Alfred Adler

11 Key excerpts on "Alfred Adler"

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  Psychology for Actors

  Theories and Practices for the Acting Process

  • Kevin Page(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 4 Alfred Adler Inferiority and the Individual

  Alfred Adler (1870–1937) was another early associate of Freud’s who eventually broke away to pursue his own vision of the human psyche (Adler, 1956). Although they had never met, Freud invited Adler to join an elite group of physicians and psychiatrists (later known as the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society) in 1902 after Adler had publicly defended Freud’s recently published The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud & Brill, 1913; first published in 1900) from attacks in a local newspaper. While Adler attended this group for more than eight years, and was its president in 1910, he was never personally close to Freud, and left the group in 1911, in protest, with nine other members, and would shortly form his own organization, the Association for Individual Psychology, under which title he would continue to formulate and disseminate his own ideas (Bottome, 1957). While it is oft-misstated that Adler was a student or pupil of Freud’s in the beginning, this is not true, and was an idea that Adler himself vehemently denied for the rest of his life (Hoffman, 1988, p. 105).

  Adler’s individual psychology was based on a much different set of views than Freud’s darkly sexual and deterministic vision. Adler felt that childhood sexuality, while certainly important, took a backseat to the individual’s drives for power and superiority, as well as the relationship of the individual to society (Adler, 1924). Individual psychology was the first version of an “ego psychology.” Adler’s focus on conscious, rational processes, outward behavior, goal-seeking, and values separates his work from “depth psychology,” which is much more interested with the dynamics of the unconscious mind and its causal relationship to neuroticism. Adler’s individual psychology was to have a major impact on family therapy, child guidance, education, and psychotherapy (Frick, 1991, p. 21). His theories have become so absorbed into the fabric of twentieth-century psychology as a field, and our shared cultural language, that often Adler has been forgotten as the source of those influences. Adler made a serious impact on the psychology of his day and was a noted influence on many other famous psychologists who followed, including Carl Rogers, Rollo May, and Abraham Maslow (Ansbacher, 1990; Hoffman, 1988, p. 102). However, after his death in 1937, his influence and notoriety began to wane, and it was not until near the end of the twentieth century that Adler’s ideas and reputation began a resurgence of popularity.

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  Contemporary Psychotherapies for a Diverse World

  First Revised Edition

  • Jon Frew, Michael D. Spiegler, Jon Frew, Michael D. Spiegler(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Adler’s life was one of many contrasts. Although trained as a physician, he became a psychologist and educator as well as an early pro-feminist and skilled public speaker. Adler believed in personal freedom, social responsibility, and the rights of children, women, and workers. While alive, he was more popular than Freud, though over time Freud’s fame has far surpassed Adler’s. For example, Adler’s first book of popular psychology, Understanding Human Nature, was a huge success, selling over 100,000 copies in the first 6 months. This is in contrast to Freud’s best-selling book of the time, The Interpretation of Dreams, which sold around 17,000 copies over a 10-year period. Now Freud is largely viewed as the founder of modern psychotherapy, yet recently there has been a growing appreciation and understanding of the vast influence of Adler’s theories and practice on modern psychotherapy and counseling. Adler’s psychological and developmental concepts, such as the inferiority complex, power trips, power conflicts, control, life tasks, life-style, goal-oriented behavior, and social interest, have all entered the common lexicon. Adler’s theories and insights into the human personality serve as the foundation of today’s most prominent theories of psychotherapy, including many that you will read about in this book: person-centered therapy, existential therapy, cognitive therapy, rational emotive behavioral therapy, reality therapy, and family therapy. In many ways, Adler could be considered the grandfather of modern psychotherapy. Alfred Adler was born on February 7, 1870, near Vienna, Austria. His parents were Jewish and his father worked as a corn trader. Young Alfred, the second of six children, was not a healthy child. He was subject to frequent bouts of a respiratory disorder and vitamin deficiency, and he almost died from pneumonia at the age of 4. If this was not enough, he was run over twice on the Vienna streets

