A B C Of Adler'S Psychology

Philippe Mairet, Mairet, Philippe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415758123
• eBook ISBN: 9781136333521
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

This is Volume XIV of twenty-one in the Individual Differences series with the library of Psychology. First published in 1928, this study offers a look at the leading ideas and a sketch of the origins of Dr Alder's method of 'Individual Psychology' whose core idea is to gain knowledge of individuals including their inner life and as a whole in himself and indivisible unit of human society.

A B C of Adler’s Psychology

Chapter I

THE BASIS OF MODERN PSYCHOLOGY

DR ALFRED ADLER’S work in psychology, while it is scientific and general in method, is essentially the study of the separate personalities we are, and is herefore called Individual Psychology. Concrete, particular, unique human beings are the subjects of this psychology, and it can only be truly learned from the men, women and children we meet.

The supreme importance of this contribution to modern psychology is due to the manner in which it reveals how all the activities of the soul are drawn together into the service of the individual, how all his faculties and strivings are related to one end. We are enabled by this to enter into the ideals, the difficulties, the efforts and discouragements of our fellow-men, in such a way that we may obtain a whole and living picture of each as a personality. In this co-ordinating idea, something like finality is achieved, though we must understand it as finality of foundation. There has never before been a method so rigorous and yet adaptable for following the fluctuations of that most fluid, variable and elusive of all realities, the individual human soul.

Since Adler regards not only science but even intelligence itself as the result of the communal efforts of humanity, we shall find his consciousness of his own unique contribution more than usually tempered by recognition of his collaborators, both past and contemporary. It will therefore be useful to consider Adler’s relation to the movement called Psycho-analysis, and first of all to recall, however briefly, the philosophic impulses which inspired the psycho-analytic movement as a whole.

It may be said without exaggeration that psycho-analysis owes its existence to Schopenhauer. The most important psycho-analysts admit a direct debt to him; but their indirect income from him is much greater, for his forcible reversal of the tendency of European thought is responsible for various other movements which have converged upon modern psychology. Schopenhauer’s importance in this respect is not due to his psychological observations, penetrating as they often are, but to his exaltation of the Will into the first principle of his system. In all his writings it is the will and not the intelligence which is studied as the magnum mysterium. This Will, which is the immanent, omnipotent creator of everything, is made by Schopenhauer to appear much more like the devil than like God, for it is a blind urge to self-existence, utterly relentless in nature. Even the intelligence which it produces in Man, the highest order of its creation, is only produced in order to further its own aims. But in this the Will, as it were, over-reaches itself, for intelligence produces self-consciousness, which finally detects the evil of its own will. This Will does not really desire the good of its own creatures, but only their continuation, and not even their continuation as individuals, but through procreation as species. The individual thinks all the time that he is pursuing his own pleasure, but that is exactly how the Will manages him. Pleasure is like the carrot which the Irishman, sitting in the cart, dangles before the donkey’s nose on a stick to make it go, and removes to make it stop. That is how the Will drives man, against his own true interest. When man’s intellect, however, rises to the height of general conceptions, it can perceive itself in relation to all things, and then it realizes that it is only an instrument. It is as if the donkey perceived the stick that holds the carrot, and realized that it would never reach it.

Such a homely illustration gives no idea of the greatness of Schopenhauer’s theme, but may roughly indicate how he focussed attention upon the mystery of the will. He inevitably led men to search for the vital impulses behind thoughts rather than for the inter-relations between thoughts themselves. This conception of the Will as a universal Will to live spread much further than Schopenhauer’s own writings. It ascended to be the Will to Power of Nietzche and descended to be the “Life-Force” of Bernard Shaw. But it was through Eduard Von Hartmann that it took its most vital line of evolution.

Hartmann took his stand upon the indivisibility of Will and Idea. No idea is possible without Will and no movement of the Will exists which is not at the same time an idea. To Hartmann, therefore, it was absurd to conceive of the creative urge in the universe as “blind” Will, or even as Will in the abstract. It is very farseeing and is just as much intelligence as will. A being may not be able to express its will in any other way than by action, but that does not prove that its will is not also an idea. A bird building its nest for the first time cannot translate its purpose into anything else except concrete reality, cannot express its idea in words or fantasy— probably not even to itself. But can it therefore be said to have no purpose, no idea? Clearly there is an idea dynamically present, but in a state which we call ‘unconscious’ because it is not translatable into words or symbols. The real Being of the Universe, realizing itself in all creation, including man and civilization, is precisely this unconscious force of intelligence. Not that it is correctly described as unconscious (Hartmann was inclined later to re-name his arch-concept “the Superconscious”), but to our limited consciousnesses, revolving in their own memory-films of words and images, this deeper substratum seems dark and inexpressible. The Unconscious is a much vaster, super-individual intelligence from which our conscious thinking has cut itself off.

