similar to the second child, although each may focus on a different "competitor." The youngest child is likely to be the most pampered in a family with more than one child. Youngest children are the second most likely source of problem children, just behind first children. On the other hand, the youngest may also feel incredible inferiority, with everyone older and ‘therefore" superior. But, with all those "pace-setters" ahead, the youngest can also be driven to exceed all of them. As with everything in Adler’s system, birth order is to be understood in the context of the individual’s own special circumstances.[br /]
[br /]
Adler like Freud, saw personality or lifestyle as something established quite early in life. Adler felt that there were three basic childhood situations that most contribute to a faulty lifestyle. The first is one we’ve spoken of several times : organ inferiorities,’ as well as early childhood diseases. The second is ‘pampering’. Many children are taught, by the actions of others, that they can take without giving. The third is ‘neglect.’ A child who is neglected or abused learns what the pampered child learns, but learns it in a far more direct manner : They learn inferiority because they are told and shown every day that they are of no value; they learn selfishness because they are taught to trust none. If you haven’t known love, you don’t develop a capacity for it later. We should note that the neglected child includes not only orphans and the victims of abuse, but the children whose parents are never there, and the ones raised in a rigid, authoritarian manner.[br /]
[br /]
[b]MAJOR ILLNESS[/b][br /]
[br /]
At the age of 5, he was very ill indeed with pneumonia. His father harnessed a sleigh and drove across Vienna in the middle of the night, to fetch the Kaiser’s doctor to his little son’s bedside.
The physician told that he was gravely ill with pneumonia and also warned his father that he doubted the child would recover. It was at that Adler decided he wanted to become a doctor so that he might be able to fight deadly diseases. He never changed his mind.[br /]
[br /]
His father used to get up every day at five o’clock, take Adler out for a walk and return to breakfast by himself at a café.[br /]
[br /]
[b]LAST YEARS[/b][br /]
[br /]
After resigning from his visiting post at Columbia University, he suffered from his first and last severe illness, in 1934. His family joined him in Vienna. His illness and Raissa’s instant response to his need for her changed both their lives. For the first time, Adler realized how deep his wife’s devotion to him really was; and his whole nature responded to it, and to her care for him.[br /]
[br /]
Adler’s passion for Vienna was amazing. He enjoyed the evenings of Vienna, visiting Cafe houses and smoking cheroot heavily. His last evening in Vienna seemed the same as all the other evenings. He had first taken his final lecture at the university. He ended with the words, "Children, do something – and do it well". In the last at the café to his group, he made no farewell.[br /]
[br /]
After seeing Adler off for Vienna in the early Autumn of 1934, he went to London. Adler was deeply interested in this keen and wide-awake city, where his lectures were arranged in different Universities. His lectures were over-crowded from the beginning, and he communicated as easily with his audiences in English as he did when using his native German tongue.[br /]
[br /]
[b]'INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY’ BORN[/b][br /]
[br /]
During 1907, he turned to psychiatry and was invited to join Dr. Sigmund Freud’s discussion group. After writing papers on organic inferiority, which were quite compatible with Freud’s views, he wrote, first, a paper concerning an ‘aggression instinct’, which Freud did not approve of, and then a paper on children’s feelings of inferiority, which suggested that Freud’s sexual notions be taken more metaphorically than literally.[br /]
[br /]
Although Freud named him the president of the Viennese Analytic Society and the co-editor of the organization’s newsletter, Adler didn’t stop his criticism. There were three meetings of the group for a full discussion of their differences, and then the question was put to the vote, where Adler’s views compatible with his remaining in the psychoanalyst group or not ?[br /]
[br /]
Adler was out-voted, the majority remained with Freud and flourished under his increasing discipline, but Adler, with nine other members of the organization, resigning to form the ‘Society for Free Psychoanalysis’ in 1911. In the following year, the organization became ‘The Society for Individual Psychology.’ This year was the witness of Freud and Adler’s last meeting.[br /]
[br /]
[b]LECTURER AND WARRIOR[/b][br /]
[br /]
In 1912, Adler published his book, ‘The Neurotic Constitution’, in which he further developed his main concepts. He called his psychological system ‘Individual Psychology’, a term which is sometimes misunderstood. It refers to the indivisibility of the personality in its psychological structure. The year 1913, was a very important one in Adler’s life. In it he gave the magnificent course of lectures which were afterwards put together in Menschen – Kenntniss and which did more than anything else he had yet achieved to spread his reputation over Central Europe. In the same year, Adler and his group made their final definition of the twelve chief tenets of ‘Individual Psychology : Adler’s next book, ‘Understanding Human Nature’, which comprised of lectures given at the Viennese Institute for Adult Education, and is still on the required-reading list of American high schools.[br /]
[br /]
The light-hearted Vienna of 1914 considered that war with Serbia would be a most satisfactory solution to various outstanding political pin-pricks.At that time Adler told his group of Individual Psychologists, ‘There is going to be a war, and in my opinion, it will last a long time and famine will be one of its results. Let us show a little foresight and add to the stock of food by growing vegetables wherever there is any ground for them, and perhaps by breeding rabbits, since they breed swiftly and in large quantities.’[br /]
[br /]
Soon, the flood of war swept between Adler and his family. He had to serve for two years as a military doctor near the Russian front, first at Krakow and then at Bruenn. One of the Adler’s most painful duties during the war was to advise what soldiers after convalescence were fit to be sent back to the trenches. This job caused him such pain and anxiety that it influenced his sleeping as well as his waking thoughts. ‘It was then I stopped dreaming altogether for the rest of my life’ Adler said later on.His physical endurance at that time almost a miracle. He worked without cessation for sixteen hours a day, without a physical breakdown of any kind, although he was approaching middle age.[br /]
[br /]
[b]CHILD GUIDANCE CLINICS[/b][br /]
[br /]
He began his medical career as an opthamologist, but he soon switched to general practice, and established his office in a lower class part of Vienna, across from the Prader, a combination amusement park and circus. His clients included circus people, and it has been suggested that the unusual strengths and weaknesses of the performers led to his insights into ‘organ inferiorities’ and ‘compensation’.[br /]
[br /]
After returning from War duty in 1918, Adler founded several child guidance clinics in Vienna. These were soon visited by professionals from abroad, stimulating the development of similar clinics in other countries.[br /]
[br /]
Adler’s treatment of children and their instant understanding of him were incredibly swift and satisfactory. Once Adler was brought a child whom he immediately saw was in a very low, discouraged state, and feeling almost overwhelmed by a passionate desire to shine. Adler promptly sat down on a step below the child so that he should feel himself to be the bigger and the more important person.[br /]
[br /]
Once, he asked a very solitary, egocentric child, unable to make contacts with his fellows, what he liked to do best. Football I.’ The boy replied.[br /]
[br /]
‘Yes’, Adler said, ‘I am understand that very well-there you are all alone in the goal – and that is what you always like best, isn’t it ?’[br /]
[br /]
The boy was a goal-keeper, although Adler had not been told this fact.[br /]
[br /]
A priest of the Catholic Church once came to Adler as a patient.[br /]
[br /]
‘Before I decide to have your treatment’, he told Adler, ‘I must be assured that you will say nothing against my religion.’[br /]
[br /]
‘I think that I may safely assure you of that’ Adler replied quietly, and when the priest – after a successful cure – paid him a good-bye visit, he said ‘I want to tell you, Dr. Adler, that you have more than kept your promise about respecting my religion, in-fact I have found you to be the most really religious person that I have ever met!.’[br /]
[br /]
[b]DEPARTURE &THEORIES[/b][br /]
[br /]
Half of the last year of Adler’s life had been a particularly happy one. A long visit to California, where he taught at a summer school in connection with the Williams Institute near San Francisco, had been a surprisingly gay and successful piece of work. In the Autumn, Adler went back to his Long Island College of Medicine. The lectures at Aberdeen University were a particular pride and joy to Adler. During delivering a series of lectures at the University, on May 28, 1937, he suddenly collapsed while walking in the street. Within an hour of Adler’s sudden collapse in the Union Street he died from heart failure within few minutes.[br /]
[br /]
Adler died, known and honored as many great men have died known and honored, but he also died loved – as few great men have ever been loved. Browning’s Epilogue might have been written for Adler :[br /]
[br /]
He marched straight forward,[br /]
Never doubled clouds would break; [br /]
Never dreamed thought right were worsted [br /]
Wrong would triumph;[br /]
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake.[br /]
[br /]
Alfred Adler postulate a single ‘drive’ or motivating force behind all our behavior and experience. By the time his theory had turned to its most mature form, he called that motivating force the ‘striving for perfection." It is the desire we all have to fulfill our potentials, to come closer and closer to our ideal. It is, as many of you will already see, very similar to the more popular idea of self – actualization.