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  Current Psychotherapies

  • Danny Wedding, Raymond Corsini(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  The focus on strengths of the individual as well as those elements related to well-being share a considerable amount of overlap with Adlerian psychology. Despite this overlap, the positive psychology literature almost never mentions Adler’s ideas. Indeed, Adler’s fo-cus on what is good with the individual, the emphasis on encouragement of the indi-vidual, and the notion of expanding social interest (i.e., a feeling of belonging to and participating with others) in the individual are all consonant with those elements out-lined in positive psychology. History LO3 Precursors Adler is often described as a man ahead of his time (e.g., Ellenberger, 1970), and his assumptions were often out of step with the prevailing contemporary medical and scien-tific tenor (Maniacci, 2012). Several reasons for this have been detailed by many authors in another work (Carlson & Maniacci, 2012), but they can be summarized here. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Adlerian Psychotherapy | 67 Adler was a scientist. He earned a degree in medicine and was a practicing physi-cian. He initially wrote about and conceptualized cases from a materialistic, relatively hard deterministic perspective. Such a perspective won him the recognition and atten-tion of several people in his hometown of Vienna, most notably Sigmund Freud. Such a hard deterministic stance was most evident in his first major publication on organ infe-riority in 1907, when he was still an active member of the original inner circle of Freud and his colleagues (Adler, 1917).

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  Personality Theories

  Development, Growth, and Diversity

  • Bem P. Allen(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  After enjoying a first visit in 1926, the United States became his home in 1934 when he and his wife fled Nazi-infested Austria. Here Adler became known as an “indefatigable lecturer” to parents and teachers, as well as a “constant advisor” to child-guidance clinics (Alexander & Selesnick, 1966). These characteristics clearly confirm his tendency to ex-traversion, especially relative to Freud and Jung (Dolliver, 1994). His devotion to parenting was reflected in the fact that two of his four children, Alexandra and Kurt, became psychiatrists in their father’s tradition. Later you will learn that he had significant influence on many other personologists.

  Adler’s View of the Person

  Basic Orientation

  Adler refused to think of humans as collections of ids, egos, and complexes. He saw each person as a whole individual with aspects that are too interconnected for meaningful examination apart from one another. The lives of people were seen as flowing from immaturity to maturity without the discrete breaks that characterized Freud’s psychosexual stages. From his perspective, people decide for themselves what direction their lives take, sometimes wisely, sometimes not. Whatever their direction, Adler saw them as striving for “perfection” as they conceived of it.

  At first Adler emphasized natural feelings of inferiority that appear very early in life and require compensation thereafter (Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1964). However, Eva Dreidurs Ferguson (1989) argued that Adler evolved toward greater emphasis on striving for power and superiority. Near the end of his career, “Adler made it explicit that humans as a species strive to belong and that the goal … is to contribute to human welfare” (p. 354).

  Dinkmeyer and Sherman (1989) list five principles that might be regarded as basic Adlerian assumptions about people and their psychological functioning.

  1.

  All behavior has social meaning

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  The Psychology Of Alfred Adler

  and the Development of the Child

  • Madelaine Ganz(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER ONEThe Theory of Adlerian Psychology A. WHAT IS Alfred Adler’S PSYCHOLOGY?

  B EFORE attempting a theoretical exposition of Adlerian psychology, it is advisable to emphasize certain necessary distinctions. From the formal point of view, then, we distinguish, on the one hand, the psychology of the whole from a symptomatology of its various parts considered separately; and on the other hand we distinguish between finalistic explanations and causal explanations.

  From the material point of view, namely from that of content, Adlerian psychology takes account of everything that concerns the individual, society and their mutual relations. Although all these factors obviously interpenetrate in actuality, their analysis is indispensable in theory if we are to acquire an adequate knowledge of any individual.

  1. A psychology of totality

  The German word itself – ‘Individualpsychologie’ – easily gives rise to a misunderstanding, for one is tempted to think it means a psychology that applies to the individual exclusively. But if one refers to the etymological sense of the word (individere ) its field of application is much more extensive. This is the psychology of ‘the whole that cannot be divided’ concerned at one and the same time with the individual as he is in himself and in his relation to the community. Just as medicine is no longer—as a general rule—satisfied with the separate treatment of morbid symptoms, but proceeds to take account of the condition of the entire organism, neither should psychology be limited to the study of certain phenomena in isolation from the psyche as a whole.

