In Freud's Shadow

Adler in Context

Paul E. Stepansky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138872073
• eBook ISBN: 9781135827038
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In its detailed, interpretive reconsideration of Adler's involvement with Freud and psychoanalysis, In Freud's Shadow constitutes a seminal contribution to our historical understanding of the early psychoanalytic movement. Making extensive use of the Minutes of the Vienna Psycho-Analytic Society, Freud's correspondence, and the diaries of Lou Andreas-Salome, Stepansky reconstructs the ambience and reanalyzes the substance of the ongoing debates about Adler's work within the psychoanalytic discussion group. One valuable by-product of his undertaking, then, is a compelling portrait of the early Vienna Psycho-Analytic Society from the standpoint of the sociology of small groups and, more especially, of Freud's status as the "group leader" of the Society.

Thoroughly researched, meticulously documented, and brilliantly written, In Freud's Shadow: Adler in Context represents a watershed in the literature on Adler, Frued, and the history of psychoanalysis. It will be of major interest not only to psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and psychologists, but to social scientists, historians, and lay readers interested in the politics of scientific controversy, the sociology of small groups, and the relationship of psychology to contemporary systems of belief.

1	From Socialism to Pedagogy: Prelude to Adlerian Theory

Studies of Alfred Adler have long had their conventions. Sympathetic disciples and explicators generally try to locate the origins of Individual Psychology in the early physical and psychological vulnerabilities of the movement’s founder. In the rickets, spasms of breathlessness, and rachitis that plagued Adler during childhood, they see the origins of his later sensitivity to the theme of “inferiority” in his medical and psychological work. In his childhood decision to pursue a career in medicine following a bout with pneumonia during which he overheard his doctor pronounce him “lost,” they see the kind of “compensatory” strategy at work that would figure so prominently in Adler’s theory of psychological development. In Adler’s youthful resolve to become an able mathematics student after great difficulty with the subject, and in his early recollection of overcoming an inhibitory fear of walking through a local cemetery, they see the germ of the kind of successful “overcompensations” that Adler’s system of therapy later sought to cultivate.¹

In accepting the connections between these childhood experiences and the development of Adlerian psychology, such explicators have done no more than acknowledge the verdict Adler himself popularized during the 1920s and 30s. During his later career in America, the founder of Individual Psychology constantly referred to autobiographical experiences in order to document the therapeutic optimism that was at the core of his psychological Weltanschauung. He began one lecture series by attempting to explain how he himself had “experienced” Individual Psychology:

To begin with, I would say I was born a very weak child suffering from certain weaknesses, especially from rickets which prevented me from moving very well. Despite this obstacle, now, nearly at the end of my life, I am standing before you in America. You can see how I have overcome this difficulty. Also, I could not speak very well early in my life; I spoke very slowly. Now, though you are probably not aware of it in my English, I am supposed to be a very good orator in German. I have also overcome this difficulty.²

It is at once suggestive and predictable that Adler should anchor his psychological insights in the disabilities of his own childhood. Unfortunately, documentary studies of Adler’s career can presently do little more than reiterate Adler’s impressionistic claims. Until the archival research of the late Hans Beckh-Widmanstetter is organized and published, there will be no basis for confirming or amending the reputed connection between Adler’s psychology and Adlerian psychology.³

In fact, we know very little about Adler’s formative years. Basic genealogical work by Beckh-Widmanstetter has traced Adler’s parents back to the Burgenland province that served as a buffer state between Austria and Hungary and established their residence in several Viennese suburbs during the 1860s and 70s. We know that Adler was born in the Viennese suburb of Rudolfsheim on 7 February 1870, that he was the second child in a family of six children, and that he spent most of his youth in the Jewish suburb of Leopoldstadt and the outlying rural area of Waehring. Adler’s father, Leopold Adler, was an unsuccessful grain merchant whose family was apparently subjected to financial difficulties during this time.