Striving for perfection was not the finest phrase Adler used to refer to his single motivating force. His earliest phrase was the ‘aggression drive.’ referring to the reaction we have when other drives, such as our need to eat, be sexually satisfied, get things done, or be loved, are frustrated.[br /]
[br /]
Another word Alder used to refer to basic motivation was ‘compensation,’ or striving to overcome. Since we all have problems, short-comings, inferiorities of one sort or another, Adler felt, earlier in his writing, that our personalities could be accounted for by the ways in which we do – or don’t – compensate or overcome those problems. The idea still plays an important role in his theory.[br /]
[br /]
One of Alder’s earliest phrases was masculine protest. He noted something pretty obvious in his culture (and by no means absent from our own) : Boys were held in higher esteem than girls. Boys wanted, often desperately, to be thought of as strong, aggressive, in control – i.e. "masculine" – and not weak, passive, or dependent – i.e. "feminine." The point, of course, was that men are somehow basically better than women. They do, after all, have the power, the education, and apparently the talent and motivation needed to do "great things." And women don’t.[br /]
[br /]
The last phrase he used, before switching to striving for perfection, was ‘striving for superiority.’ His use of this phrase reflects one of the philosophical roots of his ideas: Friedrich Nietzsche developed a philosophy that considered the will to power the basic motive of human life. Although striving for superiority does refer to the desire to be better, it also contains the idea that we want to be better than others, rather than better in our own right. Adler later tended to use striving for superiority more in reference to unhealthy or neurotic striving.[br /]
[br /]
[b]"THE STYLE OF LIFE"[/b][br /]
[br /]
Instead of talking about an individual’s personality, with the traditional sense of internal traits, structures, dynamics, conflicts, and so on, Adler preferred to talk about style of life".Adler gave a new angle to the concept of life style. According to Adler, the function of the psychologist is to induce the patient to avoid conflicts with society by recognizing its dangers, to act in accordance with reality and abstain from a reversion to delusions. No component could be evaluated accurately without regard for the unity of character. The character manifests itself in the individual’s ‘style of life’. The weak individual, unable to overcome his shortcomings or to discipline himself, adopts a ‘style of life’, which enables him to enjoy illusions of superiority. He expects social prestige because of his imagined superiority instead of actual efficiency.[br /]
[br /]
Adler has described tactfully about "style of life". According to him, "if we look at a pine tree growing in the valley, we will notice that it grows differently from one on top of the mountain. It is the same kind of a tree, but there are two distinct styles of life. Its style on top of the mountain is different from its style when growing in the valley. The style of life of a tree is the individuality of a tree expressing itself and molding itself in an environment. We recognize a style when we see it against a background of an environment different from what we expect, for then we realize that every tree has a life pattern and is not merely mechanical reaction to the environment.[br /]
[br /]
It is much the same with human beings. We see the style of life under certain conditions of environment, and it is our task to analyze its exact relation to the existing circumstances, since our mind changes with alteration of the environment. As long as a person is in a favorable situation, we cannot see his style of life clearly. In new situations, however where he is confronted with difficulties, the style of life appears clearly and distinctly.[br /]
[br /]
Adler summarized, "The style of life is a unity because it has grown out of the difficulties of early life and out of the striving for a goal."[br /]
[br /]
[b]THEOLOGY[/b][br /]
[br /]
The last point – that lifestyle is "not merely a mechanical reaction" – is second way in which Adler differs dramatically from Freud. For Freud, the things that happened in the past, such as early childhood trauma, determine what you are like in the present. Adler sees motivation as a matter of moving towards the future, rather than being driven, mechanically, by the past. We are drawn towards our goals, our purposes, our ideals. This is called teleology.[br /]
[br /]
Another major influence on Adler’s thinking was the philosopher Hans Vaihinger, who wrote a book called "The Philosophy of" As if Vaihinger believed that ultimate truth would always be beyond us, but that, for practical purposes, we need to create partial truths. His main interest was science, so he gave as examples such partial truths as protons and electrons, waves of light as distortion of space, and so on contrary to what many of us non-scientists tend to assume, these are not things that anyone has seen or proven to exist: They are useful constructs. They work for the moment, let us do science, and hopefully will lead to better, more useful constructs. We use them ‘as if" they were true. He called these partial truth fictions.[br /]
[br /]
Adler added that, at the center of each of our lifestyles, there sits one of these fictions, an important one about who we are and where we are going.[br /]
[br /]
[b]SOCIAL INTEREST[/b][br /]
[br /]
Adler felt that social concern was not simply inborn, nor just learned, but a combination of both : It is based on an innate disposition, but it has to be nurtured to survive. That it is to some extent innate, is shown by the way babies and small children often how sympathy for others without having been taught to do so. Notice how, when one baby in a nursery begins to cry, they all begin to cry. Or how, when we walk into a room where people are laughing, we ourselves begin to smile.[br /]
[br /]
One misunderstanding Adler wanted to avoid was the idea that social interest was somehow another version of extraversion. Adler meant social concern or feeling not in terms of particular social behaviors, but in the much broader sense of caring for family for community, for society, for humanity, even for life. Social concern is a matter of being useful to others.[br /]
[br /]
On the other hand, a lack of social concern is, for Alder, the very definition of mental ill-health : All failures – neurotics, psychotics, criminals, drunkards, problem children, suicides, perverts, and prostitutes – are failures because they are lacking in social interest… Their goal of success is a goal and personal superiority, and their triumphs have meaning only to themselves.[br /]
[br /]
But the inferiority complex is not just a little problem; it’s a neurosis, meaning it’s a life-size problem. You become shy and timid, insecure, indecisive, cowardly, submissive, compliant, and so on. You begin to rely on people to carry you along, even manipulating them into supporting you : "You think I’m smart / pretty / strong / sexy / good, don’t you ?" Eventually, you become a drain on them, and you may find yourself by yourself. Nobody can take all that self-centered whining for long ![br /]
[br /]
There is another way in which people respond to inferiority besides compensation and the inferiority complex : You can also develop a superiority complex. The superiority complex involves covering up your inferiority by pretending to be superior.[br /]
[br /]
[b]INFERIORITY[/b][br /]
[br /]
Adler says it’s a matter of being overwhelmed by our inferiority. If you are moving along, doing well, feeling competent, you can afford to think of others. If you are not, if life is getting the best of you, then your attentions become increasingly focussed on yourself.[br /]
[br /]
Obviously, everyone suffers from inferiority in one form or another. For example, Adler began his theoretical work considering organ inferiority, that is, the fact that each of us has weaker, as well as stronger, parts of our anatomy or physiology. Some of us are born with heart murmurs, or develop heart problems early in life; some have weak lungs, or kidneys, or early liver problems; some of us stutter or lisp; some have diabetes, or asthma, or polio; some have weak eyes, or poor hearing, or a poor musculture; some of us have innate tendencies to being heavy, others to being skinny; some of us are retarded, others are deformed; some of us are terribly tall or terribly short; and so on and so on.[br /]
[br /]
Adler noted that many people respond to these organic inferiorities with compensation. They make up for their deficiencies in some way : The inferior organ can be strengthened and even become stronger than it is in others; or other organs can be overdeveloped to take up the slack; or the person can psychologically compensate for the organic problem by developing certain skills or even certain personality styles. There are, as you well know, many examples of people who overcame great physical odds to become what those who are better endowed physically wouldn’t even dream of ![br /]
[br /]
Sadly, there are also many people who cannot handle their difficulties, and lead lives of quite despair. I would guess that our optimistic, up-beat society seriously underestimates their numbers.[br /]
[br /]
If you are overwhelmed by the forces of inferiority – whether it is your body hurting, the people around you holding you in contempt, or just the general difficulties of growing up – you develop an inferiority complex.[br /]
[br /]
[b]DIAGNOSIS & THERAPY[/b][br /]
[br /]
In order to help you to discover the "fictions" your lifestyle is based upon, Adler would look at a great variety of things – your birth – order position, for example. First, he might examine you and your medical history for any possible organic roots to your problem. A serious illness, for example, may have side effects that closely resemble neurotic and psychotic symptoms.[br /]
[br /]
In your very first session with you, he might ask for your earliest childhood memory. He is not so much looking for the truth here as for an indication of that early prototype of your present lifestyle. If your earliest memory involves security and a great deal of attention, that might indicate pampering; if you recall some aggressive competition with your older brother, that might suggest the strong strivings of a second child and the "ruling" type of personality; if your memory involves neglect and hiding under the sink, it might mean severe inferiority and avoidance; and so on.[br /]
[br /]
Like Freud and Jung, analyses of dreams were important to Adler. He took a more direct approach to them, though : Dreams are an expression of your style of life and, far from contradicting your daytime feelings, are unified with your conscious life.[br /]
[br /]
Adler would also pay attention to how you express yourself; your posture, the way you shake hands, the gestures you use, how you move, your "body language", as we say today. He notes that pampered people often lean against something ! Even your sleep postures may contribute some insight. A person who sleeps in the fetal position with the covers over his or her head is clearly different from one who sprawls over the entire bed completely uncovered ![br /]
[br /]
He would also want to know the exogenous factors, the events that triggered the symptoms that concern you. He gives a number of common triggers : Sexual problems, like uncertainty, guilt, the first time, impotence, and so on; the problems women face, such as pregnancy and childbirth and he onset and end of menstruation; your love life, dating, engagement, marriage, and divorce; your work life, including school, exams, career decisions, and the job itself; and mortal danger or the loss of a loved one.[br /]
[br /]
Last, and not least, Adler was open to the less rational and scientific, more art-like side of diagnosis; he suggested we not ignore empathy, intuition, and just plain guess work ![br /]
[br /]
There are considerable differences between Adler’s therapy and Freud’s : First, Adler preferred to have everyone sitting up and talking face to face. Further, he went to great lengths to avoid appearing to authoritarian. In fact, he advised that the therapist never allow the patient to force him into the role of an authoritarian figure, because that allowed the patient to play some of the same games he or she is likely to have played many times before : The patient may set you up as a savior, only to attack you when you inevitably reveal your humanness. By pulling you down, they feel as if they are raising themselves, with their neurotic lifestyles, up.