  In the totality of its organic and psychic functions the individual constitutes an original unity, which it expresses at every moment through all its movements internal and external. But this unity is in its turn but a part of the higher unity constituted by society. This conception of ‘totality’ is not wholly new, since one finds it, or at least a more or less marked tendency towards it, in many modern psychologists, notably Spranger and Stern. What is however genuinely characteristic of Adlerian psychology is the linking of this conception with that of an immanent finalism.

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  Archetype and Character

  Power, Eros, Spirit, and Matter Personality Types

  • V. Odajnyk(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  He even co-authored a book with a Lutheran minister, Ernest Jahn, on Religion and Individual Psychology (1933). Adler later wrote, “I regard it as no mean commendation when Jahn emphasizes that Individual Psychology has rediscovered many a lost position of Christian guidance. I have always endeavored to show that Individual Psychology is the heir to all great movements whose aim is the welfare of mankind.” 12 His interest in religion, however, remained focused on its social contributions; he had no interest in its metaphysi- cal postulates or purely spiritual concerns. Like Freud, Adler sought to ground his psychological theories in physiology. That tendency is evident in his theory of organ inferiority and in his initial description of the aggressive drive originating in Alfred Adler 113 the child’s struggle to satisfy the demands of its various organs. 13 For Adler, even the abstract notion of “drive” refers to “a sum of elementary functions of the corresponding organ and its nerve tracts . . . . The goal of the drive is determined by the satisfaction of the organic needs [for example, eating to satisfy hunger] and by the gaining of pleasure from the environment.” 14 Because, in the early period of his career, Adler sought to link all psychic manifestations to physiology, Freud could rightly argue that Adler’s psychology is “in large part, biology.” 15 Adler’s Physis orientation is also evident in the practical cast of his mind. “He was always more interested in the concrete fact than in any theory,” Phyllis Bottome, his friend and biographer, observed. 16 Although he was a creative theoretician, he always sought to apply his theories in practice. For instance, several years before he met Freud, Adler published a monograph, Health Book for the Tailor Trade (1898), in which he described the typical diseases that afflict tailors and the working conditions that contributed to these illnesses.

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  European Psychotherapy 2014/2015

  Austria: Home of the World's Psychotherapy

  • Serge Sulz, Stefan Hagspiel, Serge Sulz, Stefan Hagspiel(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Books on Demand

    (Publisher)

  Although Adler is well known in the United States in the 1930s – Germany as the then largest book market has banned his writings by then – he remains less successful in professional circles than Freud. Psychoanalysis has been received increasingly in the USA in the 1920s and it provides a more structured theoretical framework than individual psychology. In addition, Adler is considered a dissenter among the established analysts, who is to be approached with skepticism. In a popular context, though, he has a broad impact, because he simplifies his teachings for the American market which is heavily influenced by an optimistic feasibility ideology. The tragic and skeptical aspects of his theory, such as the aggression drive or inferiority complex, are pushed to the side and give way to the "pursuit of perfection" and an exaggerated emphasis on the "social interest". "Adler allowed a superficial pragmatism at the expense of a thorough analytical-therapeutic approach" (Kenner 2007, p. 52). The contrasts between North American and German individual psychology are still obvious today, made visible for example in a special issue of the Journal of Individual Psychology, where an article by the American authors Henry F. Stein and Martha E. Edwards is criticized by German-speaking authors (Lehmkuhl 2000).