Despite the fact that he grew up in Jewish neighborhoods, Adler remained strikingly indifferent to the question of his religious identity. He neither made positive identification with his Jewishness nor experienced any anti-Semitism in the rural outskirts of Vienna. Although nominally observant of the Jewish holidays, Adler’s parents practiced a “pallid, watered-down version of Judaism” that left little imprint on their children (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 573; Sperber, 1970, p. 28). Alfred attended the Synagogue during Jewish holidays, and perhaps on the Sabbath, but he developed no elective affinity for Judaism. His parents’ home in Rudolfsheim, moreover, was practically adjacent to a playground used only by gentile working-class children. It was at this Rudolfsheim playground that Adler picked up the Viennese dialect of “Gstetten” and came to identify himself entirely with the social community of his Christian playmates (Beckh-Widmanstetter, 1966, pp. 39–40; Ellenberger, 1970, p. 579; Sperber, 1970, p. 29). As a young man, Adler underwent baptism and became a Protestant. He never commented on his conversion and his biographers have been unable to provide a satisfactory explanation, given Adler’s insulation from social anti-Semitism and subsequent indifference to questions of religious belief. The best they can do is to link Adler’s conversion to his secular identity as a “Viennese” and to his intellectual distaste for the very prospect of anti-Semitism.⁴

Of Adler’s formal education, we know very little. In 1879, at the age of nine, he attended the same Sperlgymnasium that Sigmund Freud had entered 14 years earlier. In 1881, when his family moved to Hernals, Adler was enrolled in the Hernalser Gymnasium. He attended this school until his eighteenth year, but the destruction of the school archives during World War II precludes any detailed investigation of his student career. Upon completion of the Gymnasium course, Adler registered at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Vienna for the winter semester of 1888–1889.

Adler’s medical education was conventional and restricted in scope. He trained at a time when the Vienna Medical Faculty was steeped in a tradition of scientific positivism that contributed to its fascination with diagnosis and relative neglect of therapy. One historian of the period has recently invoked the concept of “therapeutic nihilism” to describe the modest therapeutic expectations that accompanied the Viennese Faculty’s scientific pretensions during this time (Johnston, 1972, p. 223).⁵ Given the prevailing preoccupation with pure medical research, it is not surprising that Adler’s obligatory course of training did not range outside the subject matter of medicine, surgery, and pathology. He received no psychiatric training. After a notably undistinguished academic performance as a medical student, Adler completed his medical studies in 1895, interned briefly at the Viennese Poliklinik, and satisfied his obligatory military service in the Hungarian unit of a military hospital at Pressburg from 1 April to 30 September 1896. Between 1897 and 1899 Adler claimed to have undertaken further postgraduate training at both the Poliklinik and Vienna’s General Hospital, spending time on the psychiatric, medical, and opthalmologic services.⁶ In 1899, he established a general practice in the Czerningasse at No. 7, a popular street not far from the Prater.

This skeletal outline must, at present, suffice for our knowledge of the young Adler. Students of Adler’s thought, however, are fortunate to have a more convenient starting point. The earliest signpost of Adler’s intellectual development, and the earliest printed source available to his biographers, is the small collection of socialist material that Adler published in the first years of his medical career. Focusing on the subject matter of “social medicine,” this material includes Adler’s first publication, the Health Book for the Tailoring Trade of 1898, and the small collection of editorials he contributed to a Viennese medical journal, the Aerztliche Standeszeitung, between 1902 and 1904. However suggestive it is that Adler should resort to autobiographical incidents in validating the claims of his later psychology, this strategy may tell us more about the explanatory pretensions of Individual Psychology in the 1930s than about the origins of Adler’s thought at the turn of the century. It is the publications on social medicine that provide us with the documentary foothold from which to examine the historical origins of Adler’s psychological theories. To be sure, these intriguing contributions reveal a facet of Adler’s career that has been generally overlooked by his psychologist disciples and is worthy of documentation in its own right. But for the intellectual biographer the socialist publications have additional importance: they encapsulate the therapeutic concerns that would guide Adler first to the province of psychosomatic medicine and eventually to clinical psychiatry.

I.

