ALFRED ADLER
1870 - 1937
Dr. C. George Boeree



I would like to introduce Alfred Adler by talking about someone Adler never
knew: Theodore Roosevelt. Born to Martha and Theodore Senior in Manhattan on
October 27, 1858, he was said to be a particularly beautiful baby who needed no
help entering his new world. His parents were strong, intelligent, handsome, and
quite well-to-do. It should have been an idyllic childhood
But "Teedie," as he was called, was not as healthy as he first appeared. He had
severe asthma, and tended to catch colds easily, develop coughs and fevers, and
suffer from nausea and diarrhea. He was small and thin. His voice was reedy, and
remained so even in adulthood. He became malnourished and was often forced by
his asthma to sleep sitting up in chairs. Several times, he came dangerously
close to dying from lack of oxygen.
Not to paint too negative a picture, Teedie was an active boy -- some would say
over-active -- and had a fantastic personality. He was full of curiosity about
nature and would lead expeditions of cousins to find mice, squirrels, snakes,
frogs, and anything else that could be dissected or pickled. His repeated
confinement when his asthma flared up turned him to books, which he devoured
throughout his life. He may have been sickly, but he certainly had a desire to
live!
After traveling through Europe with his family, his health became worse. He had
grown taller but no more muscular. Finally, with encouragement from the family
doctor, Roosevelt Senior encouraged the boy, now twelve, to begin lifting
weights. Like anything else he tackled, he did this enthusiastically. He got
healthier, and for the first time in his life got through a whole month without
an attack of asthma.
When he was thirteen, he became aware of another defect of his: When he found
that he couldn't hit anything with the rifle his father had given him. When
friends read a billboard to him -- he didn't realize it had writing on it -- it
was discovered that he was terribly nearsighted!
In the same year, he was sent off to the country on his own after a bad attack
of asthma. On the way, he was waylaid by a couple of other boys his own age. He
found that not only couldn't he defend himself, he couldn't even lay a hand on
them. He later announced to his father his intention to learn to box. By the
time he went to Harvard, he was not only a healthier Teddy Roosevelt, but was a
regular winner of a variety of athletic contests.
The rest, as they say, is history. "Teedie" Roosevelt went on to become a
successful New York assemblyman, North Dakota cowboy, New York commissioner of
police, Assistant secretary of the Navy, lieutenant colonel of the "Rough
Riders," the Governor of New York, and best-selling author, all by the age of
forty. With the death of President William McKinley in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt
became the youngest president of the United States.
How is it that someone so sickly should become so healthy, vigorous, and
successful? Why is it that some children, sickly or not, thrive, while others
wither away? Is the drive that Roosevelt had peculiar to him, or is it something
that lies in each of us? These kinds of questions intrigued a young Viennese
physician named Alfred Adler, and led him to develop his theory, called
Individual Psychology.



Biography
Alfred Adler was born in the suburbs of Vienna on February 7, 1870, the third
child, second son, of a Jewish grain merchant and his wife. As a child, Alfred
developed rickets, which kept him from walking until he was four years old. At
five, he nearly died of pneumonia. It was at this age that he decided to be a
physician.
Alfred was an average student and preferred playing outdoors to being cooped up
in school. He was quite outgoing, popular, and active, and was known for his
efforts at outdoing his older brother, Sigmund.
He received a medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1895. During his
college years, he became attached to a group of socialist students, among which
he found his wife-to-be, Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein. She was an intellectual and
social activist who had come from Russia to study in Vienna. They married in
1897 and eventually had four children, two of whom became psychiatrists.
He began his medical career as an opthamologist, but he soon switched to general
practice, and established his office in a lower-class part of Vienna, across
from the Prater, a combination amusement park and circus. His clients included
circus people, and it has been suggested (Furtmuller, 1964) that the unusual
strengths and weaknesses of the performers led to his insights into organ
inferiorities and compensation.
He then turned to psychiatry, and in 1907 was invited to join Freud's discussion
group. After writing papers on organic inferiority, which were quite compatible
with Freud's views, he wrote, first, a paper concerning an aggression instinct,
which Freud did not approve of, and then a paper on children's feelings of
inferiority, which suggested that Freud's sexual notions be taken more
metaphorically than literally.