  The different perceptions of Adler thus resonate to the present: individual psychology in North America focuses more on the cognitive elements in Adler's teachings, on training manuals or on a structured approach to therapy, and shows less interest in the psychodynamic content with its conflicts and its quite tragic potential (i.e., Dreikurs, 1992; Grigorescu, 2011; Johansen, 2010; McKay& Dinkmeyer, 2003; Powers & Griffith, 1987; Savage, Nicholl & Mansager, 2003; Shulman & Mosak, 1988; Sweeney, 2009). So it says in the book Alfred Adler. The Forgotten Prophet: "It should also help us to understand more clearly the relationship between the socalled unconscious and conscious minds, which Adler saw as levels of awareness rather than disparate entities as proposed by Freud" (Grey 1998, p. IX). In the following paragraph, the author immediately talks about the "cosmic finality" and speculates about the nature of God (Grey 1998, p. Ix). Similarly, it says on the official website of the "North American Society of Adlerian Psychology": "Adler's theory is a holistic psychology that focuses on the goals and purposes of human behavior" (NASAP) (NASAP 2013). In this context, it is probably no coincidence that the NASAP's Journal of Individual Psychology devoted two special issues to the international prevalence of individual psychology (Carlson 2012; Sperry & Carlson 2012), but ignored the German-speaking countries completely: countries such as Taiwan, Malta, and Slovakia are discussed in detail, the country of origin of individual psychology, however, is not.

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  Adlerian Psychotherapy

  An Advanced Approach to Individual Psychology

  • Ursula E. Oberst, Alan E. Stewart(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 Classical Adlerian Psychology

  Sigmund Freud’s idea of explaining present psychological phenomena by searching for objective causes in the individual’s past (childhood) was a revolutionary new vision of certain problems and illnesses that could not be understood in purely medical terms, but it also has its limitations. Though Adler does not deny the influence of childhood experiences, he refuses to accept an exclusively causal explanation for the person’s present problems. Instead of being a victim of past experiences, the human being is seen as having a free will and an innate creative force, and as guided by fictions and final goals. Thus Adler refuses to accept historical experiences as an exclusively causal explanation for the person’s present problems. Adler also assumes an innate disposition for social life and community. The child is born with the innate possibility of what Adler will later call ‘community feeling’ (Gemeinschaftsgefühl ), usually translated as ‘Social Interest’. This feeling or interest in living in a community and in sharing experiences, emotions and ideas must be developed and defined by means of the child’s interaction with primary caregivers. An insufficient degree of Social Interest is expressed in a psychopathological striving for power.

  In this chapter, we will provide an overview of the historical and contemporary notions of Individual Psychology.

  Theory of personality

  Holism and the creative self

  Adler supposes that there is a creative force inborn to the child, which increases with activity; it enables people to make their own decisions and to develop their opinions on what happens to them. In this sense, individuals are not just the product of their circumstances – as assumed in classical Behaviourism (behaviour as a result of specific stimuli) or as in classical Psychoanalysis (psychological problems as result of traumatic childhood experiences) – but are also the creators of their circumstances and of themselves. This creative force works throughout the whole personality. In the classical Freudian view, personality is seen as divided. In contrast, Adler proposes a holistic view of the personality: the individual acts as a whole, his or her feelings, beliefs and behaviours are guided by the same organising principle: the fictionate goal. This unifying principle can be seen as the individual’s unique way of responding to situations. It is not only the essential part of the personality; it also distinguishes him or her from other people and makes the individual unique and personal.

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  Transpeople

  Repudiation, Trauma, Healing

  • Christopher Acton Shelley(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • University of Toronto Press

    (Publisher)

  Following his break from Freud, Adler formed the Society for Free Psychoanalysis, which later evolved into the school of individual psy-chology , a somewhat confusing reference to the Latin individuus , Adlerian Theory 171 meaning indivisibility. This obscure reference to ‘indivisibility’ – perhaps due to inappropriate translation into English where its intended meaning is not at all obvious – was consistent with Adler’s insistence upon the fictional unity of the neuroses and indeed the fic-tional (yet useful) unity of the self. His position contrasts with Freudian psychoanalysis and its counter-insistence upon permanent, compart-mentalized conflict, an un-mendable fracture. The American adoption of Adler’s school favoured the retention of the colloquially understood term ‘individual’ as referring to one person, rather than collective issues. However, Adler’s meaning, while pertaining to his theorizing on the unique and creative power of the individual psyche, did not ignore con-textual and collective aspects. It is paradoxical that Adler’s ‘individual psychology’ is actually a social psychology (King and Shelley, 2008). Ansbacher and Ansbacher (as cited in Adler, 1956) argue that the conflict between Adler and Freud essentially pitted ‘psychology with a soul [Adler] against a psychology where the soul or self was eclipsed [Freud].’ The Ansbachers further conclude that ‘the self or the soul 3 must remain the focal point if psychology is to provide satisfactory explanations’ (p. 62). Indeed, both Adler and Jung shared a holistic regard for the psyche, and did not ignore its spiritual dimensions (whether religious or existential), remaining faithful to the root meaning of psyche as the prefix of psych-ology (soul-logic). The noted Jungian scholar James Hillman (1983) argues that ‘if there are Freudian parallels with Jung, even more so are there Adlerian ones ...