It is difficult to ascertain the precise nature and extent of Adler’s early socialist affiliation. In 1946, his friend and colleague Carl Furtmueller recounted Adler’s aloofness during his medical student days (1888–1895) when “only personal friendship connected him with members of the socialist group.” As a young doctor, however, Adler “joined the group, appeared in their debating meetings and was also seen now and then in big popular meetings.” He participated, Furtmueller recollected, not as a “speaker and debater,” but as a “listener” on whom the sociological conception of Marxism “had a decisive influence” (p. 333). In 1970, Manes Sperber, a Marxist Individual Psychologist who broke with Adler in the 1920s, stated that Adler had joined a “League of Socialist Students” before 1898 and become one of the group’s prominent members. Sperber went on to claim that Adler read Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Critique of Political Economy, and early philosophical works during this time (1970, pp. 17–18). Although it is at present impossible to confirm these accounts or to elaborate further the extent of Adler’s involvement in socialist circles, there is no reason to doubt the fact of Adler’s early socialist sympathies. Between 1898 and 1904 he published a 30-page pamphlet and a number of editorials that are broadly “socialist” in their import. During 1908, we know that Adler was the friend and therapist of A. A. Joffe, a close associate of Trotsky and the chief contributor to the newspaper that Trotsky was publishing in Vienna during this time. A comment in Trotsky’s memoirs (1970, pp. 220, 227) indicates that he and his family were personal friends of Adler as well. We have a record of the well-received lecture on the “Psychology of Marxism” that Adler presented to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on 10 March 1909. In his later career, moreover, when the content of his writings never ranged outside his own psychological preconceptions, Adler still contributed three editorials to Vienna’s socialist daily, the Arbeiter-Zeitung (1923, 1924, 1925). On the other hand, it was during the mid-1920s that Adler dissociated himself from the work of Marxist disciples like Manès Sperber and Alice and Otto Ruehle (Sperber, 1970, pp. 129–131, 223).

What can we say interpretively about Adler as socialist? Although Adler himself never expressly commented on the path that led him from his medical studies to socialism, several issues of historical context are relevant to understanding the significance of this little-known phase of his career.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Vienna witnessed a striking interchange between complementary currents of political and medical activism. Max Gruber, the distinguished Viennese physician who later influenced Victor Adler to pursue a career in science, redirected the pan-German and socialist activism of his student days toward the application of medical science to social problems. Following his participation in the radical Leseverein der deutschen Studenten (Reading Society of Viennese and German Students) during his university days, Gruber studied medicine in Vienna and proceeded to a series of professorships of hygiene in Germany and Austria where he conducted bacteriological experiments that were instrumental in confirming Robert Koch’s theory of the origin of infectious illnesses.⁷ Theodor Meynert, Vienna’s most distinguished professor of psychiatry during this time, was not only an honorary member of the student Leseverein, but hired the group’s leader, Engelbert Pernerstorfer, as tutor for his children. He was on close personal terms with his student Victor Adler as well (see Stockert-Meynert, 1930, pp. 78–80 and McGrath, 1974, p. 42).

More specifically, it is interesting to observe that Alfred Adler was not the only Viennese physician to arrive at socialism through his everyday observations as an Armenarzt—a physician serving the urban poor. It is noteworthy that the career of Victor Adler (not related to Alfred), the founder of a unified Social Democratic party in Austria in the mid-1880s, paralleled Alfred Adler’s career in this important respect. Like Alfred Adler, Victor Adler began his medical career with a small general practice in a working-class section of the city. In 1883, his interest in the health of the Austrian laboring classes led him to accept a temporary position as a government factory inspector, a post established under new labor legislation sponsored by the Austrian Prime Minister Taaffe. In this official capacity, he toured industrial sites in Germany, Switzerland, and England and, on his return, issued a report criticizing the factories in these countries and recommending passage of a worker’s health law in Austria.

Victor Adler’s recommendations were not acted upon, and he did not receive a permanent government appointment after his tour was completed. His experience as a medical factory inspector, however, did have a crucial effect on his subsequent career: it led him, in 1886, to the Austrian workers” movement. The physical plight of the working poor was henceforth to be addressed not through isolated medical interventions, but through the politics of socialist reform (Ermers, 1932, pp. 104, 109–112; Braunthal, 1965, pp. 37–39). Victor Adler never forsook the medical rationale that informed his political activism, however, and Max Ermers has contended that his socialism was from the outset a kind of “philanthropic medical socialism,” a socialism that represented a consistent application of principles derived from medicine and the requirements of social hygiene (1932, pp. 248–249).