[br /]
[br /]
This is essentially the explanation Adler gave for resistance. He said, "when a patient forgets appointments, comes in late, demands special favors, or generally becomes stubborn and un-co-operative, it is not, as Freud thought, a matter of repression. Rather, resistance is just a sign of the patient’s lack of courage to give up their neurotic lifestyle."[br /]
[br /]
The patient must come to understand the nature of his or her lifestyle and its roots in self-centered fictions. This understanding or insight cannot be forced : If you just tell someone "look, here is your problem !" he or she will only pull away from you and look for ways of bolstering their present fictions. Instead, a patient must be brought into such a state of feeling that he likes to listen, and wants to understand. Only then can he be influenced to live what he has understood. It is the patient, not the therapist, who is ultimately responsible for curing him – or herself.[br /]
[br /]
[b]TWELVE CHIEF TENETS OF INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY[/b][br /]
[br /]
Every neurosis can be understood as an attempt to free oneself from a feeling of inferiority in order to gain a feeling of superiority.The path of the neurosis does not lead in the direction of social functioning, nor does it aim at solving given life-problems, but finds an outlet for itself in a small family circle, thus achieving the isolation of the patient.The larger unit of the social group is either completely or very extensively pushed aside by a mechanism consisting of hypersensitiveness and intolerance. Only a small group is left over for maneuvers aiming at the various types of superiority to expend themselves upon. At the same time protection and the withdrawal from the demands of the community and the decision of life are made possible.[br /]
[br /]
Thus estranged from reality, the neurotic man lives a life of imagination and fantasy, and employs a number of devices for enabling him to side-step the demands of reality, and for reaching out towards an ideal situation which would free him from any service for the community and absolve him from responsibility.These exemptions and privileges of illness and suffering give him a substitute for his original hazardous goal of superiority.[br /]
[br /]
Thus the neurosis represents an attempt to free one-self from all the constraints of the community by establishing a counter-compulsion. This latter is so constituted that it eventually faces the peculiar nature of the surroundings and their demands. Both of these convincing inferences can be drawn from the manner in which this counter-compulsion manifests itself and from the neurosis selected.[br /]
[br /]
The counter-compulsion takes on the nature of a revolt, gathers its material either from favorable affective experiences or from observations. It permits thoughts and affects to become preoccupied either with the above-mentioned disturbances or with unimportant details, as long as they at least serve the purpose of directing the eye and the attention of the patient away from his life problems. In this manner, depending upon the needs of the situation, he prepares anxiety and compulsion situations, sleeplessness, swooning, perversions, hallucinations, slightly pathological effects, neurasthenia and hypochondriachal complexes and psychotic pictures of his actual condition, all of which serve him as excuses.[br /]
[br /]
Even logic falls under the domination of the counter-compulsion. As in psychosis, this process may go as far as the actual nullification of logic.Logic, the will to live, love and human sympathy, co-operation and language, all arise out of the needs of human communal life. Against the latter are directed automatically all the plans of the neurotic individual striving for isolation and lusting for power.[br /]
[br /]
To cure a neurosis it is necessary to change completely the whole upbringing of the patient and turn him definitely and unconditionally back into human society.All the volition and all the strivings of the neurotic are dictated by his prestige-seeking policy, which is continually looking for excuses which will enable him to leave the problems of life unsolved. He consequently turns against allowing any community feeling to develop.[br /]
[br /]
If, therefore, one may regard the demand for a complete and unified understanding of man and for a comprehension of his (undivided) individuality as justified – a view to which we are forced, both by the nature of reason and the individual psychological knowledge of the urge towards an integration of the personality – then the method, enables us to arrive at some conception of the power lines along which the individual strives to attain superiority.[br /]
[br /]
[b]ON HIS THEORIES[/b][br /]
[br /]
Although Adler’s theory may be less interesting than Freud’s with its sexuality, or Jung’s with its mythology, it has probably struck a reader as the most common sensible theory. In fact, very few personality theorists like him are found so.[br /]
[br /]
Abraham Maslow once said that, the older he gets, the more right Adler seems. Carl Roger’s brand of therapy is similar to Adler’s theory. The theorists called Neo-Freudians – Horney, Fromm, and Sullivan – should really have been called Neo-Adlerians.[br /]
[br /]
The positive sides on his theory need not to be listed. His clear descriptions of people’s complaints, his simple theoretical structure, his straight forward and common – sense interpretations of their problems, his trust and even affection for the common person – all these aspects made his theory both comfortable and highly influential.[br /]
[br /]
Criticism of Adler tend to involve the issue of whether or not his theory is scientific. The mainstream of psychology today is experimentally oriented, which means the concepts of a theory uses must be measurable and manipulable. Even teleological approach, there are criticisms you can make regarding how scientific Adler’s theory is : Many of the details of his theory are too anecdotal, and true in particular cases, but don’t necessarily have the generality, Adler seems to claim for them.[br /]
[br /]
[b]HIS REMARKABLE PUBLICATIONS[/b][br /]
[br /]
THE DOCTOR AS EDUCATOR ( 1904 )[br /]
[br /]
STUDY OF ORGAN INFERIORITY AND ITS PSYCHICAL COMPENSATION ( 1907 )[br /]
[br /]
THE INSTINCT OF AGGRESSION ( 1908 )[br /]
[br /]
THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION ( 1912 )[br /]
[br /]
THE PRACTICE AND THEORY OF INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY ( 1920 )[br /]
[br /]
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN NATURE ( 1928 )[br /]
[br /]
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN ( 1929 )[br /]
[br /]
[br /]
[br /]
Alfred Adler was born at Penzing, a suburb of Vienna, in a house that was literally the last house of the city. The whole Adler family was exceptionally musical. One of Adler’s brothers played and taught the violin, his sister Hermine was an excellent pianist. Adler himself had so beautiful a tenor voice that he was constantly urged in his youth to give up science for an operatic career. He had all the gifts needed for a great singer : an infallible memory, a perfect ear, and tremendous dramatic power, but he never thought to give up science for music.[br /]
[br /]
At the time of his birth, his family were well-to-do. His immediate family consisted of four brothers and two sisters. His youngest brother, Richard adored Alfred and clung to him throughout the life. At the time of Richard’s birth, the sudden poverty of his parents checked his education and darkened his prospects. While all the elder brothers and sisters had enjoyed a prosperous childhood, and a good start in life, except him, so that he had the bitterness of contrast to add to the difficulties of his fate. Adler tried in every way to release and strengthen this favorite youngest and helped him both materially and spiritually all his life.[br /]
[br /]
[b]FAVORITE CHILD OF HIS FATHER[/b][br /]
[br /]
Adler looked like his mother. He was broad, short and very vigorous, with a massive thinker’s brow, and the most bright and lively eyes.[br /]
[br /]
His father was a very free and happy personality, tremendously proud, with the strength of will and aim to make his pride tell. He was a handsome man with a fine figure, and cared greatly for his personal appearance, brushed his clothes and always cleaned his boots so that they shone like glass. He appeared invariably as if dressed for a party. Nothing ever prevented him from going his own way, if he were walking downstairs, he never moved aside for any one walking up. When he saw people with his walking stick, saying politely, with a charming smile, ‘I do not like to clean my trousers on your shoes as I pass !’ He insisted on his children being allowed great personal freedom. Adler was his father’s favorite child. His father often said to him upon their early morning strolls, ‘Alfred never believe what any one tells you !’[br /]
[br /]
[b]TEACHER’S ADVICE[/b][br /]
[br /]
Once, his teacher suggested that his father take Adler out of school work, and apprentice him to a cobbler, since he never would graduate anyway. His father only scoffed at the teacher and expressed his disapproval of him to his son. At the time, Adler lost interest in school and failed in mathematics. Then he decided to show the teacher what he could do ! In a short time, he ranked first in his class in mathematics and never again experienced difficulties in his studies. With such passion, he acquired his M.D. degree from the University of Vienna in 1895.[br /]
[br /]
[b]YOUTH AND ROMANCE[/b][br /]
[br /]
Adler said of his boyhood, ‘I always had tunes running through my head. When I began to read as a student, they stopped but while I was a young boy tunes came to me instead of thoughts.’ Adler was an intensely active man with an extremely tender heart and lively social manners. He was never handsome, but his early photographs show a strong attractive face with an open engaging expression. He was always a true friend to women and deeply respected them as human beings. He met once a young and most attractive girl, who traveled alone with Adler to a foreign country, acting as his interpreter and secretary. This girl and her parents had an absolute confidence and security in[br /]
[br /]
attitude, a confidence and a security, which were fully justified. Another young girl equally attractive was also at one time put in his charge, and was constantly with him over the space of months. She was an efficient shaker of masculine vulnerability, but later she admitted that with Adler, she had not succeeded. Adler never loved any woman as he loved his wife and his most happy and successful friendships were with men. He often quoted Shakespeare’s dictum, ‘He never loved, who loved not at first sight.’[br /]
[br /]
‘Love’, Adler used to say, ‘is a task for two. A task in which two persons must be engaged has its own special form and cannot be successfully performed if it is treated as a task for one person alone.’ Raissa was an intellectual and social activist, who had come from Russia to study in Vienna. When Alfred married to Raissa in 1897, the first his family knew of his love affair was a telegram, `Am married, returning with bride, find home for me’. After marriage, eventually they had four children, two of whom became psychiatrists.[br /]
[br /]
[b]BIRTH ORDER & CHILDHOOD[/b][br /]
[br /]
Adler must be credited as the first theorist to include not only a child’s mother and father and other adults as early influence on the child, but the child’s brothers and sisters as well. His consideration of the effects of siblings and the order in which they were born is probably what Adler is best-known for.[br /]
[br /]
The only child is more likely than others to be pampered, with all the ill results we’ve discussed. The first child begins life as an only child, with all the attention to him – or herself. Sadly, just as things are getting comfortable, the second child arrives and "dethrones" the first.[br /]
[br /]
The child may battle for his or her lost position. The second child is in a very different situation : He or she has the first child as a sort of "pace-setter", and tends to become quite competitive, constantly trying to surpass the older child. They often succeed, but many feel as if the race is never done, and they tend to dream of constant running without getting anywhere.[br /]
[br /]
Other "middle" children will tend to be similar to the second child, although each may focus on a different "competitor." The youngest child is likely to be the most pampered in a family with more than one child. Youngest children are the second most likely source of problem children, just behind first children. On the other hand, the youngest may also feel incredible inferiority, with everyone older and ‘therefore" superior. But, with all those "pace-setters" ahead, the youngest can also be driven to exceed all of them. As with everything in Adler’s system, birth order is to be understood in the context of the individual’s own special circumstances.[br /]
[br /]
Adler like Freud, saw personality or lifestyle as something established quite early in life. Adler felt that there were three basic childhood situations that most contribute to a faulty lifestyle. The first is one we’ve spoken of several times : organ inferiorities,’ as well as early childhood diseases. The second is ‘pampering’. Many children are taught, by the actions of others, that they can take without giving. The third is ‘neglect.’ A child who is neglected or abused learns what the pampered child learns, but learns it in a far more direct manner : They learn inferiority because they are told and shown every day that they are of no value; they learn selfishness because they are taught to trust none. If you haven’t known love, you don’t develop a capacity for it later. We should note that the neglected child includes not only orphans and the victims of abuse, but the children whose parents are never there, and the ones raised in a rigid, authoritarian manner.[br /]
[br /]
[b]MAJOR ILLNESS[/b][br /]
[br /]
At the age of 5, he was very ill indeed with pneumonia. His father harnessed a sleigh and drove across Vienna in the middle of the night, to fetch the Kaiser’s doctor to his little son’s bedside.