Although Freud named Adler the president of the Viennese Analytic Society and
the co-editor of the organization's newsletter, Adler didn't stop his criticism.
A debate between Adler's supporters and Freud's was arranged, but it resulted in
Adler, with nine other members of the organization, resigning to form the
Society for Free Psychoanalysis in 1911. This organization became The Society
for Individual Psychology in the following year.
During World War I, Adler served as a physician in the Austrian Army, first on
the Russian front, and later in a children's hospital. He saw first hand the
damage that war does, and his thought turned increasingly to he concept of
social interest. He felt that if humanity was to survive, it had to change its
ways!
After the war, he was involved in various projects, including clinics attached
to state schools and the training of teachers. In 1926, he went to the United
States to lecture, and he eventually accepted a visiting position at the Long
Island College of Medicine. In 1934, he and his family left Vienna forever. On
May 28, 1937, during a series of lectures at Aberdeen University, he died of a
heart attack.



Theory
Alfred Adler postulates a single "drive" or motivating force behind all our
behavior and experience. By the time his theory had gelled into its most mature
form, he called that motivating force the striving for perfection. It is the
desire we all have to fulfill our potentials, to come closer and closer to our
ideal. It is, as many of you will already see, very similar to the more popular
idea of self-actualization.
"Perfection" and "ideal" are troublesome words, though. On the one hand, they
are very positive goals. Shouldn't we all be striving for the ideal? And yet, in
psychology, they are often given a rather negative connotation. Perfection and
ideals are, practically by definition, things you can't reach. Many people, in
fact, live very sad and painful lives trying to be perfect! As you will see,
other theorists, like Karen Horney and Carl Rogers, emphasize this problem.
Adler talks about it, too. But he sees this negative kind of idealism as a
perversion of the more positive understanding. We will return to this in a
little while.
Striving for perfection was not the first phrase Adler used to refer to his
single motivating force. His earliest phrase was the aggression drive, referring
to the reaction we have when other drives, such as our need to eat, be sexually
satisfied, get things done, or be loved, are frustrated. It might be better
called the assertiveness drive, since we tend to think of aggression as physical
and negative. But it was Adler's idea of the aggression drive that first caused
friction between him and Freud. Freud was afraid that it would detract from the
crucial position of the sex drive in psychoanalytic theory. Despite Freud's
dislike for the idea, he himself introduced something very similar much later in
his life: the death instinct.
Another word Adler used to refer to basic motivation was compensation, or
striving to overcome. Since we all have problems, short-comings, inferiorities
of one sort or another, Adler felt, earlier in his writing, that our
personalities could be accounted for by the ways in which we do -- or don't --
compensate or overcome those problems. The idea still plays an important role in
his theory, as you will see, but he rejected it as a label for the basic motive
because it makes it sound as if it is your problems that cause you to be what
you are.
One of Adler's earliest phrases was masculine protest. He noted something pretty
obvious in his culture (and by no means absent from our own): Boys were held in
higher esteem than girls. Boys wanted, often desperately, to be thought of as
strong, aggressive, in control -- i.e. "masculine" -- and not weak, passive, or
dependent -- i.e. "feminine." The point, of course, was that men are somehow
basically better than women. They do, after all, have the power, the education,
and apparently the talent and motivation needed to do "great things," and women
don't.
You can still hear this in the kinds of comments older people make about little
boys and girls: If a baby boy fusses or demands to have his own way (masculine
protest!), they will say he's a natural boy; If a little girl is quiet and shy,
she is praised for her femininity; If, on the other hand, the boy is quiet and
shy, they worry that he might grow up to be a sissy; Or if a girl is assertive
and gets her way, they call her a "tomboy" and will try to reassure you that
she'll grow out of it!
But Adler did not see men's assertiveness and success in the world as due to
some innate superiority. He saw it as a reflection of the fact that boys are
encouraged to be assertive in life, and girls are discouraged. Both boys and
girls, however, begin life with the capacity for "protest!" Because so many
people misunderstood him to mean that men are, innately, more assertive, lead
him to limit his use of the phrase.
