Alfred Adler

The Pattern of Life

W. Beran Wolfe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415210706
• eBook ISBN: 9781136335204
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

First Published in 1999. Alfred Adler has given us the key to this understanding in his monumental contributions to modern psychology, but before the compilation of this volume of case histories the student of the methods of Individual Psychology has been compelled to search for his case material among the German publications of Adler and his pupils. Many of these published cases deal with conditions germane to continental environments, but puzzling to American readers. The principles and practice of Individual Psychology, however, are universally valid in their application, as this volume of purely American cases demonstrates.

Adler and Our Neurotic World

An Introductory Essay by the Editor

THE art of understanding human nature is the art of understanding the dynamic patterns of human conduct. Alfred Adler has given us the key to this understanding in his monumental contributions to modern psychology, but before the compilation of this volume of case histories the student of the methods of Individual Psychology has been compelled to search for his case material among the German publications of Adler and his pupils. Many of these published cases deal with conditions germane to continental environments, but puzzling to American readers. The principles and practice of Individual Psychology, however, are universally valid in their application, as this volume of purely American cases demonstrates. The essential unity of all human conduct is amply adduced by the success of the Viennese psychologist and educator in the analysis and treatment of these cases brought to his clinic, without previous selection or limitation, at the New School of Social Research, during his lecture season of 1929. They are typical of cases found in the schools and child-guidance clinics of every large American city. Some of the cases were brought in by New York physicians, some by psychologists, but the majority by New York school teachers who were puzzled by problem children under their care.

All of the cases were worked up more or less thoroughly according to an outline for the study of problem children written originally for the child-guidance clinics which Dr. Adler established in Vienna. Although for the sake of brevity the headings have not been incorporated in the text, the arrangement will be obvious to any student who desires to prepare a case history for study. The method of presentation was as follows: a physician or teacher who had studied a problem child prepared the history according to the protocol. Dr. Adler, without having seen the child or previously discussing the case with the teacher, read the case history, sentence by sentence, making his deductions as the case progressed. Occasionally Dr. Adler was misled by a statement in the protocol, but in the vast majority of instances he built up a dynamic picture of the child’s personality, often predicting the findings with uncanny insight into the ways of a child’s soul, always illuminating the history with his gentle sympathy for the actors in the human drama under discussion.

After the record had been analyzed with the finesse of a psychiatric detective weighing clues, a brief discussion of the child’s situation followed, and a summary of the aims of psychotherapy or guidance outlined. The parents of the child were then brought into the lecture room and questioned and instructed before the class. Finally the child himself was brought in, and the situation was discussed with him in simple, kindly language. The follow-up work, indicated by the analysis, was then entrusted to the teacher or physician who had presented the history. From time to time, during the course of lectures, reports of progress were brought in, and the reactions of the children discussed.

Not all the cases were finally successful in their readjustment, failures being due sometimes to the ignorance and lack of co-operation of parents whose neuroses remained unresolved despite the efforts of teachers and psychiatrists to change their attitudes toward their children. Other causes of slow progress were deplorable economic situations, intercurrent diseases, or difficulties which served to restore the original situation in which the neurosis occurred. Some of the cases showed temporary improvement but presented new sets of symptoms under new conditions, which required continued psychotherapy until the parents had gained a more complete insight into the dynamics of the child’s behaviour, or the child had exhausted his repertoire of neurotic tricks. One of our own cases which showed excellent progress under intensive treatment and re-education, relapsed when the child was faced by the insuperable problem of an old-style school teacher, whose discouragement and deprecation in a few days destroyed the results of months of painstaking work. Yet the great majority of these cases showed definite improvement, and a considerable number a complete change of pattern.

Readers of this book should realize that it is not a comprehensive treatise on psychotherapy, but rather an outline of childhood neuroses and a key to the art of reading case histories. Its chief value lies in acquainting all those who have to deal with children and adults with the dynamic patterns of human conduct. The technique of cure can no more be taught by such a volume than the art of etching can be taught by a treatise on the various physical and chemical processes that comprise the technique of preparing and printing a copper-plate. The book will have fulfilled its purpose if it succeeds in encouraging all who study its pages to view human beings not as static machines designated by labels, but as moving, living, purpose-fulfilling entities striving for significance and security in a per-plexing world.