The physician told that he was gravely ill with pneumonia and also warned his father that he doubted the child would recover. It was at that Adler decided he wanted to become a doctor so that he might be able to fight deadly diseases. He never changed his mind.[br /]
[br /]
His father used to get up every day at five o’clock, take Adler out for a walk and return to breakfast by himself at a café.[br /]
[br /]
[b]LAST YEARS[/b][br /]
[br /]
After resigning from his visiting post at Columbia University, he suffered from his first and last severe illness, in 1934. His family joined him in Vienna. His illness and Raissa’s instant response to his need for her changed both their lives. For the first time, Adler realized how deep his wife’s devotion to him really was; and his whole nature responded to it, and to her care for him.[br /]
[br /]
Adler’s passion for Vienna was amazing. He enjoyed the evenings of Vienna, visiting Cafe houses and smoking cheroot heavily. His last evening in Vienna seemed the same as all the other evenings. He had first taken his final lecture at the university. He ended with the words, "Children, do something – and do it well". In the last at the café to his group, he made no farewell.[br /]
[br /]
After seeing Adler off for Vienna in the early Autumn of 1934, he went to London. Adler was deeply interested in this keen and wide-awake city, where his lectures were arranged in different Universities. His lectures were over-crowded from the beginning, and he communicated as easily with his audiences in English as he did when using his native German tongue.[br /]
[br /]
[b]'INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY’ BORN[/b][br /]
[br /]
During 1907, he turned to psychiatry and was invited to join Dr. Sigmund Freud’s discussion group. After writing papers on organic inferiority, which were quite compatible with Freud’s views, he wrote, first, a paper concerning an ‘aggression instinct’, which Freud did not approve of, and then a paper on children’s feelings of inferiority, which suggested that Freud’s sexual notions be taken more metaphorically than literally.[br /]
[br /]
Although Freud named him the president of the Viennese Analytic Society and the co-editor of the organization’s newsletter, Adler didn’t stop his criticism. There were three meetings of the group for a full discussion of their differences, and then the question was put to the vote, where Adler’s views compatible with his remaining in the psychoanalyst group or not ?[br /]
[br /]
Adler was out-voted, the majority remained with Freud and flourished under his increasing discipline, but Adler, with nine other members of the organization, resigning to form the ‘Society for Free Psychoanalysis’ in 1911. In the following year, the organization became ‘The Society for Individual Psychology.’ This year was the witness of Freud and Adler’s last meeting.[br /]
[br /]
[b]LECTURER AND WARRIOR[/b][br /]
[br /]
In 1912, Adler published his book, ‘The Neurotic Constitution’, in which he further developed his main concepts. He called his psychological system ‘Individual Psychology’, a term which is sometimes misunderstood. It refers to the indivisibility of the personality in its psychological structure. The year 1913, was a very important one in Adler’s life. In it he gave the magnificent course of lectures which were afterwards put together in Menschen – Kenntniss and which did more than anything else he had yet achieved to spread his reputation over Central Europe. In the same year, Adler and his group made their final definition of the twelve chief tenets of ‘Individual Psychology : Adler’s next book, ‘Understanding Human Nature’, which comprised of lectures given at the Viennese Institute for Adult Education, and is still on the required-reading list of American high schools.[br /]
[br /]
The light-hearted Vienna of 1914 considered that war with Serbia would be a most satisfactory solution to various outstanding political pin-pricks.At that time Adler told his group of Individual Psychologists, ‘There is going to be a war, and in my opinion, it will last a long time and famine will be one of its results. Let us show a little foresight and add to the stock of food by growing vegetables wherever there is any ground for them, and perhaps by breeding rabbits, since they breed swiftly and in large quantities.’[br /]
[br /]
Soon, the flood of war swept between Adler and his family. He had to serve for two years as a military doctor near the Russian front, first at Krakow and then at Bruenn. One of the Adler’s most painful duties during the war was to advise what soldiers after convalescence were fit to be sent back to the trenches. This job caused him such pain and anxiety that it influenced his sleeping as well as his waking thoughts. ‘It was then I stopped dreaming altogether for the rest of my life’ Adler said later on.His physical endurance at that time almost a miracle. He worked without cessation for sixteen hours a day, without a physical breakdown of any kind, although he was approaching middle age.[br /]
[br /]
[b]CHILD GUIDANCE CLINICS[/b][br /]
[br /]
He began his medical career as an opthamologist, but he soon switched to general practice, and established his office in a lower class part of Vienna, across from the Prader, a combination amusement park and circus. His clients included circus people, and it has been suggested that the unusual strengths and weaknesses of the performers led to his insights into ‘organ inferiorities’ and ‘compensation’.[br /]
[br /]
After returning from War duty in 1918, Adler founded several child guidance clinics in Vienna. These were soon visited by professionals from abroad, stimulating the development of similar clinics in other countries.[br /]
[br /]
Adler’s treatment of children and their instant understanding of him were incredibly swift and satisfactory. Once Adler was brought a child whom he immediately saw was in a very low, discouraged state, and feeling almost overwhelmed by a passionate desire to shine. Adler promptly sat down on a step below the child so that he should feel himself to be the bigger and the more important person.[br /]
[br /]
Once, he asked a very solitary, egocentric child, unable to make contacts with his fellows, what he liked to do best. Football I.’ The boy replied.[br /]
[br /]
‘Yes’, Adler said, ‘I am understand that very well-there you are all alone in the goal – and that is what you always like best, isn’t it ?’[br /]
[br /]
The boy was a goal-keeper, although Adler had not been told this fact.[br /]
[br /]
A priest of the Catholic Church once came to Adler as a patient.[br /]
[br /]
‘Before I decide to have your treatment’, he told Adler, ‘I must be assured that you will say nothing against my religion.’[br /]
[br /]
‘I think that I may safely assure you of that’ Adler replied quietly, and when the priest – after a successful cure – paid him a good-bye visit, he said ‘I want to tell you, Dr. Adler, that you have more than kept your promise about respecting my religion, in-fact I have found you to be the most really religious person that I have ever met!.’[br /]
[br /]
[b]DEPARTURE &THEORIES[/b][br /]
[br /]
Half of the last year of Adler’s life had been a particularly happy one. A long visit to California, where he taught at a summer school in connection with the Williams Institute near San Francisco, had been a surprisingly gay and successful piece of work. In the Autumn, Adler went back to his Long Island College of Medicine. The lectures at Aberdeen University were a particular pride and joy to Adler. During delivering a series of lectures at the University, on May 28, 1937, he suddenly collapsed while walking in the street. Within an hour of Adler’s sudden collapse in the Union Street he died from heart failure within few minutes.[br /]
[br /]
Adler died, known and honored as many great men have died known and honored, but he also died loved – as few great men have ever been loved. Browning’s Epilogue might have been written for Adler :[br /]
[br /]
He marched straight forward,[br /]
Never doubled clouds would break; [br /]
Never dreamed thought right were worsted [br /]
Wrong would triumph;[br /]
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake.[br /]
[br /]
Alfred Adler postulate a single ‘drive’ or motivating force behind all our behavior and experience. By the time his theory had turned to its most mature form, he called that motivating force the ‘striving for perfection." It is the desire we all have to fulfill our potentials, to come closer and closer to our ideal. It is, as many of you will already see, very similar to the more popular idea of self – actualization.