The last phrase he used, before switching to striving for perfection, was
striving for superiority. His use of this phrase reflects one of the
philosophical roots of his ideas: Friederich Nietzsche developed a philosophy
that considered the will to power the basic motive of human life. Although
striving for superiority does refer to the desire to be better, it also contains
the idea that we want to be better than others, rather than better in our own
right. Adler later tended to use striving for superiority more in reference to
unhealthy or neurotic striving.
Life style
A lot of this playing with words reflects Adler's groping towards a really
different kind of personality theory than that represented by Freud's. Freud'
theory was what we nowadays would call a reductionistic one: He tried most of
his life to get the concepts down to the physiological level. although he
admitted failure in the end, life is nevertheless explained in terms of basic
physiological needs. In addition, Freud tended to "carve up" the person into
smaller theoretical concepts -- the id, ego, and superego -- as well.
Adler was influenced by the writings of Jan Smuts, the South African philosopher
and statesman. Smuts felt that, in order to understand people, we have to
understand them more as unified wholes than as a collection of bits and pieces,
and we have to understand them in the context of their environment, both
physical and social. This approach is called holism, and Adler took it very much
to heart.
First, to reflect the idea that we should see people as wholes rather than
parts, he decided to label his approach to psychology individual psychology. The
word individual means literally "un-divided."
Second, instead of talking about a person's personality, with the traditional
sense of internal traits, structures, dynamics, conflicts, and so on, he
preferred to talk about style of life (nowadays, "lifestyle"). Life style refers
to how you live your life, how you handle problems and interpersonal relations.
Here's what he himself had to say about it: "The style of life of a tree is the
individuality of a tree expressing itself and molding itself in an environment.
We recognize a style when we see it against a background of an environment
different from what we expect, for then we realize that every tree has a life
pattern and is not merely a mechanical reaction to the environment."
Teleology
The last point -- that lifestyle is "not merely a mechanical reaction" -- is a
second way in which Adler differs dramatically from Freud. For Freud, the things
that happened in the past, such as early childhood trauma, determine what you
are like in the present. Adler sees motivation as a matter of moving towards the
future, rather than being driven, mechanistically, by the past. We are drawn
towards our goals, our purposes, our ideals. This is called teleology.
Moving things from the past into the future has some dramatic effects. Since the
future is not here yet, a teleological approach to motivation takes the
necessity out of things. In a traditional mechanistic approach, cause leads to
effect: If a, b, and c happen, then x, y, and z must, of necessity, happen. But
you don't have to reach your goals or meet your ideals, and they can change
along the way. Teleology acknowledges that life is hard and uncertain, but it
always has room for change!
Another major influence on Adler's thinking was the philosopher Hans Vaihinger,
who wrote a book called The Philosophy of "As If." Vaihinger believed that
ultimate truth would always be beyond us, but that, for practical purposes, we
need to create partial truths. His main interest was science, so he gave as
examples such partial truths as protons an electrons, waves of light, gravity as
distortion of space, and so on. Contrary to what many of us non-scientists tend
to assume, these are not things that anyone has seen or proven to exist: They
are useful constructs. They work for the moment, let us do science, and
hopefully will lead to better, more useful constructs. We use them "as if" they
were true. He called these partial truths fictions.
Vaihinger, and Adler, pointed out that we use these fictions in day to day
living as well. We behave as if we knew the world would be here tomorrow, as if
we were sure what good and bad are all about, as if everything we see is as we
see it, and so on. Adler called this fictional finalism. You can understand the
phrase most easily if you think about an example: Many people behave as if there
were a heaven or a hell in their personal future. Of course, there may be a
heaven or a hell, but most of us don't think of this as a proven fact. That
makes it a "fiction" in Vaihinger's and Adler's sense of the word. And finalism
refers to the teleology of it: The fiction lies in the future, and yet
influences our behavior today.
Adler added that, at the center of each of our lifestyles, there sits one of
these fictions, an important one about who we are and where we are going.