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  Religion in Personality Theory

  • Frederick Walborn(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Unlike Freud, who viewed personality development as a result of conflicting forces within the person (id, ego, and superego), Adler believed the person should be viewed as whole. Adler would go on to develop the Society of Individual Psychology.

  At 34 years of age, Adler converted from Judaism to Protestantism. During the early 1900s, Protestantism was a small minority religion in Austria. Adler converted less than one month after his lifelong Catholic friend Furtmüller had been admitted to the Protestant Church. Adler considered it to be the most liberal religious institution available, and he wanted his children to have some religious upbringing. However, many biographers wrote that he was not an actively religious man. He would best be described as a humanist (Baruth & Manning, 1987 ).

  Coauthor with a Lutheran Minister

  In 1933, Adler and a Lutheran minister, Ernst Jahn, collaborated in writing a book on religion and Individual Psychology (Jahn & Adler, 1933/1979 ). A major difference between the two men’s writings is that the faithful, like Jahn, believe that God is a reality. Whereas Adler believed God was an idea that can foster social living. According to Adler, religion is important because it helps to move people from being self-focused to other-focused.

  In their book, Religion and Individual Psychology, Adler and the minister review many of Adler’s concepts as being compatible with religion. One of his major concepts is the natural striving toward perfection. God serves as a goal for this teleological venture.

  When we look dispassionately we find that the difference in form over the course of time is not essential. Whether one calls the highest effective goal deity, or socialism, or, as we do, the pure idea of social interest, or as others call it in obvious connection with social interest, ego ideal, it always reflects the same ruling, perfection-promising, grace-giving goal of overcoming (Jahn & Adler, 1933/1979, pp. 277-278 ).

  He wrote that how people’s perception of God may evolve over the millennia and the shape God takes does not matter as much as the teachings. It is obvious by the preceding quote that Adler did not consider himself a person to believe in God; rather, he believed that the ultimate goal of life is a sense of community, people working together for a higher purpose.

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  Theories and Applications of Counseling and Psychotherapy

  Relevance Across Cultures and Settings

  • Earl J. Ginter, Gargi Roysircar, Lawrence H. Gerstein(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Table 4.5 provides an overall summary of several key areas pertaining to Adlerian therapy as it is currently practiced.

  Table 4.5

  Critical Thinking Questions

  1. Freud was not an Adlerian and Adler was not a Freudian. Explain the following assertion: Adler was not an Adlerian.
  2. How are selfish goals similar to and different from defense mechanisms?
  3. According to Adler’s theory, should we expect a mature, psychologically healthy adult to possess equal amounts of social interest and self-interest? Justify your answer.

  Suggested Readings: Important Primary Sources

  Books

  Adler, A. [Alfred]. (1954). Understanding human nature (W. B. Wolfe, Trans.). New York, NY: Fawcett Premier. (Original work published 1927)

  Carlson, J., Watts, R. E., & Maniacci, M. (2006). Adlerian therapy: Theory and practice. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

  Watts, R. E. (2003). Adlerian, cognitive, and constructivist therapies: An integrative dialogue. New York, NY: Springer.

  Journals

  • Journal of Individual Psychology

  Websites

  • Idaho Society of Individual Psychology (ISIP): http://adleridaho.org
  • Journal of Individual Psychology: https://utpress.utexas.edu/journals/journal-of-individual-psychology
  • North American Society of Adlerian Psychology: www.alfredadler.org

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