Striving for perfection was not the finest phrase Adler used to refer to his single motivating force. His earliest phrase was the ‘aggression drive.’ referring to the reaction we have when other drives, such as our need to eat, be sexually satisfied, get things done, or be loved, are frustrated.[br /]
[br /]
Another word Alder used to refer to basic motivation was ‘compensation,’ or striving to overcome. Since we all have problems, short-comings, inferiorities of one sort or another, Adler felt, earlier in his writing, that our personalities could be accounted for by the ways in which we do – or don’t – compensate or overcome those problems. The idea still plays an important role in his theory.[br /]
[br /]
One of Alder’s earliest phrases was masculine protest. He noted something pretty obvious in his culture (and by no means absent from our own) : Boys were held in higher esteem than girls. Boys wanted, often desperately, to be thought of as strong, aggressive, in control – i.e. "masculine" – and not weak, passive, or dependent – i.e. "feminine." The point, of course, was that men are somehow basically better than women. They do, after all, have the power, the education, and apparently the talent and motivation needed to do "great things." And women don’t.[br /]
[br /]
The last phrase he used, before switching to striving for perfection, was ‘striving for superiority.’ His use of this phrase reflects one of the philosophical roots of his ideas: Friedrich Nietzsche developed a philosophy that considered the will to power the basic motive of human life. Although striving for superiority does refer to the desire to be better, it also contains the idea that we want to be better than others, rather than better in our own right. Adler later tended to use striving for superiority more in reference to unhealthy or neurotic striving.[br /]
[br /]
[b]"THE STYLE OF LIFE"[/b][br /]
[br /]
Instead of talking about an individual’s personality, with the traditional sense of internal traits, structures, dynamics, conflicts, and so on, Adler preferred to talk about style of life".Adler gave a new angle to the concept of life style. According to Adler, the function of the psychologist is to induce the patient to avoid conflicts with society by recognizing its dangers, to act in accordance with reality and abstain from a reversion to delusions. No component could be evaluated accurately without regard for the unity of character. The character manifests itself in the individual’s ‘style of life’. The weak individual, unable to overcome his shortcomings or to discipline himself, adopts a ‘style of life’, which enables him to enjoy illusions of superiority. He expects social prestige because of his imagined superiority instead of actual efficiency.[br /]
[br /]
Adler has described tactfully about "style of life". According to him, "if we look at a pine tree growing in the valley, we will notice that it grows differently from one on top of the mountain. It is the same kind of a tree, but there are two distinct styles of life. Its style on top of the mountain is different from its style when growing in the valley. The style of life of a tree is the individuality of a tree expressing itself and molding itself in an environment. We recognize a style when we see it against a background of an environment different from what we expect, for then we realize that every tree has a life pattern and is not merely mechanical reaction to the environment.[br /]
[br /]
It is much the same with human beings. We see the style of life under certain conditions of environment, and it is our task to analyze its exact relation to the existing circumstances, since our mind changes with alteration of the environment. As long as a person is in a favorable situation, we cannot see his style of life clearly. In new situations, however where he is confronted with difficulties, the style of life appears clearly and distinctly.[br /]
[br /]
Adler summarized, "The style of life is a unity because it has grown out of the difficulties of early life and out of the striving for a goal."[br /]
[br /]
[b]THEOLOGY[/b][br /]
[br /]
The last point – that lifestyle is "not merely a mechanical reaction" – is second way in which Adler differs dramatically from Freud. For Freud, the things that happened in the past, such as early childhood trauma, determine what you are like in the present. Adler sees motivation as a matter of moving towards the future, rather than being driven, mechanically, by the past. We are drawn towards our goals, our purposes, our ideals. This is called teleology.[br /]
[br /]
Another major influence on Adler’s thinking was the philosopher Hans Vaihinger, who wrote a book called "The Philosophy of" As if Vaihinger believed that ultimate truth would always be beyond us, but that, for practical purposes, we need to create partial truths. His main interest was science, so he gave as examples such partial truths as protons and electrons, waves of light as distortion of space, and so on contrary to what many of us non-scientists tend to assume, these are not things that anyone has seen or proven to exist: They are useful constructs. They work for the moment, let us do science, and hopefully will lead to better, more useful constructs. We use them ‘as if" they were true. He called these partial truth fictions.[br /]
[br /]
Adler added that, at the center of each of our lifestyles, there sits one of these fictions, an important one about who we are and where we are going.[br /]
[br /]
[b]SOCIAL INTEREST[/b][br /]
[br /]
Adler felt that social concern was not simply inborn, nor just learned, but a combination of both : It is based on an innate disposition, but it has to be nurtured to survive. That it is to some extent innate, is shown by the way babies and small children often how sympathy for others without having been taught to do so. Notice how, when one baby in a nursery begins to cry, they all begin to cry. Or how, when we walk into a room where people are laughing, we ourselves begin to smile.[br /]
[br /]
One misunderstanding Adler wanted to avoid was the idea that social interest was somehow another version of extraversion. Adler meant social concern or feeling not in terms of particular social behaviors, but in the much broader sense of caring for family for community, for society, for humanity, even for life. Social concern is a matter of being useful to others.[br /]
[br /]
On the other hand, a lack of social concern is, for Alder, the very definition of mental ill-health : All failures – neurotics, psychotics, criminals, drunkards, problem children, suicides, perverts, and prostitutes – are failures because they are lacking in social interest… Their goal of success is a goal and personal superiority, and their triumphs have meaning only to themselves.[br /]
[br /]
But the inferiority complex is not just a little problem; it’s a neurosis, meaning it’s a life-size problem. You become shy and timid, insecure, indecisive, cowardly, submissive, compliant, and so on. You begin to rely on people to carry you along, even manipulating them into supporting you : "You think I’m smart / pretty / strong / sexy / good, don’t you ?" Eventually, you become a drain on them, and you may find yourself by yourself. Nobody can take all that self-centered whining for long ![br /]
[br /]
There is another way in which people respond to inferiority besides compensation and the inferiority complex : You can also develop a superiority complex. The superiority complex involves covering up your inferiority by pretending to be superior.[br /]
[br /]
[b]INFERIORITY[/b][br /]
[br /]
Adler says it’s a matter of being overwhelmed by our inferiority. If you are moving along, doing well, feeling competent, you can afford to think of others. If you are not, if life is getting the best of you, then your attentions become increasingly focussed on yourself.[br /]
[br /]
Obviously, everyone suffers from inferiority in one form or another. For example, Adler began his theoretical work considering organ inferiority, that is, the fact that each of us has weaker, as well as stronger, parts of our anatomy or physiology. Some of us are born with heart murmurs, or develop heart problems early in life; some have weak lungs, or kidneys, or early liver problems; some of us stutter or lisp; some have diabetes, or asthma, or polio; some have weak eyes, or poor hearing, or a poor musculture; some of us have innate tendencies to being heavy, others to being skinny; some of us are retarded, others are deformed; some of us are terribly tall or terribly short; and so on and so on.[br /]
[br /]
Adler noted that many people respond to these organic inferiorities with compensation. They make up for their deficiencies in some way : The inferior organ can be strengthened and even become stronger than it is in others; or other organs can be overdeveloped to take up the slack; or the person can psychologically compensate for the organic problem by developing certain skills or even certain personality styles. There are, as you well know, many examples of people who overcame great physical odds to become what those who are better endowed physically wouldn’t even dream of ![br /]
[br /]
Sadly, there are also many people who cannot handle their difficulties, and lead lives of quite despair. I would guess that our optimistic, up-beat society seriously underestimates their numbers.[br /]
[br /]
If you are overwhelmed by the forces of inferiority – whether it is your body hurting, the people around you holding you in contempt, or just the general difficulties of growing up – you develop an inferiority complex.[br /]
[br /]
[b]DIAGNOSIS & THERAPY[/b][br /]
[br /]
In order to help you to discover the "fictions" your lifestyle is based upon, Adler would look at a great variety of things – your birth – order position, for example. First, he might examine you and your medical history for any possible organic roots to your problem. A serious illness, for example, may have side effects that closely resemble neurotic and psychotic symptoms.[br /]
[br /]
In your very first session with you, he might ask for your earliest childhood memory. He is not so much looking for the truth here as for an indication of that early prototype of your present lifestyle. If your earliest memory involves security and a great deal of attention, that might indicate pampering; if you recall some aggressive competition with your older brother, that might suggest the strong strivings of a second child and the "ruling" type of personality; if your memory involves neglect and hiding under the sink, it might mean severe inferiority and avoidance; and so on.[br /]
[br /]
Like Freud and Jung, analyses of dreams were important to Adler. He took a more direct approach to them, though : Dreams are an expression of your style of life and, far from contradicting your daytime feelings, are unified with your conscious life.[br /]
[br /]
Adler would also pay attention to how you express yourself; your posture, the way you shake hands, the gestures you use, how you move, your "body language", as we say today. He notes that pampered people often lean against something ! Even your sleep postures may contribute some insight. A person who sleeps in the fetal position with the covers over his or her head is clearly different from one who sprawls over the entire bed completely uncovered ![br /]
[br /]
He would also want to know the exogenous factors, the events that triggered the symptoms that concern you. He gives a number of common triggers : Sexual problems, like uncertainty, guilt, the first time, impotence, and so on; the problems women face, such as pregnancy and childbirth and he onset and end of menstruation; your love life, dating, engagement, marriage, and divorce; your work life, including school, exams, career decisions, and the job itself; and mortal danger or the loss of a loved one.[br /]
[br /]
Last, and not least, Adler was open to the less rational and scientific, more art-like side of diagnosis; he suggested we not ignore empathy, intuition, and just plain guess work ![br /]
[br /]
There are considerable differences between Adler’s therapy and Freud’s : First, Adler preferred to have everyone sitting up and talking face to face. Further, he went to great lengths to avoid appearing to authoritarian. In fact, he advised that the therapist never allow the patient to force him into the role of an authoritarian figure, because that allowed the patient to play some of the same games he or she is likely to have played many times before : The patient may set you up as a savior, only to attack you when you inevitably reveal your humanness. By pulling you down, they feel as if they are raising themselves, with their neurotic lifestyles, up.
