|
Alfred Adler (February, 1870 – May, 1937) was an Austrian medical
doctor and psychologist, founder of the school of individual psychology. In
collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was
among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement. He was the first major figure
to break away from psychoanalysis to form an independent school of psychotherapy
and personality theory. Adler had an enormous effect on the disciplines of
counseling and psychotherapy as they would develop over the course of the 20th
century (Ellenberger, 1970).
He influenced notable figures in other schools of psychotherapy
such as Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis. His writings
preceded and at times were surprisingly consistent with later neo-Freudian insights
such as evidenced in the works of Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich
Fromm.
Adler emphasized the importance of social equality in order to prevent various
forms of psychopathology and espoused the development of social interest and
democratic family structures as the ideal ethos for raising children. His most
famous concept is the inferiority complex which speaks to the problem of
self-esteem and its negative compensations (e.g. sometimes producing a paradoxical
superiority striving). His emphasis on power dynamics is rooted in the philosophy
of Nietzsche. Adler argued for holism, viewing the individual holistically rather
than reductively, the latter being the dominant lens for viewing human psychology.
Adler was also among the first in psychology to argue in favor of feminism making
the case that power dynamics between men and women (and associations with
masculinity and femininity) are crucial to understanding human psychology (Connell,
1995). Adler is considered, along with Freud and Jung, to be one of the three
founding figures of depth psychology, which emphasizes the unconscious and
psychodynamics (Ellenberger, 1970; Ehrenwald, 1991).
 Early career:
Adler and Freud
Part of a series of articles on
Psychoanalysis
Constructs
Psychosexual development
Psychosocial development
Conscious • Preconscious • Unconscious
Id, ego, and super-ego
Libido • Drive
Transference • Sublimation • Resistance
Important
Figures
Sigmund Freud • Carl Jung
Alfred Adler • Otto Rank
Anna Freud • Margaret Mahler
Karen Horney • Jacques Lacan
Ronald Fairbairn • Melanie Klein
Harry Stack Sullivan
Erik Erikson • Nancy Chodorow
Susan Sutherland Isaacs
Ernest Jones • Heinz Kohut
Important
works
The Interpretation of Dreams
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
"Beyond the Pleasure Principle"
Civilization and Its Discontents
Schools of
Thought
Self psychology • Lacanian
Analytical psychology • Object relations
Interpersonal • Relational
Attachment • Ego psychology
Psychology
Portal
In 1901 Adler received a letter from Sigmund Freud inviting
him to join an informal discussion group that included Max Kahane, Rudolf
Reitler, and Wilhelm Stekel. They met regularly on Wednesday evenings at
Freud's home with membership expanding over time. This group was the beginning
of the psychoanalytic movement (Mittwochsgesellschaft or the "Wednesday
Society"). A long serving member of the group, 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 supporters formally
disengaged, the first of the great dissenters from Freudian psychoanalysis
(preceding Carl Jung's notorious split in 1914). 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. It is commonly suggested that Adler was once "a pupil
of Freud's", however this suggestion is a myth; they were colleagues. In 1929
Adler showed a reporter with the New York Herald a copy of the faded postcard
that Freud had sent him in 1902. He wanted to prove that he had never been a
disciple of Freud's but rather that Freud had sought him out to share his
ideas.
Adler founded the Society of Individual Psychology in 1912 after his break from the
psychoanalytic movement. Adler's group initially included some orthodox Nietzschean
adherents (who believed that Adler's ideas on power and inferiority were closer to
Nietzsche than were Freud's). Their enmity aside, Adler retained a lifelong
admiration of Freud's ideas on dreams and credited him for creating a scientific
approach to their clinical utilization (Fiebert, 1997). Nevertheless, even with
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 and
the arena of gender and politics are important considerations that go beyond
libido. Moreover, Freud did not share Adler's socialist beliefs. Trotsky's
biography mentions his having discussions with Alfred Adler in Vienna.
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, during which he served as a doctor with the Austrian Army. Post-war his
influence increased greatly into the 1930s, he established a number of child
guidance clinics from 1921 and was a frequent lecturer in Europe and the United
States, 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 the overcoming of 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 patient to sit together more or less as
equals. Clinically, Adler's methods were 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 (especially corporal punishment). Adler's popularity was
related to the comparative optimism and comprehensibility of his ideas. He often
wrote for the lay public compared to Freud or Jung, whose writings tended to be
exclusively academic. Adler always retained a pragmatic approach that was task
oriented. These "Life tasks" are comprised of occupation/work, society/friendship,
and love/sexuality. Their success depends on co-operation. The tasks of life are
not to be considered in isolation since, as Adler (1956) famously commented, "they
all throw cross-lights on one another" (pp. 132-133).
