Alfred Adler ( ; ; February 7, 1870 – May 28, 1937) was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings of belonging, relationships within the family, and birth order set him apart from Freud and others in their common circle. He proposed that contributing to others ("social interest" or ) was how the individual feels a sense of worth and belonging in the family and society. His earlier work focused on inferiority,Alfred Adler, Understanding Human Nature (1992) Chapter 6 coining the term "inferiority complex", an isolating element which he argued plays a key role in personality development. Adler considered a human being as an individual whole, and therefore he called his school of psychology Individual Psychology.
Adler was the first to emphasize the importance of the social element in the re-adjustment process of the individual and to carry psychiatry into the community. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Adler as the 67th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.
Early life Adler was born on February 7, 1870 at Mariahilfer Straße 208Prof. Dr. Klaus Lohrmann "Jüdisches Wien. Kultur-Karte" (2003), Mosse-Berlin Mitte gGmbH (Verlag Jüdische Presse) in Rudolfsheim, a village on the western fringes of Vienna, a modern part of Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus, the 15th district of the city. He was second of the seven children of an Austrian-Jewish couple, Pauline (Beer) and Leopold Adler. Leopold was a grain merchant and came from a Hungarian-Jewish family. Alfred's younger brother died in the bed next to him when Alfred was only three years old, and throughout his childhood, he maintained a rivalry with his older brother. This rivalry was spurred on because Adler believed his mother preferred his brother over him. Despite his good relationship with his father, he still struggled with feelings of inferiority in his relationship with his mother.
Alfred was an active, popular child and an average student who was also known for the competitive attitude toward his older brother, Sigmund. Early on, he developed rickets, which kept Alfred from walking until he was four years old. At the age of four, he developed pneumonia and heard a doctor say to his father, "Your boy is lost". Along with being run over twice and witnessing his younger brother's death, this sickness contributed to his overall fear of death. At that point, he decided to be a physician. He was very interested in the subjects of psychology, sociology, and philosophy. After graduating from the University of Vienna in 1895, specialized as an eye doctor, and later in neurology and psychiatry.
Career Adler began his medical career as an ophthalmologist, but he soon switched to general practice, and established his surgery in a less affluent part of Vienna across from the Prater, a combination of 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.
In his early career, Adler wrote an article in defense of Sigmund Freud's theory after reading one of his most well known works, The Interpretation of Dreams. In 1902, because of his supportive article, Adler received an invitation from Freud to join a small, informal discussion group that included Max Kahane, Rudolf Reitler, and Wilhelm Stekel. The group, the "Wednesday Society" (), met regularly on Wednesday evenings at Freud's home and was the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement, expanding over time to include many more members. By 1906, membership stood at 17. Each week, a member would present a paper and after a short break of coffee, cakes, and cigars the group would discuss it. The main members were Fritz Wittels, Otto Rank, Max Eitingon, Karl Abraham, Hanns Sachs, Ernest Jones, Max Graf, and Sandor Ferenczi. In 1908, Adler presented his paper, "The aggressive instinct in life and in neurosis", at a time when Freud believed that early sexual development was the primary determinant of the making of character, with which Adler took issue. Adler proposed that the sexual and aggressive drives were "two originally separate instincts which merge later on". Freud at the time disagreed with this idea.
When Freud in 1920 proposed his dual instinct theory of libido and aggressive drives in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, without citing Adler, he was reproached that Adler had proposed the aggressive drive in his 1908 paper (Eissler, 1971). Freud later commented in a 1923 footnote he added to the Little Hans case that, "I have myself been obliged to assert the existence of an aggressive instinct" (1909, p. 140, 2), while pointing out that his conception of an aggressive drive differs from that of Adler. A long-serving member of the group, he made many more beyond this 1908 pivotal contribution to the group, and Adler became president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society eight years later (1910). He remained a member of the Society until 1911, when he and a group of his supporters formally disengaged from Freud's circle, the first of the great dissenters from orthodox psychoanalysis (preceding Carl Jung's split in 1914).For further detail, see Sigmund Freud#Resignations from the IPA
This departure suited both Freud and Adler, since they had grown to dislike each other. During his association with Freud, Adler frequently maintained his own ideas, which often diverged from Freud's. While Adler is often referred to as "a pupil of Freud", this was not true; they were colleagues, Freud referring to him in print in 1909 as "My colleague Dr Alfred Adler".Sigmund Freud, Case Histories II (PFL 9) p. 41n The association of Adler and Freud lasted a total of nine years, and they never saw each other after the separation. Freud continued to dislike Adler even after the separation and tended to do so with other defectors from psychoanalysis. Even after Adler's death, Freud maintained his distaste for him. When conversing with a colleague over the matter, he stated, "I don't understand your sympathy for Adler. For a Jewish boy out of a Viennese suburb a death in Aberdeen is an unheard of career in itself and a proof of how far he had got on. The world really rewarded him richly for his service in having contradicted psychoanalysis."