[br /]
[br /]
This is essentially the explanation Adler gave for resistance. He said, "when a patient forgets appointments, comes in late, demands special favors, or generally becomes stubborn and un-co-operative, it is not, as Freud thought, a matter of repression. Rather, resistance is just a sign of the patient’s lack of courage to give up their neurotic lifestyle."[br /]
[br /]
The patient must come to understand the nature of his or her lifestyle and its roots in self-centered fictions. This understanding or insight cannot be forced : If you just tell someone "look, here is your problem !" he or she will only pull away from you and look for ways of bolstering their present fictions. Instead, a patient must be brought into such a state of feeling that he likes to listen, and wants to understand. Only then can he be influenced to live what he has understood. It is the patient, not the therapist, who is ultimately responsible for curing him – or herself.[br /]
[br /]
[b]TWELVE CHIEF TENETS OF INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY[/b][br /]
[br /]
Every neurosis can be understood as an attempt to free oneself from a feeling of inferiority in order to gain a feeling of superiority.The path of the neurosis does not lead in the direction of social functioning, nor does it aim at solving given life-problems, but finds an outlet for itself in a small family circle, thus achieving the isolation of the patient.The larger unit of the social group is either completely or very extensively pushed aside by a mechanism consisting of hypersensitiveness and intolerance. Only a small group is left over for maneuvers aiming at the various types of superiority to expend themselves upon. At the same time protection and the withdrawal from the demands of the community and the decision of life are made possible.[br /]
[br /]
Thus estranged from reality, the neurotic man lives a life of imagination and fantasy, and employs a number of devices for enabling him to side-step the demands of reality, and for reaching out towards an ideal situation which would free him from any service for the community and absolve him from responsibility.These exemptions and privileges of illness and suffering give him a substitute for his original hazardous goal of superiority.[br /]
[br /]
Thus the neurosis represents an attempt to free one-self from all the constraints of the community by establishing a counter-compulsion. This latter is so constituted that it eventually faces the peculiar nature of the surroundings and their demands. Both of these convincing inferences can be drawn from the manner in which this counter-compulsion manifests itself and from the neurosis selected.[br /]
[br /]
The counter-compulsion takes on the nature of a revolt, gathers its material either from favorable affective experiences or from observations. It permits thoughts and affects to become preoccupied either with the above-mentioned disturbances or with unimportant details, as long as they at least serve the purpose of directing the eye and the attention of the patient away from his life problems. In this manner, depending upon the needs of the situation, he prepares anxiety and compulsion situations, sleeplessness, swooning, perversions, hallucinations, slightly pathological effects, neurasthenia and hypochondriachal complexes and psychotic pictures of his actual condition, all of which serve him as excuses.[br /]
[br /]
Even logic falls under the domination of the counter-compulsion. As in psychosis, this process may go as far as the actual nullification of logic.Logic, the will to live, love and human sympathy, co-operation and language, all arise out of the needs of human communal life. Against the latter are directed automatically all the plans of the neurotic individual striving for isolation and lusting for power.[br /]
[br /]
To cure a neurosis it is necessary to change completely the whole upbringing of the patient and turn him definitely and unconditionally back into human society.All the volition and all the strivings of the neurotic are dictated by his prestige-seeking policy, which is continually looking for excuses which will enable him to leave the problems of life unsolved. He consequently turns against allowing any community feeling to develop.[br /]
[br /]
If, therefore, one may regard the demand for a complete and unified understanding of man and for a comprehension of his (undivided) individuality as justified – a view to which we are forced, both by the nature of reason and the individual psychological knowledge of the urge towards an integration of the personality – then the method, enables us to arrive at some conception of the power lines along which the individual strives to attain superiority.[br /]
[br /]
[b]ON HIS THEORIES[/b][br /]
[br /]
Although Adler’s theory may be less interesting than Freud’s with its sexuality, or Jung’s with its mythology, it has probably struck a reader as the most common sensible theory. In fact, very few personality theorists like him are found so.[br /]
[br /]
Abraham Maslow once said that, the older he gets, the more right Adler seems. Carl Roger’s brand of therapy is similar to Adler’s theory. The theorists called Neo-Freudians – Horney, Fromm, and Sullivan – should really have been called Neo-Adlerians.[br /]
[br /]
The positive sides on his theory need not to be listed. His clear descriptions of people’s complaints, his simple theoretical structure, his straight forward and common – sense interpretations of their problems, his trust and even affection for the common person – all these aspects made his theory both comfortable and highly influential.[br /]
[br /]
Criticism of Adler tend to involve the issue of whether or not his theory is scientific. The mainstream of psychology today is experimentally oriented, which means the concepts of a theory uses must be measurable and manipulable. Even teleological approach, there are criticisms you can make regarding how scientific Adler’s theory is : Many of the details of his theory are too anecdotal, and true in particular cases, but don’t necessarily have the generality, Adler seems to claim for them.[br /]
[br /]
[b]HIS REMARKABLE PUBLICATIONS[/b][br /]
[br /]
THE DOCTOR AS EDUCATOR ( 1904 )[br /]
[br /]
STUDY OF ORGAN INFERIORITY AND ITS PSYCHICAL COMPENSATION ( 1907 )[br /]
[br /]
THE INSTINCT OF AGGRESSION ( 1908 )[br /]
[br /]
THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION ( 1912 )[br /]
[br /]
THE PRACTICE AND THEORY OF INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY ( 1920 )[br /]
[br /]
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN NATURE ( 1928 )[br /]
[br /]
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN ( 1929 )[br /]
[br /]
[br /]
[b]FEBRUARY 7, 1870[/b] Alfred Adler was born in Vienna, Austria.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1888[/b] He began study at the University of Vienna Medical School.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1895[/b] He received his degree in medicine from the University of Vienna.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1897[/b] Adler fell in love with Raissa Timofeivna Epstein and in the same year, he married her.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1898[/b] He set up private practice in Vienna. His wife gave birth to a daughter, Valentine. Publication of two articles in ‘Medical News Bulletin’ of Austria. He also published his first monograph, `Health Book for the Tailor Trade’.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1899 - 1900[/b] First meeting with Sigmund Freud.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1901[/b] His second child, Alexandra Adler was born.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1902[/b] He published two more articles in ‘Medical News Bulletin’. Sigmund Freud invited Adler to join the fledgling Wednesday Psychological Society, which was later renamed as ‘Vienna Psychoanalytic Society’.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1904[/b] He published his most important article to date, ‘The Physician as Educator’. Adler converted from Judaism to Protestantism. His third progeny. Kurt Adler was born. Wrote "The Doctor as Educator."[br /]
[br /]
[b]1907[/b] He differed sharply from Freud, when his `Study of Organ Inferiority and its psychical Compensation’ was published. Published his monograph an organ inferiority.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1909[/b] His fourth child Cornelia (daughter) was born.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1910[/b] Became president of Viennese branch of the Psychoanalytic Association.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1911[/b] Adler was expelled from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society under Freud’s impetus. He formed his own group, initially called the ‘Society for Free Psychoanalytic Inquiry’. After that Freud and Adler never met again.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1912[/b] Publication of his work as Published "The Neurotic Constitution"[br /]
[br /]
[b]1913[/b] Adler renamed his group as the `Society for Individual Psychology.’[br /]
[br /]
[b]1914[/b] Publication of ‘Healing and Education’, edited by Adler.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1916[/b] He was drafted as a military physician for the Austria-Hungarian Empire during Ist World War.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1918[/b] After being discharged from military service, he began to emphasize social feelings in his writings, and founded several child guidance clinics in Vienna.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1922[/b] Publication of ‘The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology.’[br /]
[br /]
[b]1924[/b] He became a professor at Vienna’s Pedagogical Institute.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1927[/b] Publication of ‘Understanding Human Nature’. He went to United States on his first lecture-tour.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1928[/b] Publication of ‘The Case of Miss R : The Interpretation of a Life Story.’ He was appointed as a Clinical Director of the Mariahilfer Ambulatorium, Vienna.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1929[/b] He became an adjunct professor at Columbia University. With this appointment, he started to shift base of operations from Vienna to New York City. Publication of ‘Individual Psychology in the Schools; ‘Problems of Neurosis : A Book of Case Histories’, ‘Publication of The Science of Living’ and ‘Guiding the Child : On the Principles of Individual Psychology; edited by Adler.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1930[/b] He resigned from Columbia University.
[b]Publication of three books :-[/b]
The Education of Children’, [br /]
‘The Pattern of Life’[br /]
‘The Problem Child : The Life Style of the Difficult Child as Analyzed in Specific Cases.’[br /]
[br /]
[b]1931[/b] His book, ‘What Life Should Mean to You’ was published.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1932[/b] He was appointed as a visiting professor of Medical Psychology at the Long Island College of Medicine. It was his first full-time academic position in the United States.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1933[/b] Publication of ‘Religion and Individual Psychology Publication of Social Interest : A Challenge to Mankind.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1934[/b] Austria was taken over by its fascists and Adler’s psycho-educational movement was suppressed.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1935[/b] Austria was annexed by Hitler’s Nazi Germany.Adler and his family moved to the United States. His wife relocated to New York City and resumed living full-time with Adler. He became mentor to the young Abraham Maslow. Adler founded ‘International Journal of Individual Psychology’ in U.S.A. May 28.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1937[/b] He died of heart attack in Aberdeen, Scotland.[br /]
[br /]
[br /]
[br /]
[b]1888[/b] He began study at the University of Vienna Medical School.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1895[/b] He received his degree in medicine from the University of Vienna.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1897[/b] Adler fell in love with Raissa Timofeivna Epstein and in the same year, he married her.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1898[/b] He set up private practice in Vienna. His wife gave birth to a daughter, Valentine. Publication of two articles in ‘Medical News Bulletin’ of Austria. He also published his first monograph, `Health Book for the Tailor Trade’.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1899 - 1900[/b] First meeting with Sigmund Freud.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1901[/b] His second child, Alexandra Adler was born.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1902[/b] He published two more articles in ‘Medical News Bulletin’. Sigmund Freud invited Adler to join the fledgling Wednesday Psychological Society, which was later renamed as ‘Vienna Psychoanalytic Society’.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1904[/b] He published his most important article to date, ‘The Physician as Educator’. Adler converted from Judaism to Protestantism. His third progeny. Kurt Adler was born. Wrote "The Doctor as Educator."[br /]
[br /]
[b]1907[/b] He differed sharply from Freud, when his `Study of Organ Inferiority and its psychical Compensation’ was published. Published his monograph an organ inferiority.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1909[/b] His fourth child Cornelia (daughter) was born.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1910[/b] Became president of Viennese branch of the Psychoanalytic Association.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1911[/b] Adler was expelled from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society under Freud’s impetus. He formed his own group, initially called the ‘Society for Free Psychoanalytic Inquiry’. After that Freud and Adler never met again.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1912[/b] Publication of his work as Published "The Neurotic Constitution"[br /]
[br /]
[b]1913[/b] Adler renamed his group as the `Society for Individual Psychology.’[br /]
[br /]
[b]1914[/b] Publication of ‘Healing and Education’, edited by Adler.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1916[/b] He was drafted as a military physician for the Austria-Hungarian Empire during Ist World War.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1918[/b] After being discharged from military service, he began to emphasize social feelings in his writings, and founded several child guidance clinics in Vienna.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1922[/b] Publication of ‘The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology.’[br /]
[br /]
[b]1924[/b] He became a professor at Vienna’s Pedagogical Institute.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1927[/b] Publication of ‘Understanding Human Nature’. He went to United States on his first lecture-tour.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1928[/b] Publication of ‘The Case of Miss R : The Interpretation of a Life Story.’ He was appointed as a Clinical Director of the Mariahilfer Ambulatorium, Vienna.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1929[/b] He became an adjunct professor at Columbia University. With this appointment, he started to shift base of operations from Vienna to New York City. Publication of ‘Individual Psychology in the Schools; ‘Problems of Neurosis : A Book of Case Histories’, ‘Publication of The Science of Living’ and ‘Guiding the Child : On the Principles of Individual Psychology; edited by Adler.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1930[/b] He resigned from Columbia University.