II

The principles and practice of Individual Psychology have been treated exhaustively in works devoted to the scientific discussion of Dr. Alfred Adler’s contributions to modern psychology. At the risk of fatiguing readers who have already mastered the theories of Individual Psychology, it seems especially advisable to include a short and necessarily incomplete outline of these principles for readers to whom “The Pattern of Life” is a first introduction to Adler’s work, lest the cases in the book seem unrelated and incomprehensible.

The concept of the unity of the human personality, which is the foundation of Individual Psychology, is neither new nor unique to Alfred Adler’s psychology. The Greek dramatists considered this unity essential long before the birth of Christ. The unknown writer of the nursery rhyme of Humpty Dumpty stated the case for this indestructible unity of living organisms when he proclaimed that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not reassemble a broken egg. Were it not for this unity, no psychologist could predict human behaviour as Adler has been able to predict the conduct of a child after reading a case protocol. It is philosophically impossible to conceive of more than one soul in a body, just as it is impossible to believe that human conduct is solely the result of certain motivating and activating drives and instincts, since no one can predict the relative potency of such drives and instincts. If each human being were no more than the haphazard resultant of the blind interaction of imponderable energies, a systematic psychology would be as impossible as a science of chemistry in which the chemical elements changed their valency from day to day. Great poets, shrewd old women, novelists, successful generals, and business men know that this unity of the human organism is the sine qua non of human understanding.

The second great principle of Adler’s psychology is that the unit organism is a dynamic whole, moving through a definite life pattern toward a definite goal. “The goal of life is the maintenance of life,” as Rémy de Gourmont wrote in his “Physique de l’Amour.” It is this goal which differentiates living matter from dead matter. A sand pile has no goal. If you remove a few shovelfuls of sand from a sand pile, its essential nature is not changed. It remains a sand pile. But a living organism, be it a one-celled amœba, a humming-bird, or giraffe, has a goal of life, and its entire organization and way of life is appropriate to the attainment of that goal. You cannot remove an essential portion of a living organism without changing it into an amorphous congeries of inert cells.

Each living organism has a definite life pattern and a definite and characteristic technique of combating the environment in order to maintain its life and goal. The complexity of the pattern varies with the organism’s capability of change and adaptation, and for this reason the patterns of human behaviour are much more complicated than the patterns of an oak tree, a comparatively immobile and fixed organism. What we call soul, or psyche, in a purely biological sense, is the function of adaptation, of apperception, of the mobilization of resources, and the maintenance of life by an offensive-defensive strategy of living.

What is the goal of human life? We shall not attempt an essay in the metaphysics of human existence here. Viewed objectively and dispassionately we see that every human organism strives for a measure of security and totality which makes continued existence tolerable. The goal of the human race is the maintenance of the human race.

Just as every living species has its characteristic technique of self-preservation—the tortoise its shell, the chameleon its adaptability, the hare its fleetness, the tiger its ferocity and strength—so the human race has its characteristic method of self-preservation. This technique we call communal life, society, civilization. Millennia of living have proved this the best method. So far as archæological researches can determine, human beings have always lived in groups. The recent discoveries of the most primitive man, the Pekin man, showed that ten millions of years ago our ancestors were already living in a community.

Because it is no more possible to conceive of an isolated man than it is possible to conceive of a short-necked giraffe, it is obvious that every psychology, every science of human behaviour, must be a social psychology. The fate of the individual is inextricably linked with the fate of his group. This is a fundamental principle of Adler’s Individual Psychology. To understand a human being you must understand his relative situation in the human group in which he moves. He cannot be isolated in a laboratory and watched and observed as the behaviourists have attempted to do, because in the moment he is isolated he no longer acts as a human being, but as a caged animal. He is no longer, strictly speaking, a human being. All human behaviour, therefore, must be taken in its social relativity if it is to be understood. Just as a pine tree develops differently at the snow line from the way it does in a sunny valley, so the human being will act differently if his social environment is changed.

The social life of the human race is an outgrowth of its weakness. Communal existence was probably the quickest and most effective way our ancestors could find to protect themselves. The pattern of the human race has been a pattern beginning in individual weakness, moving toward a goal of comparative security in social solidarity. All the strengths of the human race fit into this pattern; all its weaknesses are derived from the danger of isolation. Just as in our structural growth we recapitulate the evolution of all living matter, from a single cell to an organized unity of inter-dependent tissues and organs, so the psychological growth of the individual is a recapitulation of the psychological organization of the race.