Social interest
Second in importance only to striving for perfection is the idea of social
interest or social feeling (originally called Gemeinschaftsgefuhl or "community
feeling"). In keeping with his holism, it is easy to see that anyone "striving
for perfection" can hardly do so without considering his or her social
environment. As social animals, we simply don't exist, much less thrive, without
others, and even the most resolute people-hater forms that hatred in a social
context!
Adler felt that social concern was not simply inborn, nor just learned, but a
combination of both: It is based on an innate disposition, but it has to be
nurtured to survive. That it is to some extent innate is shown by the way babies
and small children often show sympathy for others without having been taught to
do so. Notice how, when one baby in a nursery begins to cry, they all begin to
cry. Or how, when we walk into a room where people are laughing, we ourselves
begin to smile.
And yet, right along with the examples of how generous little children can be to
others, we have examples of how selfish and cruel they can be. Although we
instinctively seem to know that what hurts him can hurt me, and vice versa, we
also instinctively seem to know that, if we have to choose between it hurting
him and it hurting me, we'll take "hurting him" every time! So the tendency to
empathize must be supported by parents and the culture at large. Even if we
disregard the possibilities of conflict between my needs and yours, empathy
involves feeling the pain of others, an in a hard world, that can quickly become
overwhelming. Much easier to just "toughen up" and ignore that unpleasant
empathy -- unless society steps in on empathy's behalf!
One misunderstanding Adler wanted to avoid was the idea that social interest was
somehow another version of extraversion. Americans in particular tend to see
social concern as a matter of being open and friendly and slapping people on the
back and calling them by their first names. Some people may indeed express their
social concern this way; But other people just use that kind of behavior to
further their own ends. Adler meant social concern or feeling not in terms of
particular social behaviors, but in the much broader sense of caring for family,
for community, for society, for humanity, even for life. Social concern is a
matter of being useful to others.
On the other hand, a lack of social concern is, for Adler, the very definition
of mental ill-health: All failures -- neurotics, psychotics, criminals,
drunkards, problem children, suicides, perverts, and prostitutes -- are failures
because they are lacking in social interest.... Their goal of success is a goal
of personal superiority, and their triumphs have meaning only to themselves.
Inferiority
Here we are, all of us, "pulled" towards fulfillment, perfection,
self-actualization. And yet some of us -- the failures -- end up terribly
unfulfilled, baldly imperfect, and far from self-actualized. And all because we
lack social interest, or, to put it in the positive form, because we are too
self-interested. So what makes so many of us self-interested?
Adler says it's a matter of being overwhelmed by our inferiority. If you are
moving along, doing well, feeling competent, you can afford to think of others.
If you are not, if life is getting the best of you, then your attentions become
increasingly focussed on yourself.
Obviously, everyone suffers from inferiority in one form or another. For
example, Adler began his theoretical work considering organ inferiority, that
is, the fact that each of us has weaker, as well as stronger, parts of our
anatomy or physiology. Some of us are born with heart murmurs, or develop heart
problems early in life; Some have weak lungs, or kidneys, or early liver
problems; Some of us stutter or lisp; Some have diabetes, or asthma, or polio;
Some have weak eyes, or poor hearing, or a poor musculature; Some of us have
innate tendencies to being heavy, others to being skinny; Some of us are
retarded, some of us are deformed; Some of us are terribly tall or terribly
short; And so on and so on.
Adler noted that many people respond to these organic inferiorities with
compensation. They make up for their deficiencies in some way: The inferior
organ can be strengthened and even become stronger than it is in others; Or
other organs can be overdeveloped to take up the slack; Or the person can
psychologically compensate for the organic problem by developing certain skills
or even certain personality styles. There are, as you well know, many examples
of people who overcame great physical odds to become what those who are better
endowed physically wouldn't even dream of!
Sadly, there are also many people who cannot handle their difficulties, and live
lives of quiet despair. I would guess that our optimistic, up-beat society
serious underestimates their numbers.
But Adler soon saw that this is only part of the picture. Even more people have
psychological inferiorities. Some of as are told that we are dumb, or ugly, or
weak. Some of us come to believe that we are just plain no good. In school, we
are tested over and over, and given grades that tell us we aren't as good as the
next person. Or we are demeaned for our pimples or our bad posture and find
ourselves without friends or dates. Or we are forced into basketball games,
where we wait to see which team will be stuck with us. In these examples, it's
not a matter of true organic inferiority -- we are not really retarded or
deformed or weak -- but we learn to believe that we are. Again, some compensate
by becoming good at what we feel inferior about. More compensate by becoming
good at something else, but otherwise retaining our sense of inferiority. And
some just never develop any self esteem at all.