[b]Publication of three books :-[/b]
The Education of Children’, [br /]
‘The Pattern of Life’[br /]
‘The Problem Child : The Life Style of the Difficult Child as Analyzed in Specific Cases.’[br /]
[br /]
[b]1931[/b] His book, ‘What Life Should Mean to You’ was published.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1932[/b] He was appointed as a visiting professor of Medical Psychology at the Long Island College of Medicine. It was his first full-time academic position in the United States.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1933[/b] Publication of ‘Religion and Individual Psychology Publication of Social Interest : A Challenge to Mankind.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1934[/b] Austria was taken over by its fascists and Adler’s psycho-educational movement was suppressed.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1935[/b] Austria was annexed by Hitler’s Nazi Germany.Adler and his family moved to the United States. His wife relocated to New York City and resumed living full-time with Adler. He became mentor to the young Abraham Maslow. Adler founded ‘International Journal of Individual Psychology’ in U.S.A. May 28.[br /]
[br /]
[b]1937[/b] He died of heart attack in Aberdeen, Scotland.[br /]
[br /]
[br /]
• The educator must believe in the potential power of his pupil, and he must employ all his art in seeking to bring his pupil to experience this power.[br /]
[br /]
• The educator of a child must get to know his tendentious apperception and remove it.[br /]
[br /]
• If you wish to educate a child who has gone wrong, then you must, above all, keep your attention fixed on the intersection of two charmed circles.[br /]
[br /]
• Let yourself be guided in your pedagogic interventions especially by the observations you have made on the results of your former interventions.[br /]
[br /]
• My difficulties belong to me ![br /]
[br /]
• The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder with the truth.[br /]
[br /]
• Every individual acts and suffers in accordance with his peculiar teleology, which has all the inevitability of fate, so long as he does not understand it.[br /]
[br /]
• No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences so-called trauma – but we make out of them just what suits our purposes.[br /]
[br /]
• Behind everyone who behaves as if he were superior to others, we can suspect a feeling of inferiority which calls for very special efforts of concealment. It is as if a man feared that he was too small and walked on his toes to make himself seem taller.[br /]
[br /]
• Man knows much more than he understands.[br /]
[br /]
• The feeling of inferiority rules the mental life and can be clearly recognized in the sense of incompleteness and un-fulfillment, and in the uninterrupted struggle both of individuals and humanity.[br /]
[br /]
• The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.[br /]
[br /]
• There is no such thing as talent. There is pressure.[br /]
[br /]
• It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.[br /]
[br /]
• There is a law that man should love his neighbor as himself. In a few hundred years it should be as natural to mankind as breathing or the upright gait, but if he does not learn it, he must perish.[br /]
[br /]
• The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge to conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.[br /]
[br /]
• The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge to conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.[br /]
[br /]
• It is the patriotic duty of every man to lie for his country.[br /]
[br /]
• Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority.[br /]
[br /]
• The test of one’s behavior pattern, relationship to society, relationship to ones’ work, relationship to sex.[br /]
[br /]
• To be human means to feel inferior.[br /]
[br /]
• The science of human nature should not be approached with too much presumption and pride. On the contrary, its practitioners are notable for exercising a certain modesty. The understanding of human nature is an enormous problem, whose solutions has been the goal of our culture since time immemorial. It is not a science that should be pursued by a few specialists only. Its proper objective must be the understanding of human nature by every human being.[br /]
[br /]
• Everything may be different, even what I say to you now may be different.[br /]
[br /]
• You cannot divide the individual, man is a whole human being.[br /]
[br /]
• I have taken forty years to make my psychology simple. I might say "all neurosis is vanity" – but this also might not be understood.[br /]
[br /]
• More important than innate disposition, objective experience, and environment is the subjective evaluation of these. Furthermore, this evaluation stands in a certain, often strange, relation to reality.[br /]
[br /]
• A clumsy right hand cannot be trained into a skillful right hand by taking thought, by wishing it were less clumsy, or even by avoiding clumsiness. It can become skillful only by exercise in practical achievements, and the incentive to the achievement must be more deeply felt than the discouragement at the hitherto existent clumsiness.[br /]
[br /]
• Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.[br /]
[br /]
• We cannot say that if a child is badly nourished he will become a criminal. We must see what conclusion the child has drawn.[br /]
[br /]
• We can comprehend every single life phenomenon, as if the past, the present, and the future together with a superordinated, guiding idea were present in it in traces.[br /]
[br /]
• When we know the goal of a person, we know approximately what will follow.[br /]
[br /]
• A child was pampered and takes over the corresponding forms of expression with all their disadvantages. As the child grows up, he may become aware of the misfortune toward which he is headed. If such a child would ask what is the cause for this, everyone would say the mother. We ourselves would be tempted to agree, and also to blame the mother. But this argument collapses when the child changes his behavior, either on his own or through outside help and no longer makes these same errors.[br /]
[br /]
• Every semblance of causality in the psychological life is due to the tendency of many psychologists to present their dogmas disguised in mechanistic or physical similes. At one time they use as a comparison a pump handle moving up and down, at another a magnet with polar termini, at another a sadly harassed animal struggling for the satisfaction of its elementary needs. From such a view, to be sure, little can be seen of the fundamental differences which human psychological life manifests.[br /]
[br /]
• Every therapeutic cure, and still more, any awkward attempt to show the patient the truth, tears him from the cradle of his freedom from responsibility and must therefore reckon with the most vehement resistance.[br /]
[br /]
• Every individual acts and suffers in accordance with his peculiar teleology, which has all the inevitability of fate, so long as he does not understand it.[br /]
[br /]
• Neurosis is the natural, logical development of an individual who is comparatively inactive, filled with a personal, egocentric striving for superiority, and is therefore retarded in the development of his social interest, as we find regularly among the more passive pampered styles of life.[br /]
[br /]
• The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.[br /]
[br /]
• After all, there is no principle to live by which would be valid to the very end; even the most correct solutions of problems interfere with the course of life when they are pushed too far into the foreground, as for example, if one makes cleanliness and truth the goal of all striving. We should not be astonished if in the cases where we see an inferiority complex we find a superiority complex more or less hidden.[br /]
[br /]
• Behind everyone who behaves as if he were superior to others, we can suspect a feeling of inferiority which calls for very special efforts of concealment. It is as if a man feared that he was too small and walked on his toes to make himself seem taller.[br /]
[br /]
• All neurotic symptoms have as their object the task of safeguarding the patient’s self-esteem and thereby also the lifeline into which he has grown.[br /]
[br /]
• It is one of the most effective attitudes of the neurotic to measure thumbs down, so to speak, a real person by an ideal, since in doing so he can depreciate him as much as he wishes.[br /]
[br /]
• One of the most interesting complexes is the redeemer complex. It characterizes people who conspicuously but unknowingly take the attitude that they must save or redeem someone.[br /]
[br /]
• There are thousands of degrees and variations, but it is always clearly the attitude of a person who finds his superiority in solving the complications of others.[br /]
[br /]
• In the investigation of a neurotic style of life, we must always suspect an opponent, and note who suffers most because of the patient’s condition. Usually this is a member of the family.[br /]
[br /]
• There is always this element of concealed accusation in neurosis, the patient feeling as though he were deprived of his right-that is, of the center of attention – and wanting to fix the responsibility and blame upon someone.[br /]
[br /]
• Defiant individuals will always persecute others, yet will always consider themselves persecuted.[br /]
[br /]
• A neurotic actress talking about love affairs said : "I am not all afraid of such affairs. I am actually completely amoral. There is only one thing : I have found that all men smell bad, and that violates my aesthetic sense." We will understand that with such an attitude one can well afford to be amoral without incurring any danger.[br /]
[br /]
• To injure another person through atonement is one of the most subtle devices of the neurotic, as when, for example, he indulges in self-accusations.[br /]
[br /]
• If I didn’t have (this affliction), I would be the first." As a rule the if-clause contains an unfulfillable condition, or the patient’s own arrangement, which only he can change.[br /]
[br /]
• There is only one reason for an individual to side-step to the useless side : the fear of a defeat on the useful side.[br /]
[br /]
• Tears and complaints – the means which I have called "water power" – can be an extremely useful weapon for disturbing cooperation and reducing other to a condition of slavery.[br /]
[br /]
• The self-bound individual always forgets that his self would be safeguarded better and automatically the more he prepares himself for the welfare of mankind, and that in this respect no limits are set for him.[br /]
[br /]
• To see with the eyes of another, to hear with the ears of another, to feel with the heart of another. For the time being, this seems to me an admissible definition of what we call social feeling.[br /]
[br /]
• If anyone asks me why he should love his neighbor, I would not know how to answer him, and I could only ask in my turn why he should pose such a question… It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring[br /]
[br /]
• Imperfect preparation gives rise to the thousand-fold forms that express physical and mental inferiority and insecurity.[br /]
[br /]
• In every case there is a "yes" that emphasizes the pressure of social interest, but this is invariably followed by a "but" that possesses greater strength and prevents the necessary increase of social interest. This "but" in all cases, whether typical or particular, will have an individual nuance. The difficulty of a cure is in proportion to the strength of the "but."[br /]
[br /]
• All inherited possibilities and all influences of the body, all environmental influences, including educational application, are perceived, assimilated, digested, and answered by a living and striving being, striving for a successful achievement in his view.[br /]
[br /]
• The subjective ness of the individual, his special style of life, and his conception of life mould and shape all influences. The individual life collects all these influences and uses them as provocative bricks in building a totality which aims toward a successful goal in relating itself to outside problems.[br /]
[br /]
• I believe that I am not bound by any strict rule or prejudice but prefer to subscribe to the principle : Everything can also be different.[br /]
[br /]
• A person’s opinion of himself and the environment can best be deduced from the meaning he finds in life and from the meaning he gives to his own life.[br /]
[br /]
• There would be far fewer outbursts of temper if the possibility were not offered of assuring oneself significance in this way.[br /]
[br /]
• People often believe that left and right are contradictions, that man and woman, hot and cold, light and heavy, strong and weak are contradictions. From a scientific viewpoint, they are not contradictions, but varieties. They are degrees of a scale, arranged in accordance with their approximation to some ideal fiction. In the same way, good and bad, normal and abnormal, are not contradictions but varieties.[br /]
[br /]
[br /]
[br /]
• The educator of a child must get to know his tendentious apperception and remove it.[br /]