Every human being begins life as a relatively helpless, impotent, dependent parasite. Without the aid of his parents, the first community of the family, the human infant would perish miserably in a few hours. Under the fostering influence of parents the individual child grows in power and ability. During his growth he is a virtual parasite of the society that nurtures him.

With maturity the normal individual has developed adequate powers to begin life as a contributing member of his social group. In affirming the multiplex bonds that bind human being to human being, the normal mature individual gains a measure of peace, security, and a sense of totality and validity which make life worth living. The more of these bridges that a human being builds to his fellows the more secure he is. Speech, common sense, reason, logic, ideas, sympathy, love, science, art, religion, politics, responsibility, self-reliance, honesty, usefulness, play, love of nature, and the like, are among the most important bridges. To forego any of these techniques of communal life is to be only partially successful as a human being, to be only partially secure.

Unfortunately for us this normal pattern of development does not always occur. The reasons for its failure derive from an important biological characteristic of the human infant. The young of other species also go through a period of helplessness and dependence upon their parents, but as their physical powers grow, a parallel development of their mental capabilities occurs. A kitten that is capable of recognizing a mouse, can stalk it, catch it, and eat it. But in the human infant there is a gross disproportion between the per-ceptual faculties and the motor capabilities. The baby can recognize the fact that it is dependent upon its mother for food and warmth and protection. It knows that the mother is capable of many necessary activities which lie beyond its powers. A father appears as a huge and relatively omnipotent giant. The world about the baby moves according to ineluctable laws. Darkness and light, food and hunger, speech, locomotion, are vassals of the strange adults who move so surely and knowingly through the baby’s cosmos. But the young child realizes his relative weakness. The human baby is the only living animal that experiences his own inadequacy because his mind develops faster than his body. It is in this situation that the feeling of inferiority, a cornerstone of Individual Psychology, is created.

Far from being a handicap, the inferiority feeling has proved itself the most cogent stimulus for the development of the human race. The telescope and the microscope would never have been invented if our human eyes were as powerful as the eagle’s; the phonograph, the radio, the telephone, could never have existed without a need for better communication between human beings; the art of the perfumer and the virtuosity of the chef are our compensations for the blunting of primitive sensory perceptions far better developed in the “lower” animals. The very structure of our civilization, from newspapers to skyscrapers, from aeroplanes to symphony orchestras, from steam shovels to silk stockings, is the resultant of this primitive need for the compensation of human frailties.

The inferiority feeling to which every human being is heir because of his physical and biological constellation in the cosmos need not therefore be an individual liability. Man’s history is replete with records of his conquest of inferiority. Genius is probably no more than the expression of the urge to compensate for an individual defect in terms of social contribution. Every work of genius bears this mark of social usefulness. When we speak of genius we are inclined to forget those unsung men who invented the lever, the wheel, the axe, the musical reed, weaving, writing, and the like, and remember solely our modern geniuses who have but combined these elements in some novel form. The true history of human genius is the history of the caveman’s struggle for existence.

Each human being is capable of elaborating his personal defects into a useful contribution to society, yet a superficial survey of our society indicates that only a small proportion of the human race has gained the courage to effect such compensations. Our neurotics far outnumber our geniuses. How can we account for the failure of useful compensation?

Unfortunately for the human race, a variety of factors militate against the optimum compensation of the inferiority feeling in social adjustment and in useful work. The first of these factors that intensify the inferiority feeling until it crystallizes in an inferiority complex is the factor of physical defect. If in addition to his normal weakness the human infant experiences a special weakness in the form of a defective apparatus, his struggle for significance is made more difficult. This inferiority may be an actual inferiority of certain organs or organ systems of his body. It may, however, be an unimportant physical anomaly, medically unimportant, but socially embarrassing, such as abnormal fatness, thinness, albinism, moles, red hair, bow legs, facial hair, and the like. Ugliness is a special case in point, and, strange as it may seem, exceptional beauty may eventually lead to an inferiority complex because the beautiful child believes that his beauty is the only contribution which society requires of him.