If the preceding hasn't hit you personally yet, Adler also noted an even more
general form of inferiority: The natural inferiority of children. all children
are, by nature, smaller, weaker, less socially and intellectually competent,
than the adults around them. Adler suggested that, if we look at children's
games, toys, and fantasies, they tend to have one thing in common: The desire to
grow up, to be big, to be an adult. This kind of compensation is really
identical with striving for perfection! Many children, however, are left with
the feeling that other people will always be better than they are.
If you are overwhelmed by the forces of inferiority -- whether it is your body
hurting, the people around you holding you in contempt, or just the general
difficulties of growing up -- you develop an inferiority complex. Looking back
on my own childhood, I can see several sources for later inferiority complexes:
Physically, I've tended to be heavy, with some real "fat boy" stages along the
way; Also, because I was born in Holland, I didn't grow up with the skills of
baseball, football, and basketball in my genes; Finally, my artistically
talented parents often left me -- unintentionally -- with the feeling that I'd
never be as good as they were. So, as I grew up, I became shy and withdrawn, and
concentrated on the only thing I was good at, school. It took a long time for me
to realize my self-worth.
If you weren't "super-nerd," you may have had one of the most common inferiority
complexes I've come across: "Math phobia!" Perhaps it started because you could
never remember what seven times eight was. Every year, there was some topic you
never quite got the hang of. Every year, you fell a little further behind. And
then you hit the crisis point: Algebra. How could you be expected to know what
"x" is when you still didn't know what seven times eight was?
Many, many people truly believe that they are not meant to do math, that they
are missing that piece of their brains or something. I'd like to tell you here
and now that anyone can do math, if they are taught properly and when they are
really ready. That aside, you've got to wonder how many people have given up
being scientists, teachers, business people, or even going to college, because
of this inferiority complex.
But the inferiority complex is not just a little problem, it's a neurosis,
meaning it's a life-size problem. You become shy and timid, insecure,
indecisive, cowardly, submissive, compliant, and so on. You begin to rely on
people to carry you along, even manipulating them into supporting you: "You
think I'm smart / pretty / strong / sexy / good, don't you?" Eventually, you
become a drain on them, and you may find yourself by yourself. Nobody can take
all that self-centered whining for long!
There is another way in which people respond to inferiority besides compensation
and the inferiority complex: You can also develop a superiority complex. The
superiority complex involves covering up your inferiority by pretending to be
superior. If you feel small, one way to feel big is to make everyone else feel
even smaller! Bullies, braggarts, and petty dictators everywhere are the prime
example. More subtle examples are the people who are given to attention-getting
dramatics, the ones who feel powerful when they commit crimes, and the ones who
put others down for their gender, race, ethnic origins, religious beliefs,
sexual orientation, weight, height, etc. etc. Even more subtle still are the
people who hide their feelings of worthlessness in the delusions of power
afforded by alcohol and drugs.
Psychological types
Although all neurosis is, for Adler, a matter of insufficient social interest,
he did note that three types could be distinguished based on the different
levels of energy they involved:
The first is the ruling type. They are, from childhood on, characterized by a
tendency to be rather aggressive and dominant over others. Their energy -- the
strength of their striving after personal power -- is so great that they tend to
push over anything or anybody who gets in their way. The most energetic of them
are bullies and sadists; somewhat less energetic ones hurt others by hurting
themselves, and include alcoholics, drug addicts, and suicides.
The second is the leaning type. They are sensitive people who have developed a
shell around themselves which protects them, but they must rely on others to
carry them through life's difficulties. They have low energy levels and so
become dependent. When overwhelmed, they develop what we typically think of as
neurotic symptoms: phobias, obsessions and compulsions, general anxiety,
hysteria, amnesias, and so on, depending on individual details of their
lifestyle.