Emigration
and death
In 1932, after most of Adler's Austrian clinics were
closed due to his Jewish heritage (regardless of the fact that he had already
converted to Christianity), Adler left Austria for a professorship at the Long
Island College of Medicine in the USA. Adler died from a heart attack in
Aberdeen, Scotland during a lecture tour in 1937. At the time it was a blow to
the influence of his ideas although a number of them were taken up by
neo-Freudians. Through the work of Dreikurs in the United States and many
other adherents worldwide, Adlerian ideas and approaches remain strong and
viable more than 70 years after Adler's death.
Around the world there are various organizations promoting Adler's orientation
towards mental and social well-being. These include the International Committee of
Adlerian Summer Schools and Institutes (ICASSI), the North American Society for
Adlerian Psychology (NASAP) and the International Association for Individual
Psychology. Teaching institutes and programs exist in Austria, Canada, England,
Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Switzerland, the United States and
Wales.
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.
Adler was also influenced by the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich
Nietzsche, Rudolf Virchow and the statesman Jan Smuts (who coined the term
"holism"). Adler's School, known as "Individual Psychology"—an arcane reference to
the Latin individuus meaning indivisibility, a term intended to emphasize holism—is
both a social and community psychology as well as a depth psychology. Adler was an
early advocate in psychology for prevention and emphasized the training of parents,
teachers, social workers and so on in democratic approaches that allow a child to
exercise their power through reasoned decision making whilst co-operating with
others. He was a social idealist, and was known as a socialist in his early years
of association with psychoanalysis (1902–1911). His allegiance to Marxism
dissipated over time (he retained Marx's social idealism yet distanced himself from
Marx's economic theories).
Adler (1938) was a very pragmatic man and believed that lay people could make
practical use of the insights of psychology. He sought to construct a social
movement united under the principles of "Gemeinschaftsgefuehl" (community feeling)
and social interest (the practical actions that are exercised for the social good).
Adler was also an early supporter of feminism in psychology and the social world
believing that feelings of superiority and inferiority were often gendered and
expressed symptomatically in characteristic masculine and feminine styles. These
styles could form the basis of psychic compensation and lead to mental health
difficulties. Adler also spoke of "safeguarding tendencies" and neurotic behavior
long before Anna Freud wrote about the same phenomena in her book The Ego and the
Mechanisms of Defense.
Adlerian-based scholarly, clinical and social practices focus on the following
topics:
Mental Health Prevention
Social Interest and Community Feeling
Holism and the Creative Self
Fictional Finalism, Teleology, and Goal constructs
Psychological and Social Encouragement
Inferiority, Superiority and Compensation
Life Style / Style of Life
Early Recollections (a projective technique)
Family Constellation and Birth Order
Life Tasks & Social Embeddedness
The Conscious and Unconscious realms
Private Logic & Common Sense (based in part on Kant's "sensus communis")
Symptoms and Neurosis
Safeguarding Behaviour
Guilt and Guilt Feelings
Socratic Questioning
Dream Interpretation
Child and Adolescent Psychology
Democratic approaches to Parenting and Families
Adlerian Approaches to Classroom Management
Leadership and Organisational Psychology
From its inception, Adlerian psychology has always included both professional and
lay adherents. Indeed, Adler felt that all people could make use of the scientific
insights garnered by psychology and he welcomed everyone, from decorated academics
to those with no formal education to participate in spreading the principles of
Adlerian psychology.
Adler's
approach to personality
Adler's 1912 book, Ueber den nervoesen Charakter (The Neurotic Character) defines
his earlier key ideas. He argued that human personality could be explained
teleologically, separate strands dominated by the guiding purpose of the
individual's unconscious self ideal to convert feelings of inferiority to
superiority (or rather completeness). The desires of the self ideal were countered
by social and ethical demands. If the corrective factors were disregarded and the
individual over-compensated, then an inferiority complex would occur, fostering the
danger of the individual becoming egocentric, power-hungry and aggressive or worse.
Common therapeutic tools include the use of humor, historical instances, and
paradoxical injunctions.
Psychodynamics
and teleology
Adler believed that human psychology is psychodynamic in nature yet unlike Freud's
metapsychology, which emphasizes instinctual demands, human psychology is guided by
goals and fuelled by a yet unknown creative force. Like Freud's instincts, Adler's
fictive goals are largely unconscious. These goals have a 'teleological' function.