The second group of factors that intensify the inferiority feeling deals with the social, religious, and economic condition of the individual. Members of any minority group, whether social, religious, or economic, suffer an accentuation of their inferiority feeling because of the additional difficulties of the world, contact with sordidness, vice, and crime. Great riches, however, may also have a disastrous effect, because the proper stimulus to work is so frequently lacking where a child grows up in an atmosphere of affluence.

A third set of factors that may intensify the inferiority feeling of the child derive from his family constellation. This group is important, because no child escapes its influence. The only child derives his inferiority complex from his abnormal importance in the family, and his poor training for social adjustment. His life is all too frequently a search for the lost paradise of his youth. The oldest child, having been an only child, and displaced by a younger rival, may be so discouraged by his fall from power that he can never muster sufficient courage to attack the problems of existence objectively. The second child, although he grows up in the same house, imbibes the same milk, sleeps in the same room as the older child, nevertheless has an entirely different environment. He has always a pace-maker ahead of him and, in his aggressive striving to overtake the older child, may overshoot his mark and become an unobjective rebel. The youngest child may shrink in fear of competing with the more successful older children. The only boy in a family of girls, the only girl in a family of boys, may be discouraged because of this unique position. While no position in the family is without its dangers, it is one of the most important teachings of Individual Psychology, the first science to point out the significance of the ordinal position of the child in the family constellation, that no position can compel a child to become neurotic.

Sex in itself may be a factor that complicates the burden of the child. We live in a civilization dominated by a masculine ideal, a civilization that exaggerates masculine values and activities, and still considers, despite good scientific evidence to the contrary, that woman is an inferior sex. The utter fallacy of the prejudice has been exploded by the microscope and the machine, but it exists in widespread tradition nevertheless. Every girl child therefore has an additional burden of proof thrown upon her shoulders. The fact that she is “only a girl” often precludes a normal development along lines of her choice.

The prejudice in favour of the males, however, is not without damage to them. Many a boy is terrified, either by minor physical defects or by other discouraging factors, until he doubts his ability to be a “hundred-per-cent he-man” and spends the rest of his life avoiding the implications and responsibilities of his sex. The increase in marital disharmony, divorce, homosexuality, and sexual delinquency among children, is an important aspect of our over-emphasis on sexual differences, and the ever-increasing struggle for prestige that marks the contemporary life of the sexes.

As we have indicated in an earlier section, the normal course of human development may be divided into two phases; an earlier phase of individuation, with growth of the individual at the expense of the environment; and a secondary phase of communal adjustment, marked by the continuation of individuation in terms of social contribution. A child does not grow naturally into the second phase without a certain reconciliation with his adult environment and without a proper initiation into the fellowship of mankind. This initiation is usually accomplished by the intermediation of the child’s mother.

A child’s mother is the first person with whom the child makes a social contact. Mother’s love is the first social approval. As soon as a child realizes that he is appreciated by one other human being he has begun the process of social adjustment. In his mother, and she need not be his blood mother, he experiences the first wholly trustworthy individual in his environment, and with this beginning he can continue his progress toward the normal goal of human adjustment.

It is apparent that the mother has a double function, whose first phase is the reconciliation of the child to his situation in the world, whose second phase consists in encouragement of the child to develop his own powers of growth and adjustment to other individuals. This delicate rôle is seldom played to perfection, and in the mistakes of a child’s mother the infinite variety of human patterns may take their origin. There are several typical mistakes, all of which produce easily recognizable types of “problem” adults.

Although children are no longer treated so brutally as they have been in the past, there are nevertheless many mothers in this selfish age who either neglect their children or actually hate them. Illegitimate, ugly, unwanted children often develop anti-social character traits because their guardians have not interested or reconciled them with the world in which they live. It is not strange that many criminals are recruited from the poorer sections of the population, where such neglect and such hate, together with the poverty that leads to ugliness and disease, flourish most widely. These children learn courage and independence in the gutter, but their courage...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Adler and Our Neurotic World
• A Gesture of the Whole Body
• Maternal Domination
• The Road to Crime
• The Boy Who Wants to Lead
• The Fear of Growing Up
• The Rebellious “Bad” Boy
• The Hunger Strike
• Follow the Leader
• The too Docile Child
• Laying the Neurotic Foundations
• Congenital Feeble-Mindedness
• The Tyranny of Illness