The third type is the avoiding type. These have the lowest levels of energy and
only survive by essentially avoiding life -- especially other people. When
pushed to the limits, they tend to become psychotic, retreating finally into
their own personal worlds.
There is a fourth type as well: the socially useful type. This is the healthy
person, one who has both social interest and energy. Note that without energy,
you can't really have social interest, since you wouldn't be able to actually do
anything for anyone!
Adler noted that his four types looked very much like the four types proposed by
the ancient Greeks. They, too, noticed that some people are always sad, others
always angry, and so on. But they attributed these temperaments (from the same
root as temperature) to the relative presence of four bodily fluids called
humors.
If you had too much yellow bile, you would be choleric (hot and dry) and angry
all the time. The choleric is, roughly, the ruling type.
If you had too much phlegm, you would be phlegmatic (cold and wet) and be
sluggish. This is roughly the leaning type.
If you had too much black bile -- and we don't know what the Greeks were
referring to here -- you would be melancholy (cold and dry) and tend to be sad
constantly. This is roughly the avoiding type.
And, if you had a lot of blood relative to the other humors, you be in a good
humor, sanguine (warm and moist). This naturally cheerful and friendly person
represents the socially useful type.
One word of warning about Adler's types: Adler believed very strongly that each
person is a unique individual with his or her own unique lifestyle. The idea of
types is, for him, only a heuristic device, meaning a useful fiction, not an
absolute reality!
Childhood
Adler, like Freud, saw personality or lifestyle as something established quite
early in life. In fact, the prototype of your lifestyle tends to be fixed by
about five years old. New experiences, rather than change that prototype, tend
to be interpreted in terms of the prototype, "force fit," in other words, into
preconceived notions, just like new acquaintances tend to get "force fit" into
our stereotypes.
Adler felt that there were three basic childhood situations that most contribute
to a faulty lifestyle. The first is one we've spoken of several times: organ
inferiorities, as well as early childhood diseases. They are what he called
"overburdened," and if someone doesn't come along to draw their attention to
others, they will remain focussed on themselves. Most will go through life with
a strong sense of inferiority; A few will overcompensate with a superiority
complex. Only with the encouragement of loved ones will some truly compensate.
The second is pampering. Many children are taught, by the actions of others,
that they can take without giving. Their wishes are everyone else's commands.
This may sound like a wonderful situation, until you realize that the pampered
child fails in two ways: First, he doesn't learn to do for himself, and
discovers later that he is truly inferior; And secondly, he doesn't learn any
other way to deal with others than the giving of commands. And society responds
to pampered people in only one way: hatred.
The third is neglect. A child who is neglected or abused learns what the
pampered child learns, but learns it in a far more direct manner: They learn
inferiority because they are told and shown every day tat they are of no value;
They learn selfishness because they are taught to trust no one. If you haven't
known love, you don't develop a capacity for it later. We should note that the
neglected child includes not only orphans and the victims of abuse, but the
children whose parents are never there, and the ones raised in a rigid,
authoritarian manner.
Birth order
Adler must be credited as the first theorist to include not only a child's
mother and father and other adults as early influence on the child, but the
child's brothers and sisters as well. His consideration of the effects of
siblings and the order in which they were born is probably what Adler is
best-known for. I have to warn you, though, that Adler considered birth-order
another one of those heuristic ideas -- useful fictions -- that contribute to
understanding people, but must be not be taken too seriously.
The only child is more likely than others to be pampered, with all the ill
results we've discussed. After all, the parents of the only child have put all
their eggs in one basket, so to speak, and are more likely to take special care
-- sometimes anxiety-filled care -- of their pride and joy. If the parents are
abusive, on the other hand, the only child will have to bear that abuse alone.
The first child begins life as an only child, with all the attention to him- or
herself. Sadly, just as things are getting comfortable, the second child arrives
and "dethrones" the first. At first, the child may battle for his or her lost
position. He or she might try acting like the baby -- after all, it seems to
work for the baby! -- only to be rebuffed and told to grow up. Some become
disobedient and rebellious, others sullen and withdrawn. Adler believes that
first children are more likely than nay other to become problem children. More
positively, first children are often precocious. They tend to be relatively
solitary and more conservative than the other children in the family.