Constructivist Adlerians, influenced by neo-Kantian and Nietzschean ideas, view
these 'teleological' goals as "fictions" in the sense that Hans Vaihinger spoke of
("fictio"). Usually there is a fictional final goal which can be deciphered
alongside of innumerable sub-goals. The inferiority / superiority dynamic is
constantly at work through various forms of compensation and over-compensation. For
example, in anorexia nervosa the fictive final goal is to "be perfectly thin"
(overcompensation on the basis of a feeling of inferiority). Hence, the fictive
final goal can serve a persecutory function that is ever-present in subjectivity
(though its trace springs are usually unconscious). The end goal of being 'thin' is
fictive however since it can never be subjectively achieved.
Teleology also serves another vital function for Adlerians. Chilon's "hora telos"
("see the end, consider the consequences") provides for both healthy and
maladaptive psychodynamics. Here we also find Adler's emphasis on personal
responsibility in mentally healthy subjects who seek their own and the social good
(Slavik & King, 2007).
Constructivism
and metaphysics
The metaphysical thread of Adlerian theory does not problematise the notion of
teleology since concepts such as eternity (an ungraspable end where time ceases to
exist) match the religious aspects that are held in tandem. In contrast, the
constructivist Adlerian threads (either humanist/modernist or postmodern in
variant) seek to raise insight of the force of unconscious fictions - which carry
all of the inevitability of 'fate' - so long as one does not understand them. Here,
'teleology' itself is fictive yet experienced as quite real. This aspect of Adler's
theory is somewhat analogous to the principles developed in Rational Emotive
Behavior Therapy (REBT) and Cognitive Therapy (CT). Both Albert Ellis and Aaron T.
Beck credit Adler as a major precursor to REBT and CT. Ellis in particular was a
member of the North American Society for Adlerian Psychology and served as an
editorial board member for the Adlerian Journal Individual Psychology.
As a psychodynamic system, Adlerians excavate the past of a client/patient in order
to alter their future and increase integration into community in the here-and-now.
The here-and-now aspects are especially relevant to those Adlerians who emphasize
humanism and/or existentialism in their approaches.
Holism
Metaphysical Adlerians emphasise a spiritual holism in keeping with what Jan Smuts
articulated (Smuts coined the term holism), that is, the spiritual sense of
one-ness that holism usually implies (etymology of holism - traced to Holy-ness).
Smuts believed that evolution involves a progressive series of lesser wholes
integrating into larger ones. Whilst Smuts' text "Holism and Evolution" is thought
to be a work of science, it actually attempts to unify evolution with a higher
metaphysical principle (holism). The sense of connection and one-ness revered in
various religious traditions (e.g. Baha'i, Chrisitanity, Judaism, Islam, etc.)
finds a strong complement in Adler's thought.
The pragmatic and materialist aspects to contextualizing members of communities,
the construction of communities and the socio-historical-political forces that
shape communities matter a great deal when it comes to understanding an
individual's psychological make-up and functioning. This aspect of Adlerian
psychology holds a high level of synergy with the field of community psychology.
However, Adlerian psychology, unlike community psychology, is holistically
concerned with both prevention and clinical treatment after-the-fact. Hence, Adler
cannot be considered the "first community psychologist", a discourse that
formalized decades following Adler's death (King & Shelley, 2007).
Adlerian psychology,Carl Jung's Analytical Psychology, Gestalt Therapy and Karen
Horney's psychodynamic approach are holistic schools of psychology. These
discourses eschew a reductive approach to understanding human psychology and
psychopathology.
Typology
Adler (1956) developed a scheme of the so called personality types. These 'types'
are to be taken as provisional or heuristic since he did not, in essence, believe
in personality types. The danger with typology is to lose sight of the individual's
uniqueness and to gaze reductively, acts that Adler opposed. Nevertheless, he
intended to illustrate patterns that could denote a characteristic governed under
the overall style of life. Hence American Adlerians such as Harold Mosak have made
use of Adler's typology in this provisional sense:
The Getting or Leaning type are those who selfishly take without giving back. These
people also tend to be anti-social and have low activity levels.
The Avoiding types are those that hate being defeated. They may be successful, but
have not taken any risks getting there. They are likely to have low social contact
in fear of rejection or defeat in any way.
The Ruling or Dominant type strive for power and are willing to manipulate
situations and people, anything to get their way. People of this type are also
prone to anti-social behavior.
The Socially Useful types are those who are very outgoing and very active. They
have a lot of social contact and strive to make changes for the good.
These 'types' are typically formed in childhood and are expressions of the Style of
Life.