Adler founded the Society for Individual Psychology in 1912, after his break from the psychoanalytic movement. Adler's group initially included some orthodox Nietzschean adherents (who believed Adler's ideas on power and inferiority were closer to Nietzsche than Freud's). Their enmity aside, Adler retained a lifelong admiration for Freud's ideas on dreams and credited him with creating a scientific approach to their clinical utilization (Fiebert, 1997). Nevertheless, even regarding dream interpretation, Adler had his own theoretical and clinical approach. The primary differences between Adler and Freud centered on Adler's contention that the social realm (exteriority) is as important to psychology as is the internal realm (interiority). The dynamics of power and compensation extend beyond sexuality; gender and politics can be as important as libido. Moreover, Freud did not share Adler's socialist beliefs, the latter's wife (Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein) being for example an intimate friend of many of the Russian Marxists such as Leon Trotsky.Jones, p. 401
In 1927, Adler entrusted the founding of the Adler's Society to Dimitrije Mitrinović, a Serbian philosopher, revolutionary, and mystic.
In Berlin, in summer 1930, Adler met with English occultist Aleister Crowley. Their connection was through Karl Germer, a German and American businessman and occultist known as Frater Saturnus, who was one of Adler's patients. Crowley later claimed to "know [Adler] personally" and even to have "handled" some of his Berlin patients and to have "put a lot of my own theory and practice into it."
The Adlerian school Following Adler's break from Freud, he enjoyed considerable success and celebrity in building an independent school of psychotherapy and a unique personality theory. He traveled and lectured for a period of 25 years promoting his socially oriented approach. His intent was to build a movement that would rival, even supplant, others in psychology by arguing for the holistic integrity of psychological well-being with that of social equality. Adler's efforts were halted by World War I (1914–1918), during which he served as a doctor with the Austro-Hungarian Army, first on the Russian front and then at a children's hospital.
After the conclusion of the war, Adler's influence increased greatly. In 1919, he started the first Child Guidance clinic in Vienna. With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Social Democratic Party of Austria came to power in the newly-formed Austrian Republic. The Social Democrats supported welfare programs with a particular focus on childhood educational reform. The resulting climate enabled Adler and his associates to establish 28 child guidance clinics, and Vienna became the first city in the world to provide schoolchildren with free educational therapy.
From 1921 onwards, Adler was a frequent lecturer in Europe and then the United States in 1926, becoming a visiting professor at Columbia University in 1927. His clinical treatment methods for adults were aimed at uncovering the hidden purpose of symptoms using the therapeutic functions of insight and meaning. Adler was concerned with overcoming the superiority/inferiority dynamic, and was one of the first psychotherapists to discard the analytic couch in favor of two chairs. This allows the clinician and the patient to sit together more or less as equals.
Adler's clinical methods, which include "Adlerian therapy" or individual psychology, are not limited to treatment after-the-fact but extend to the realm of prevention by preempting future problems in the child. Prevention strategies include encouraging and promoting social interest, belonging, and a cultural shift within families and communities that leads to the eradication of pampering and neglect, and especially corporal punishment.
Adler often wrote for the lay public, and his popularity was related to the relative optimism and comprehensibility of his ideas. Adler always retained a pragmatic approach that was task-oriented. These "Life tasks" are occupation/work, society/friendship, and love/sexuality. Their success depends on cooperation. The tasks of life are not to be considered in isolation since, as Adler famously commented, "they all throw cross-lights on one another".The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler, 1956, edited by H. L. Ansbacher, R. R. Ansbacher, pp. 132–133
In his bestselling book, Man's Search for Meaning, Dr. Viktor E. Frankl compared his own "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy" (after Freud's and Adler's schools) to Adler's analysis:
Emigration In the early 1930s, most of Adler's Austrian clinics had been closed due to his Jewish heritage. Some claim he had converted to Christianity, but no sources were found to sustain this claim, and all indicates he remained ethnically Jewish through his life, his wife being Jewish too, so antisemitic policies affected them. Adler thus left Austria for a professorship at the Long Island College of Medicine in the US, in 1934.
Basic principles Adler was influenced by the mental construct ideas of the philosopher Hans Vaihinger (The Philosophy of 'As if') and the literature of Dostoyevsky. While still a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, he developed a theory of organic inferiority and compensation that was the prototype for his later turn to phenomenology and the development of his famous concept, the inferiority complex.