More than a decade after Victor Adler’s conversion from medicine to politics, Alfred Adler too espoused a species of “philanthropic medical socialism” that addressed itself to the social dimension of medical practice. Although the younger Adler’s observations were not abetted by official appointment to the post of factory inspector, his medical-socialist ideology was the product of a comparable kind of first-hand inspection. Instead of extensive observations of a cross section of the European laboring population, Adler opted for an intensive examination of a single group within that population. He chose to write a detailed case study of the medical plight of one of Austria’s dying home industries as the basis for his medical-socialist recommendations. The result was the Health Book for the Tailoring Trade of 1898.

One crucial difference remains, however, between the unifier of Austrian socialism and the founder of Individual Psychology. When Victor Adler returned from his tour of European industrial sites and presented his findings to the Austrian authorities, he was on the verge of relinquishing his medical identity on behalf of his new allegiance to the Austrian workers” movement. With Alfred Adler, there was never an outright transfer of allegiance. In the handful of “socialist” publications written between 1898 and 1904, Adler did not use his medical background as the basis for a new political identity. Instead, he arrived at his distinctively medical identity through the animus of his early socialist indignation. Adler’s goal was to moralize medical practice, and he sought to accomplish this moralization by indicting the academic medical establishment (“Schulmedizin”) for failing to understand physical illness as the product of remediable social circumstances. Once the theory of disease causation was broadened to include social-environment factors, Adler insisted that the “medical” requirements for health would dovetail with the political demands of the laboring classes, and that medicine and political reform would jointly provide the basis for a new concept of “social medicine.”

II.

The Health Book for the Tailoring Trade (1898) was Adler’s most impressive attempt to document the claim that medical practice was obliged to acknowledge the claims of “social medicine.” His formal intent was to document the many ways in which specific occupational practices accounted for specific occupational diseases, and thereby to demonstrate the need for a broadened conception of disease etiology. To this end he fixed on the Austrian tailor trade, a dying Hausindustrie whose ongoing victimization by the industrial revolution translated into the increasing misery of its remaining practitioners. Plagued by erratic seasonal work, subject to the erratic wage practices of Kleinmeister themselves in the employ of large entrepreneurs, forced to labor in filthy homes 16 to 18 hours a day when work was available, the typical tailor suited Adler’s purpose admirably.

It is altogether understandable that Adler should have used his medical experience as the basis for a piece of socialist criticism during this early part of his career. After the period of repressive legislation that accompanied Taaffe’s “draconic regime” of the mid-1880s, the Social Democrats made steady progress in Austria following Victor Adler’s success in unifying the party’s moderate and radical wings. During the 1890s, emergency legislation against the Social Democrats was discontinued, Austrian trade unions were incorporated into the Social Democratic organization, and significant socialist gains were registered in the parliamentary elections of 1897. From 1898 onward, the Social Democrats made steady political progress during the very period when Austrian parliamentary life disintegrated under the impetus of the “nationalities” question (see Bruegel, 1925, pp. 228–234, 298–301, 305–312, 324–325). The quiet growth of the Austrian trade union movement accompanied the success of the Social Democrats. After the Second Trade Union Congress of 1897, Austrian trade unions underwent expansion and centralization. The growth of the movement was abetted by the passage of a federal law in 1898 which extended the competence of trade union courts (Gewerbegerichte) to all industries. Unfortunately, the Austrian clothing industry did not share in this growth; they failed to unionize, owing to the inequality between provincial shoemakers and urban tailors (Deutsch, 1929, pp. 355–360).

Although Vienna itself remained under the control of Karl Lueger and the Christian Socialist party from 1897, Lueger undertook a far-reaching program of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Note on Translations
• Introduction
• 1 From Socialism to Pedagogy: Prelude to Adlerian Theory
• 2 From Medicine to Psychiatry: The Foundations of Adlerian Theory, Part I
• 3 From Medicine to Psychiatry: The Foundations of Adlerian Theory, Part II
• 4 Adler in Freud’s Circle: I. The Vicissitudes of Discipleship
• 5 Adler in Freud’s Circle: II. The Anatomy of Dissension
• 6 Adler in Freud’s Circle: III. The Nervous Character and its Critic
• 7 Adler in Freud’s Circle: IV. The Psychology of Repudiation
• 8 The Psychologist as Pedagogue: Adler and the Education of the Child
• 9 The Psychologist as Prophet: Adler and Gemeinschaftsgefuehl
• Appendix: The Hidden Adler in Freud
• References
• Index