The second child is in a very different situation: He or she has the first child
as a sort of "pace-setter," and tends to become quite competitive, constantly
trying to surpass the older child. They often succeed, but many feel as if the
race is never done, and they tend to dream of constant running without getting
anywhere. Other "middle" children will tend to be similar to the second child,
although each may focus on a different "competitor."
The youngest child is likely to be the most pampered in a family with more than
one child. After all, he or she is the only one who is never dethroned! And so
youngest children are the second most likely source of problem children, just
behind first children. On the other hand, the youngest may also feel incredible
inferiority, with everyone older and "therefore" superior. But, with all those
"pace-setters" ahead, the youngest can also be driven to exceed all of them.
Who is a first, second, or youngest child isn't as obvious as it might seem. If
there is a long stretch between children, they may not see themselves and each
other the same way as if they were closer together. There are eight years
between my first and second daughter and three between the second and the third:
That would make my first daughter an only child, my second a first child, and my
third the second and youngest! And if some of the children are boys and some
girls, it makes a difference as well. A second child who is a girl might not
take her older brother as someone to compete with; A boy in a family of girls
may feel more like the only child; And so on. As with everything in Adler's
system, birth order is to be understood in the context of the individual's own
special circumstances.
Diagnosis
In order to help you to discover the "fictions" your lifestyle is based upon,
Adler would look at a great variety of things -- your birth-order position, for
example. First, he might examine you and your medical history for any possible
organic roots to your problem. A serious illness, for example, may have side
effects that closely resemble neurotic and psychotic symptoms.
In your very first session with you, he might ask for your earliest childhood
memory. He is not so much looking for the truth here as for an indication of
that early prototype of your present lifestyle. If your earliest memory involves
security and a great deal of attention, that might indicate pampering; If you
recall some aggressive competition with your older brother, that might suggest
the strong strivings of a second child and the "ruling" type of personality; If
your memory involves neglect and hiding under the sink, it might mean severe
inferiority and avoidance; And so on.
He might also ask about any childhood problems you may have had: Bad habits
involving eating or the bathroom might indicate ways in which you controlled
your parents; Fears, such as a fear of the dark or of being left alone, might
suggest pampering; Stuttering is likely to mean that speech was associated with
anxiety; Overt aggression and stealing may be signs of a superiority complex;
Daydreaming, isolation, laziness, and lying may be various ways of avoiding
facing one's inferiorities.
Like Freud and Jung, dreams (and daydreams) were important to Adler. He took a
more direct approach to them, though: Dreams are an expression of your style of
life and, far from contradicting your daytime feelings, are unified with your
conscious life. Usually, they reflect the goals you have and the problems you
face in reaching them. If you can't remember any dreams, Adler isn't put off: Go
ahead and fantasize right then and there. Your fantasies will reflect your
lifestyle just as well.
Adler would also pay attention to how you express yourself: Your posture, the
way you shake hands, the gestures you use, how you move, your "body language,"
as we say today. He notes that pampered people often lean against something!
Even your sleep postures may contribute some insight: A person who sleeps in the
fetal position with the covers over his or her head is clearly different from
one who sprawls over the entire bed completely uncovered!
He would also want to know the exogenous factors, the events that triggered the
symptoms that concern you. He gives a number of common triggers: Sexual
problems, like uncertainty, guilt, the first time, impotence, and so on; The
problems women face, such as pregnancy and childbirth and he onset and end of
menstruation; Your love life, dating, engagement, marriage, and divorce; Your
work life, including school, exams, career decisions, and the job itself; And
mortal danger or the loss of a loved one.
Last, and not least, Adler was open to the less rational and scientific, more
art-like side of diagnosis: He suggested we not ignore empathy, intuition, and
just plain guess-work!
Therapy
There are considerable differences between Adler's therapy and Freud's: First,
Adler preferred to have everyone sitting up and talking face to face. Further,
he went to great lengths to avoid appearing too authoritarian. In fact, he
advised that the therapist never allow the patient to force him into the role of
an authoritarian figure, because that allows the patient to play some of the
same games he or she is likely to have played many times before: The patient may
set you up as a savior, only to attack you when you inevitably reveal your
humanness. By pulling you down, they feel as if they are raising themselves,
with their neurotic lifestyles, up.
