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Alfred Adler ( ; ; 7 February 1870 – 28 May 1937) was an Austrians 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 Sigmund Freud and others in their common circle. He proposed that contributing to others (social interest or Gemeinschaftsgefühl) 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. Alfred 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.
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 studying at the University of Vienna, he specialized as an Ophthalmology, and later in neurology and psychiatry.
In his early career, Adler wrote an article in defence of Freud's theory after reading one of Freud's most well known works, The Interpretation of Dreams. In 1902, because of his supportive article, Adler received an invitation from Sigmund Freud to join an informal discussion group that included and Wilhelm Stekel. The group, the "Wednesday Society" (Mittwochsgesellschaft), 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. Each week a member would present a paper and after a short break of coffee and cakes, the group would discuss it. The main members were Otto Rank, Max Eitingon, Wilhelm Stekel, Karl Abraham, Hanns Sachs, Fritz Wittels, 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", in fact this was never 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 9 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." 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 for 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 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, and gender and politics can be as important as libido. Moreover, Freud did not share Adler's socialism beliefs, the latter's wife 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.”
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 Austria-Hungary, 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.
At the same time, from 1921 onwards, Adler 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 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.
Clinically, Adler's methods 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, Viktor Frankl compared his own "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy" (after Freud's and Adler's schools) to Adler's analysis:
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 individuals 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).
Adler was pragmatic and believed that lay people could make practical use of the insights of psychology. 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:Jane Griffith (2026). 9780918287106, Adlerian Psychology Association, Ltd., Publishers. ISBN 9780918287106
Adler created Adlerian Therapy, because he believed that one's psyche should be studied in the context of that person's environment.
Adler's book, Über den nervösen Charakter ( The Neurotic Character) defines his earlier key ideas. He argued that human personality could be explained teleology: parts of the individual's unconscious self ideally work to convert feelings of inferiority to superiority (or rather completeness).'Inferiority Complex', in Richard Gregory ed, The Oxford Companion to the Mind (1987) p. 368 The desires of the self ideal were countered by social and ethical demands. If the corrective factors were disregarded and the individual overcompensated, then an inferiority complex would occur, fostering the danger of the individual becoming egocentric, power-hungry and aggressive or worse.Adler, Understanding Ch. 11 'Aggressive Character Traits'
Common therapeutic tools include the use of humor, historical instances, and paradoxical injunctions.Gerald Corey, Theory and Practice of Counselling and Psychotherapy (1991)p. 155 and p. 385
Teleology 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.
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, especially given Adler's concern for what he called "the absolute truth and logic of communal life".Adler, Understanding p. 209 However, Adlerian psychology, unlike community psychology, is holistically concerned with both prevention and clinical treatment after-the-fact. Hence, Adler can be considered the "first community psychologist", a discourse that formalized in the decades following Adler's death (King & Shelley, 2008).
Adlerian psychology, Carl Jung's analytical psychology, Gestalt therapy and Karen Horney's Psychodynamics approach are holistic schools of psychology. These discourses eschew a reductive approach to understanding human psychology and psychopathology.
These 'types' are typically formed in childhood and are expressions of the Style of Life.
In early writings (1908), Adler suggested that in a three-child family, the oldest child would be the most likely to suffer from neuroticism and substance addiction, reasoning that this was a compensation for the feelings of excessive responsibility and the loss of their pampered position. 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 did not produce scientific support for his interpretations on birth order roles. The value of the hypothesis was to extend the importance of siblings in marking the psychology of the individual beyond Freud's limited emphasis on the parents. Hence, Adlerians utilize the concept to map the influence that siblings (or lack thereof) had on the psychology of their clients. The idiographic approach entails an examination of the phenomenology of one's birth order position for likely influence on the subject's Style of Life. The subjective experiences of sibling positionality and inter-relations are significant for Adlerian therapists, rather than the specific predictions that may or may not have been objectively true in Adler's time.
For Adler, birth order answered the question, "Why do children, who are raised in the same family, grow up with very different personalities?" Adler argued that children do not grow up in the same shared environment; the oldest child grows up in a family where they have younger siblings, the middle child with older and younger siblings, and the youngest with older siblings. The position in the family constellation, Adler argued, is the reason for these differences in personality, a point later taken up by Eric Berne.Eric Berne, What Do You Say After You Say Hello? (1975) p. 71-81
Adler and his wife's pragmatic approach, and the seemingly high success rates of their treatment were based on their ideas of social functioning and well-being. Clearly, life style choices and situations were emphasized, for example the need for relaxation or the negative effects of early childhood conflicts were examined, which compared to other authoritarian or religious treatment regimens, were clearly modern approaches. Certainly some of his observations, for example that psychopaths were more likely to be drug addicts are not compatible with current methodologies and theories of substance abuse treatment, but the self-centered attributes of the illness and the clear escapism from social responsibilities by pathological addicts put Adler's treatment modalities clearly into a modern contextual reasoning.Adler, A. (1932). Narcotic Abuse and Alcoholism, Chapter VII. p. 50-65. The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler: Journal articles: 1931–1937. Transl. by G.L.Liebenau. T.Stein (2005). .