On birth
order
Adler often emphasized one's birth order as having an influence on the Style of
Life and the strengths and weaknesses in one's psychological make up. Birth Order
referred to the placement of siblings within the family. Adler believed that the
firstborn child would be loved and nurtured by the family until the arrival of a
second child. This second child would cause the first born to suffer feelings of
dethronement, no longer being the center of attention. Adler (1956) believed that
in a three-child family, the oldest child would be the most likely to suffer from
neuroticism and substance addiction which he reasoned was a compensation for the
feelings of excessive responsibility "the weight of the world on one's shoulders"
(e.g. having to look after the younger ones) and the melancholic loss of that once
supremely pampered position. As a result, he predicted that this child was the most
likely to end up in jail or an asylum. Youngest children would tend to be
overindulged, leading to poor social empathy. Consequently, the middle child, who
would experience neither dethronement nor overindulgence, was most likely to
develop into a successful individual yet also most likely to be a rebel and to feel
squeezed-out. Adler himself was the second in a family of six children.
Adler never produced any scientific support for his interpretations on birth order
roles. Yet the value of the hypothesis was to extend the importance of siblings in
marking the psychology of the individual beyond Freud's more limited emphasis on
the Mother and Father. Hence, Adlerians spend time therapeutically mapping the
influence that siblings (or lack thereof) had on the psychology of their clients.
The idiographic approach entails an excavation of the phenomenology of one's birth
order position for likely influence on the subject's Style of Life. In sum, the
subjective experiences of sibling positionality and inter-relations are
psychodynamically important for Adlerian therapists and personality theorists, not
the cookbook predictions that may or may not have been objectively true in Adler's
time.
On
homosexuality
Adler's ideas regarding non heteronormative sexuality and various social forms of
deviance have long been controversial. Along with prostitution and criminality,
Adler had classified 'homosexuals' as falling among the "failures of life". In
1917, he began his writings on homosexuality with a 52 page brochure, and
sporadically published more thoughts throughout the rest of his life.
The Dutch psychiatrist Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg underlines how Alfred Adler
came to his conclusions for, in 1917, Adler believed that he had established a
connection between homosexuality and an inferiority complex towards one's own
gender. This point of view differed from Freud's equally problematic contention
that homosexuality is rooted in narcissism or Jung's conservative views of
inappropriate expressions of contrasexuality vis-a-vis the archetypes of the Anima
and Animus.
In contemporary Adlerian thought gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are not considered
within the problematic discourse of the "failures of life". There is evidence that
Adler may have been moving towards abandoning the hypothesis. Towards the end of
Adler's life, in the mid 1930s, his opinion towards homosexuality began to shift.
Elizabeth H. McDowell, a New York state family social worker recalls undertaking
supervision with Adler on a young man who was "living in sin" with an older man in
New York city. Adler asked her, "is he happy, would you say"? "Oh yes", Elizabeth
replied. Adler then stated, "Well, why don't we leave him alone" (Manaster,
Painter, Deutsch, and Overholt, 1977, pp. 81-82). On reflection, Elizabeth found
this comment to contain "profound wisdom". In the 1930s the common attitude and
medical opinion was quite unanimous, homosexuality was considered a moral failing
and a mental disease. In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association de-listed
homosexuality as a mental disorder in their diagnostic nomenclature (DSM).
Christopher Shelley (1998), an Adlerian psychotherapist, published a volume of
essays in the 1990s that feature Freudian, (post)Jungian and Adlerian contributions
that demonstrate affirmative shifts in the depth psychologies. These shifts show
how depth psychology can be utilized to support rather than pathologise gay and
lesbian psychotherapy clients.
On Parent
education and prevention
Adler emphasized both treatment and prevention. As a psychodynamic psychology,
Adlerians emphasize the foundational importance of childhood in developing
personality and any tendency towards various forms of psychopathology. The best way
to inoculate against what are now termed "personality disorders" (what Adler had
called the "neurotic character"), or a tendency to various neurotic conditions
(depression, anxiety, etc.), is to train a child to be and feel an equal part of
the family. This entails developing a democratic character and the ability to
exercise power reasonably rather than through compensation. Hence Adler
proselytized against corporal punishment and cautioned parents to refrain from the
twin evils of pampering and neglect. The responsibility to the optimal development
of the child is not limited to the Mother or Father but to teachers and society
more broadly. Adler argued therefore that teachers, nurses, social workers, and so
on require training in parent education in order to complement the work of the
family in fostering a democratic character. When a child does not feel equal and is
enacted upon (abused through pampering or neglect) they are likely to develop
inferiority or superiority complexes and various accompanying compensation
strategies. These strategies exact a social toll by seeding higher divorce rates,
the breakdown of the family, criminal tendencies and subjective suffering in the
various guises of psychopathology. Adlerians have long promoted parent education
groups especially those influenced by the famous Austrian/American Adlerian Rudolf
Dreikurs (Dreikurs & Soltz, 1964).