[br /]
• If you wish to educate a child who has gone wrong, then you must, above all, keep your attention fixed on the intersection of two charmed circles.[br /]
[br /]
• Let yourself be guided in your pedagogic interventions especially by the observations you have made on the results of your former interventions.[br /]
[br /]
• My difficulties belong to me ![br /]
[br /]
• The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder with the truth.[br /]
[br /]
• Every individual acts and suffers in accordance with his peculiar teleology, which has all the inevitability of fate, so long as he does not understand it.[br /]
[br /]
• No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences so-called trauma – but we make out of them just what suits our purposes.[br /]
[br /]
• Behind everyone who behaves as if he were superior to others, we can suspect a feeling of inferiority which calls for very special efforts of concealment. It is as if a man feared that he was too small and walked on his toes to make himself seem taller.[br /]
[br /]
• Man knows much more than he understands.[br /]
[br /]
• The feeling of inferiority rules the mental life and can be clearly recognized in the sense of incompleteness and un-fulfillment, and in the uninterrupted struggle both of individuals and humanity.[br /]
[br /]
• The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.[br /]
[br /]
• There is no such thing as talent. There is pressure.[br /]
[br /]
• It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.[br /]
[br /]
• There is a law that man should love his neighbor as himself. In a few hundred years it should be as natural to mankind as breathing or the upright gait, but if he does not learn it, he must perish.[br /]
[br /]
• The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge to conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.[br /]
[br /]
• The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge to conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.[br /]
[br /]
• It is the patriotic duty of every man to lie for his country.[br /]
[br /]
• Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority.[br /]
[br /]
• The test of one’s behavior pattern, relationship to society, relationship to ones’ work, relationship to sex.[br /]
[br /]
• To be human means to feel inferior.[br /]
[br /]
• The science of human nature should not be approached with too much presumption and pride. On the contrary, its practitioners are notable for exercising a certain modesty. The understanding of human nature is an enormous problem, whose solutions has been the goal of our culture since time immemorial. It is not a science that should be pursued by a few specialists only. Its proper objective must be the understanding of human nature by every human being.[br /]
[br /]
• Everything may be different, even what I say to you now may be different.[br /]
[br /]
• You cannot divide the individual, man is a whole human being.[br /]
[br /]
• I have taken forty years to make my psychology simple. I might say "all neurosis is vanity" – but this also might not be understood.[br /]
[br /]
• More important than innate disposition, objective experience, and environment is the subjective evaluation of these. Furthermore, this evaluation stands in a certain, often strange, relation to reality.[br /]
[br /]
• A clumsy right hand cannot be trained into a skillful right hand by taking thought, by wishing it were less clumsy, or even by avoiding clumsiness. It can become skillful only by exercise in practical achievements, and the incentive to the achievement must be more deeply felt than the discouragement at the hitherto existent clumsiness.[br /]
[br /]
• Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.[br /]
[br /]
• We cannot say that if a child is badly nourished he will become a criminal. We must see what conclusion the child has drawn.[br /]
[br /]
• We can comprehend every single life phenomenon, as if the past, the present, and the future together with a superordinated, guiding idea were present in it in traces.[br /]
[br /]
• When we know the goal of a person, we know approximately what will follow.[br /]
[br /]
• A child was pampered and takes over the corresponding forms of expression with all their disadvantages. As the child grows up, he may become aware of the misfortune toward which he is headed. If such a child would ask what is the cause for this, everyone would say the mother. We ourselves would be tempted to agree, and also to blame the mother. But this argument collapses when the child changes his behavior, either on his own or through outside help and no longer makes these same errors.[br /]
[br /]
• Every semblance of causality in the psychological life is due to the tendency of many psychologists to present their dogmas disguised in mechanistic or physical similes. At one time they use as a comparison a pump handle moving up and down, at another a magnet with polar termini, at another a sadly harassed animal struggling for the satisfaction of its elementary needs. From such a view, to be sure, little can be seen of the fundamental differences which human psychological life manifests.[br /]
[br /]
• Every therapeutic cure, and still more, any awkward attempt to show the patient the truth, tears him from the cradle of his freedom from responsibility and must therefore reckon with the most vehement resistance.[br /]
[br /]
• Every individual acts and suffers in accordance with his peculiar teleology, which has all the inevitability of fate, so long as he does not understand it.[br /]
[br /]
• Neurosis is the natural, logical development of an individual who is comparatively inactive, filled with a personal, egocentric striving for superiority, and is therefore retarded in the development of his social interest, as we find regularly among the more passive pampered styles of life.[br /]
[br /]
• The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.[br /]
[br /]
• After all, there is no principle to live by which would be valid to the very end; even the most correct solutions of problems interfere with the course of life when they are pushed too far into the foreground, as for example, if one makes cleanliness and truth the goal of all striving. We should not be astonished if in the cases where we see an inferiority complex we find a superiority complex more or less hidden.[br /]
[br /]
• Behind everyone who behaves as if he were superior to others, we can suspect a feeling of inferiority which calls for very special efforts of concealment. It is as if a man feared that he was too small and walked on his toes to make himself seem taller.[br /]
[br /]
• All neurotic symptoms have as their object the task of safeguarding the patient’s self-esteem and thereby also the lifeline into which he has grown.[br /]
[br /]
• It is one of the most effective attitudes of the neurotic to measure thumbs down, so to speak, a real person by an ideal, since in doing so he can depreciate him as much as he wishes.[br /]
[br /]
• One of the most interesting complexes is the redeemer complex. It characterizes people who conspicuously but unknowingly take the attitude that they must save or redeem someone.[br /]
[br /]
• There are thousands of degrees and variations, but it is always clearly the attitude of a person who finds his superiority in solving the complications of others.[br /]
[br /]
• In the investigation of a neurotic style of life, we must always suspect an opponent, and note who suffers most because of the patient’s condition. Usually this is a member of the family.[br /]
[br /]
• There is always this element of concealed accusation in neurosis, the patient feeling as though he were deprived of his right-that is, of the center of attention – and wanting to fix the responsibility and blame upon someone.[br /]
[br /]
• Defiant individuals will always persecute others, yet will always consider themselves persecuted.[br /]
[br /]
• A neurotic actress talking about love affairs said : "I am not all afraid of such affairs. I am actually completely amoral. There is only one thing : I have found that all men smell bad, and that violates my aesthetic sense." We will understand that with such an attitude one can well afford to be amoral without incurring any danger.[br /]
[br /]
• To injure another person through atonement is one of the most subtle devices of the neurotic, as when, for example, he indulges in self-accusations.[br /]
[br /]
• If I didn’t have (this affliction), I would be the first." As a rule the if-clause contains an unfulfillable condition, or the patient’s own arrangement, which only he can change.[br /]
[br /]
• There is only one reason for an individual to side-step to the useless side : the fear of a defeat on the useful side.[br /]
[br /]
• Tears and complaints – the means which I have called "water power" – can be an extremely useful weapon for disturbing cooperation and reducing other to a condition of slavery.[br /]
[br /]
• The self-bound individual always forgets that his self would be safeguarded better and automatically the more he prepares himself for the welfare of mankind, and that in this respect no limits are set for him.[br /]
[br /]
• To see with the eyes of another, to hear with the ears of another, to feel with the heart of another. For the time being, this seems to me an admissible definition of what we call social feeling.[br /]
[br /]
• If anyone asks me why he should love his neighbor, I would not know how to answer him, and I could only ask in my turn why he should pose such a question… It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring[br /]
[br /]
• Imperfect preparation gives rise to the thousand-fold forms that express physical and mental inferiority and insecurity.[br /]
[br /]
• In every case there is a "yes" that emphasizes the pressure of social interest, but this is invariably followed by a "but" that possesses greater strength and prevents the necessary increase of social interest. This "but" in all cases, whether typical or particular, will have an individual nuance. The difficulty of a cure is in proportion to the strength of the "but."[br /]
[br /]
• All inherited possibilities and all influences of the body, all environmental influences, including educational application, are perceived, assimilated, digested, and answered by a living and striving being, striving for a successful achievement in his view.[br /]
[br /]
• The subjective ness of the individual, his special style of life, and his conception of life mould and shape all influences. The individual life collects all these influences and uses them as provocative bricks in building a totality which aims toward a successful goal in relating itself to outside problems.[br /]
[br /]
• I believe that I am not bound by any strict rule or prejudice but prefer to subscribe to the principle : Everything can also be different.[br /]
[br /]
• A person’s opinion of himself and the environment can best be deduced from the meaning he finds in life and from the meaning he gives to his own life.[br /]
[br /]
• There would be far fewer outbursts of temper if the possibility were not offered of assuring oneself significance in this way.[br /]
[br /]
• People often believe that left and right are contradictions, that man and woman, hot and cold, light and heavy, strong and weak are contradictions. From a scientific viewpoint, they are not contradictions, but varieties. They are degrees of a scale, arranged in accordance with their approximation to some ideal fiction. In the same way, good and bad, normal and abnormal, are not contradictions but varieties.[br /]
[br /]
[br /]
Adler received his M.D. degree from the University of Vienna in 1895.[br /]
[br /]
Long before the actual treatment of diabetes by insulin was discovered, Adler was the first psychiatrist who stressed the desirability of treating diabetes by extracts of the pancreas.[br /]
[br /]
Adler is popular for his formulation of the theory of "Individual Psychology".[br /]
[br /]
He founded the first child-guidance clinic in Vienna in 1921.[br /]
[br /]
He lectured extensively at the Universities of Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Paris, London, Oxford, Cambridge, Amsterdam, Leyden, Utrecht, Zagreb, Prague, Copenhagen, Stockholm, New York, Harvard, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Des Moines, Philadelphia, McGill, Hamilton, and also before various scientific societies in Europe and U.S.A.[br /]
[br /]
[br /]
[br /]
Long before the actual treatment of diabetes by insulin was discovered, Adler was the first psychiatrist who stressed the desirability of treating diabetes by extracts of the pancreas.[br /]
[br /]
Adler is popular for his formulation of the theory of "Individual Psychology".[br /]
[br /]
He founded the first child-guidance clinic in Vienna in 1921.[br /]
[br /]
He lectured extensively at the Universities of Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Paris, London, Oxford, Cambridge, Amsterdam, Leyden, Utrecht, Zagreb, Prague, Copenhagen, Stockholm, New York, Harvard, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Des Moines, Philadelphia, McGill, Hamilton, and also before various scientific societies in Europe and U.S.A.[br /]
[br /]
[br /]