The Dutch psychologist 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 theory that homosexuality is rooted in narcissism or Jung's view of expressions of contrasexuality vis-à-vis the archetypes of the Anima and Animus.
There is evidence that Adler may have moved 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 "Cohabitation" with an older man in New York City. Adler asked her, "Is he happy, would you say?" "Oh yes," McDowell replied. Adler then stated, "Well, why don't we leave him alone."Manaster, Painter, Deutsch, and Overholt, 1977, pp. 81–82
According to novelist Phyllis Bottome, who wrote Adler's Biography (after Adler himself laid that task upon her):
"He always treated homosexuality as lack of courage. These were but ways of obtaining a slight release for a physical need while avoiding a greater obligation. A transient partner of your own sex is a better known road and requires less courage than a permanent contact with an "unknown" sex.... Adler taught that men cannot be judged from within by their "possessions," as he used to call nerves, glands, traumas, drives et cetera, since both judge and prisoner are liable to misconstrue what is invisible and incalculable; but that he can be judged, with no danger from introspection, by how he measures up to the three common life tasks set before every human being between the cradle and the grave: work (employment), love or marriage (intimacy), and social contact (friendships.)""Alfred Adler: A Biography", G.P.Putnam's Sons, New York (copyright 1939), chap. Chief Contributions to Thought, subchap. 7, The Masculine Protest, and subchap. 9, Three Life Tasks, page 160.
The responsibility of the optimal development of the child is not limited to the mother or father, but rather includes teachers and society more broadly. Adler argued therefore that teachers, nurses, social workers, and so on require training in parent education 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) he or she is likely to develop inferiority or superiority complexes and various concomitant compensation strategies.Adler, Understanding p. 44-5 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).
This social feeling for Adler is Gemeinschaftsgefühl, a community feeling whereby one feels he or she belongs with others and has also developed an ecological connection with nature (plants, animals, the crust of this earth) and the cosmos as a whole, sub specie aeternitatis. Clearly, Adler himself had little problem with adopting a metaphysical and spiritual point of view to support his theories.
This was after Freud declared Adler's ideas as too contrary, leading to an ultimatum to all members of the Society (which Freud had shepherded) to drop Adler or be expelled, disavowing the right to dissent (Makari, 2008). Nevertheless, Freud always took Adler's ideas seriously, calling them "honorable errors".Quoted in Jones, p. 400 Following this split, Adler would come to have an enormous, independent effect on the disciplines of counseling and psychotherapy as they developed over the course of the 20th century (Ellenberger, 1970). He influenced notable figures in subsequent schools of psychotherapy such as Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis. His writings preceded, and were at times surprisingly consistent with, later Neo-Freudian insights such as those evidenced in the works of Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, some considering that it would take several decades for Freudian ego psychology to catch up with Adler's ground-breaking approach.Ruth L. Munroe, Schools of Psychoanalytic Thought (1957) p. 437
Adler emphasized the importance of equality in preventing various forms of psychopathology, and espoused the development of social interest and democratic family structures for raising children. His most famous concept is the inferiority complex which speaks to the problem of self-esteem and its negative effects on human health (e.g. sometimes producing a paradoxical superiority striving). His emphasis on power dynamics is rooted in the philosophy of Nietzsche, whose works were published a few decades before Adler's. Specifically, Adler's conceptualization of the "Will to Power" focuses on the individual's creative power to change for the better.
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, and the female analyst,Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for our Time (1988) p. 503n 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 Carl Jung, to be one of the three founding figures of depth psychology, which emphasizes the unconscious and psychodynamics (Ellenberger, 1970; Ehrenwald, 1991). He is also considered by some to be one of the greatest psychologists and philosophers of the twentieth century.James Hemming, Foreword, Alfred Adler, Understanding Human Nature (1992) p. 9
Author and journalist Margot Adler (1946–2014) was Adler's granddaughter.
Adler's remains were cremated at Warriston Crematorium in Edinburgh, but the ashes were never claimed. In 2007, his ashes were rediscovered in a casket at Warriston Crematorium and returned to Vienna for burial in 2011.
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 of Adlerian Psychology (NASAP) and the International Association for Individual Psychology. Teaching institutes and programs exist in Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Switzerland, the United States, Jamaica, Peru, and Wales.
In the episode Something About Dr. Mary of the television series Frasier, Frasier recalls having to "pass under a dangerously unbalanced portrait of Alfred Adler" during his studies at Harvard.
He appears as a character in the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
The Alfred Adler Institute of Northwestern Washington has recently published a twelve-volume set of The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, covering his writings from 1898 to 1937. An entirely new translation of Adler's magnum opus, The Neurotic Character, is featured in Volume 1. Volume 12 provides comprehensive overviews of Adler's mature theory and contemporary Adlerian practice.
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