Spirituality,
ecology and community
In a late work titled "Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind" Adler (1938) turns
to the subject of metaphysics where he integrates Jan Smuts' evolutionary holism
with the idea of teleology and community: "sub specie aeternitatus". Unabashedly,
he argues his vision of society: "Social feeling means above all a struggle for a
communal form that must be thought of as eternally applicable... when humanity has
attained its goal of perfection... an ideal society amongst all mankind, the
ultimate fulfillment of evolution." (p. 275). Adler follows this pronouncement with
a defense of metaphysics:
"I see no reason to be afraid of metaphysics; it has had a great influence on human
life and development. We are not blessed with the possession of absolute truth; on
that account we are compelled to form theories for ourselves about our future,
about the results of our actions, etc. Our idea of social feeling as the final form
of humanity - of an imagined state in which all the problems of life are solved and
all our relations to the external world rightly adjusted - is a regulative ideal, a
goal that gives our direction. This goal of perfection must bear within it the goal
of an ideal community, because all that we value in life, all that endures and
continues to endure, is eternally the product of this social feeling." (Adler,
1938, pp. 275-276).
This social feeling for Adler is Gemeinschaftsgefuehl, a community feeling whereby
one feels they belong with others and have also developed an ecological connection
with nature (plants, animals, the crust of this earth) and the cosmos as a whole,
sub specie aeternitatus. Clearly, Adler himself had little problem with adopting a
metaphysical and spiritual point of view to support his theories. Yet his overall
theoretical yield provides ample room for the dialectical humanist (modernist) and
separately the postmodernist to explain the significance of community and ecology
through differing lenses (even if Adlerians have not fully considered how deeply
divisive and contradictory these three threads of metaphysics, modernism, and post
modernism are).
Publications
Alfred Adler's key publications were The Practice and Theory of Individual
Psychology (1927), Understanding Human Nature (1927) and What Life Could Mean to
You (1931). In his lifetime, Adler published more than 300 books and articles.
The Alfred Adler Institute of Northwestern Washington has recently published the
first ten of the twelve-volume set of The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler,
covering his writings from 1898-1937. An entirely new translation of Adler's magnum
opus, The Neurotic Character, is featured in Volume 1.
Volume 1 : The Neurotic Character — 1907
Volume 2 : Journal Articles 1898-1909
Volume 3 : Journal Articles 1910-1913
Volume 4 : Journal Articles 1914-1920
Volume 5 : Journal Articles 1921-1926
Volume 6 : Journal Articles 1927-1931
Volume 7 : Journal Articles 1931-1937
Volume 8 : Lectures to Physicians & Medical Students
Volume 9 : Case Histories
Volume 10 : Case Readings & Demonstrations
Volume 11 : Education for Prevention
Volume 12 : The General System of Individual Psychology
Other key
Adlerian texts
Adler, A. (1956). The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. H. L. Ansbacher and R.
R. Ansbacher (Eds.). New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Bottome, Phyllis (1939). Alfred Adler - Apostle of Freedom. London: Faber and
Faber. 3rd Ed. 1957.
Carlson, J., Watts, R. E., & Maniacci, M. (2005). Adlerian Therapy: Theory and
Practice. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Dinkmeyer, D., Sr., & Dreikurs, R. (2000). Encouraging Children to Learn.
Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge.
Handlbauer, B. (1998). The Freud - Adler controversy. Oxford, UK: Oneworld.
Hoffman, E. (1994). The Drive for Self: Alfred Adler and the Founding of Individual
Psychology. New York: Addison-Wesley Co.
Lehrer, R. (1999). Adler and Nietzsche. In: J. Golomb, W. Santaniello, and R.
Lehrer. (Eds.). Nietzsche and Depth Psychology. (pp. 229-246). Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press.
Mosak, H. H. & Di Pietro, R. (2005). Early Recollections: Interpretive Method
and Application. New York: Routledge.
Oberst, U. E. and Stewart, A. E. (2003). Adlerian Psychotherapy: An Advanced
Approach to Individual Psychology. New York: Brunner-Routledge.
Slavik, S. & Carlson, J. (Eds.). (2005). Readings in the Theory of Individual
Psychology. New York: Routledge.
Adlerian Yearbook (Adlerian Society, UK)
Source : Some of the information on
this page came from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU
Documentation License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
|
Alfred
Adler - Mental Projector - Biography