This idea was to become the foundation of modern psychology. It suggested that the most important discoveries of the working of the mind were to be made at the deeper levels of consciousness—in fact, in the less clearly conscious states. In France especially, while Hartmann was being read with great appreciation, psychologists such as Janet and Charcot were experimenting with hypnotism. They found that a hypnotized subject, in a state resembling sleep, and unaware of his surroundings, could recall memories of which he was quite unconscious when normally awake. They also found that suggestions accepted in this condition were capable of influencing behaviour afterwards, although the patient had no conscious memory of accepting them.

These precise discoveries of the existence of unconscious memories and their activity in the life were of vast importance to psychology, and they are now placed beyond all question by ever-accumulating masses of evidence.

What we now call the “Unconscious” or the “Unconscious Mind” is conceived to be a vast and complicated structure of memory, of which only a working minimum is accessible to conscious recall. Much the greater part of memory continues to play its part in the individual’s life in a transmuted form, not as recollection, but as feeling— as emotional reaction to things and persons. In that way it continually exercises more or less suggestive power, but it is difficult, and perhaps sometimes impossible, to recall it to consciousness in the form of the original impressions. It is easy to see that the earliest impressions must have naturally the most purely emotional strength, and this is, in fact, what all psycho-analysts find. The book of memory is not like a book with successive leaves, so much as a single tablet all over which the first impressions are scrawled in a large and simple style and the succeeding ones have to be written around them, till it is over-written again and again in smaller and smaller characters. This metaphor is only meant to suggest that all subsequent impressions have to be fitted into former ones. The actual process is fundamentally simple; whatever happens to an individual, he reacts to it according to his previous experience of the most successful way of meeting that kind of situation. He does not remember most of the memories that guide him, but they exert their united pressure by the emotional tone of aversion or inclination to certain actions. Should he encounter an entirely new situation, he will either have no idea how to deal with it, or he will relate it to the most similar experience he knows, probably to one of his earliest experiences which is not even much like it.

In this transformation of memory into emotion, we are confronted by a biological necessity; the greater part of memory must be changed into feeling in order to be serviceable to life. Emotion acts almost instantaneously, and with a tremendous range of discrimination, whereas the stock of recollections which we keep “indexed,” as it were, serves a higher human purpose, but is both too cumbersome and too limited for immediate use. We cannot live by it, we cannot wait to read it up, and our emotional nature will not allow us to do so.

There are, unfortunately, such things as entirely mischievous emotional memories. These are memories which have been suppressed into the emotional form before their meaning to the individual has been at all understood. Such memories, thrust too soon out of consciousness, turn into emotional complexes which act in the reverse of a useful manner. The individual subject may then become a patient; he is either prevented from acting in what he sees to be a reasonable way, or else impelled to act unreasonably, by an emotional stress which he cannot himself understand, or which he explains to himself by a quite wrong “rationalization.”

Such an unassimilable memory can be generally fished up again and brought into consciousness by the technique of psychoanalysis, in which case it ceases to be an emotional complex and becomes a more or less normal fact of the memory. The astonishing clearness with which forgotten memories can be restored by this means whenever they are of vital importance suggests that such memories never fade—they are only covered over. We owe this technique chiefly to Freud and his school, and much of the prestige of psycho-analysis was achieved by its apparently miraculous cures of war-neuroses, such as shell-shock.

Our modern view of the soul, then, reveals it as a vast reservoir of memories, which makes itself felt in every instant as the emotional reality of that instant. It is the living reality of the past, exerting a powerful influence upon the present through our feelings. Academic psychologists may still continue, half convinced, to derive the psyche from a dozen or so of “instincts” which are conceived almost as if they were metaphysical realities. But there is no need now for any metaphysical “instinct of self-assertion”—not even for a “sexual instinct.” There are individuals who have proved what it is to succeed by submission, but there is no entity we can call the “submissive instinct” which uses individuals as its instruments. There are, however, individuals with a permanent policy of submissiveness, in whom it is possible to trace the emotional memories of success through their policy, and it can be found that they tend to seek out over and over again positions of dependence in which their proven policy will succeed.

This conception of the Unconscious as vital memory—biological memory—is common to modern psychology as a whole. But Freud, from the first a specialist in hysteria, took the memories of success or failure in the sexual life, as of the first—and almost the only—importance. Jung, a psychiatrist of genius, has tried to widen this distressingly narrow view, by seeking to reveal the super-individual or racial memories which, he believes, have as much power as the sexual and a higher kind of value for life.

It was left to Alfred Adler, a physician of wide and general experience, to unite the conception of the Unconscious more firmly with biological reality. A man of the original school of psycho-analysts, he had done much work by that method of analyzing memories out of their coagulated emotional state into clearness and objectivity. But he showed tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter I: The Basis of Modern Psychology
• Chapter II: The Life Goal
• Chapter III: Psychology and Social Science
• Chapter IV: Man and Woman
• Chapter V: The Management of Emotion
• Chapter VI: Psychology and the Conduct of Life