This is essentially the explanation Adler gave for resistance: When a patient
forgets appointments, comes in late, demands special favors, or generally
becomes stubborn and uncooperative, it is not, as Freud thought, a matter of
repression. Rather, resistance is just a sign of the patient's lack of courage
to give up their neurotic lifestyle.
The patient must come to understand the nature of his or her lifestyle and its
roots in self-centered fictions. This understanding or insight cannot be forced:
If you just tell someone "look, here is your problem!" he or she will only pull
away from you and look for ways of bolstering their present fictions. Instead, A
patient must be brought into such a state of feeling that he likes to listen,
and wants to understand. Only then can he be influenced to live what he has
understood. (Ansbacher and Ansbacher, 1956, p. 335.) It is the patient, not the
therapist, who is ultimately responsible for curing him- or herself.
Finally, the therapist must encourage the patient, which means awakening his or
her social interest, and the energy that goes with it. By developing a genuine
human relationship with the patient, the therapist provides the basic form of
social interest, which the patient can then transfer to others.



Discussion
Although Adler's theory may be less interesting than Freud's, with its
sexuality, or Jung's, with its mythology, it has probably struck you as the most
common-sensical of the three. Students generally like Adler and his theory. In
fact, quite a few personality theorists like him, too. Maslow, for example, once
said that, the older he gets, the more right Adler seems. If you have some
knowledge of Carl Rogers' brand of therapy, you may have noticed how similar it
is to Adler's. And a number of students of personality theories have noted that
the theorists called Neo-Freudians -- Horney, Fromm, and Sullivan -- should
really have been called Neo-Adlerians.
And so the "positives" of Adler's theory don't really need to be listed: His
clear descriptions of people's complaints, his straight-forward and common-sense
interpretations of their problems, his simple theoretical structure, his trust
and even affection for the common person, all make his theory both comfortable
and highly influential.
Problems
Criticisms of Adler tend to involve the issue of whether or not, or to what
degree, his theory is scientific. The mainstream of psychology today is
experimentally oriented, which means, among other things, that the concepts a
theory uses must be measurable and manipulable. This in turn means that an
experimental orientation prefers physical or behavioral variables. Adler, as you
saw, uses basic concepts that are far from physical and behavioral: Striving for
perfection? How do you measure that? Or compensation? Or feelings of
inferiority? Or social interest? The experimental method also makes a basic
assumption: That all things operate in terms of cause and effect. Adler would
certainly agree that physical things do so, but he would adamantly deny that
people do! Instead, he takes the teleological route, that people are
"determined" by their ideals, goals, values, "final fictions." Teleology takes
the necessity out of things: A person doesn't have to respond a certain way to a
certain circumstance; A person has choices to make; A person creates his or her
own personality or lifestyle. From the experimental perspective, these things
are illusions that a scientist, even a personality theorist, dare not give in
to.
Even if you are open to the teleological approach, though, there are criticisms
you can make regarding how scientific Adler's theory is: Many of the details of
his theory are too anecdotal, that is, are true in particular cases, but don't
necessarily have the generality Adler seems to claim for them. A first child
(even broadly defined) doesn't necessarily feel dethroned, nor a second child
necessarily feel competitive, for example.
Adler could, however, respond to these criticisms very easily: First, didn't we
just finish saying that, if you accept teleology, nothing about human
personality is necessary. And secondly, didn't he go to great lengths to explain
his ideas about fictional finalism? All of his concepts are useful constructs,
not absolute truths, and science is just a matter of creating increasingly
useful constructs. So if you have better ideas, let's hear them!



Readings
If you are interested in learning more about Alfred Adler's theory, go straight
to Ansbacher and Ansbacher's The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. They
take selections from his writings, organize them, and add running commentary. It
introduces all of his ideas in a very readable fashion. His own books include
Understanding Human Nature, Problems of Neurosis, The Practice and Theory of
Individual Psychology, and Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind.
You can find early and recent work by Adler and others in English in The
International Journal of Individual Psychology.



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