Alfred Adler

Psychiatrist

• Born: February 7, 1870
• Birthplace: Penzing, Austria
• Died: May 28, 1937
• Place of death: Aberdeen, Scotland

Austrian psychiatrist

Adler, the founder of individual psychology, introduced such fundamental mental-health concepts as “inferiority feeling,” “lifestyle,” “striving for superiority,” and “social interest.” The first to occupy a chair of medical psychology in the United States, Adler pioneered the use of psychiatry in both social work and early childhood education.

Areas of achievement Psychiatry and psychology, medicine

Early Life

Alfred Adler (AD-lur) was the second of seven children of Leopold Adler, a Jewish Hungarian grain merchant from the Burgenland, and his wife, a native of Moravia. Though reared on a farm, Adler was exposed to the rich cultural life of Vienna’s golden age. The death of a younger brother and his own bout with pneumonia at the age of five caused Adler to resolve to study medicine. He received his medical degree in 1895 from the University of Vienna. Much later, Adler would be awarded his Ph.D. from the Long Island College of Medicine in New York. In 1895, Adler married Raissa Timofejewna Epstein, a Moscow-born student. Together they had three daughters and a son. Two of his children, Kurt and Alexandra, later took up the practice of psychiatry. By 1897, Adler was practicing general medicine in Vienna, specializing in ophthalmology. His zeal for reform was indicated in articles in various socialist newspapers.

Though Adler’s first professional monograph had been a study of the health of tailors, by 1900 he had become interested in neurology and in psychopathological symptoms. His review in 1902 of Sigmund Freud’s book on dream interpretation led to an invitation to join the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Though closely associated with Freud (they attended the first International Congress on Psychoanalysis together in 1908), Adler insisted that he was neither Freud’s disciple nor his student. This fact was revealed in 1907 in his Studie über Minderwertigkeit von Organen (Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation, 1917). In 1911, Adler and nine others resigned from Freud’s circle to found the Society for Free Psychoanalysis. Freud then launched what has been called an “almost scurrilous attack” on Adler. For his part, Adler acknowledged his respect for Freud but explained his major intellectual disagreements with him. Adler denied the dominance of the biological over the psychological in human behavior, refusing to see sex as the primary determinant of personality. Adler stressed freedom, not determinism, in conduct, believing that Freud compared humans to animals or machines, forgetting to emphasize what makes them unique, namely, concepts and values. Adler resolved to champion a holistic, humanistic psychology. By 1912, his Über den nervösen Charakter (The Neurotic Constitution, 1917) indicated the directions being taken by Adlerian or individual psychology.

During World War I, Adler served in the Austro-Hungarian army as a military doctor on the Russian front at Kraków and Brunn. Returning from three years in the war, Adler established what was probably the world’s first child-guidance clinic in Vienna in 1919. Soon thirty such centers were operating in Vienna, Munich, and Berlin. Adler emerged as the first psychiatrist to apply mental hygiene in the schools, lecturing meanwhile at the Pedagogical Institute. A pathfinder of family therapy or community psychiatry, Adler involved students, teachers, and parents in treatment. Innovative counseling was done before a restricted audience as a teaching device. By 1926, Adler was much in demand as a lecturer in Europe and North America, and his work was commanding wide recognition.

Life’s Work

Adler’s life’s work was focused on four areas. Adler was preeminently an educator. In 1926, he became a visiting professor at Columbia University, and in 1932 he became the first professor of medical psychology in the United States, teaching at the Long Island College of Medicine in New York. By then his visits to Vienna were seasonal and occasional, terminating after the rise of fascism in Austria and Germany and the Nazi suppression of his clinics. Adler’s lectures were copied and published as Menschenkenntnis (1927; Understanding Human Nature, 1918), a text that is still a classic.

Second, Adler was widely read as an author. Increasingly his works were directed toward the general public, such as What Life Should Mean to You (1931) and Der Sinn des Lebens (1933; Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind, 1939). Other volumes included The Case of Miss R (1929), Problems of Neurosis (1929), The Case of Miss A (1931), and The Pattern of Life (1930). After his death, Adler’s papers were edited by Heinz L. and Rowena R. Ansbacher as Superiority and Social Interest (1964) and The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler (1956).

Third, Adler was much sought as a therapist. For Adler, the psychiatrist did not treat mental disease. Rather, he discovered the error in the patient’s way of life and then led him or her toward greater maturity. Therapy was a kind of teaching, with the emphasis on health, not sickness, and on the client’s total network of relationships. Adler wanted to know the patient not simply “in depth but in context.” The therapist was to be an enabler, helping the patient “see the power of self-determination” and “command the courage” to alter his or her entire world and his or her interpretation of it. In analysis, Adler relied on such diagnostic tools as dream interpretation, the meaning of early childhood recollections, and the role of birth order. Not only was therapy social as well as personal, but also it was to be preventive as well as restorative. Adler established clinics to help avoid such life failures as neurosis and psychosis. Adler was one of the first psychiatrists to apply his therapeutic techniques to the treatment of criminals, to the practice of social work, and to the education of American children.

Finally, Adler was in demand as a lecturer. The disarming gentleness that won for him acceptance from patients made him a winsome communicator to audiences. Soon as facile in English as his native German, Adler, a tenor, spoke slowly with occasional silences, pauses that were said to add to the profundity of his remarks. His was a soft voice, but one that was conciliatory and persuading in tone. His piercing eyes and friendly manner evoked a warm response. Though described as stocky and pudgy, Adler conveyed a feeling of intensity and energy with his swift movements and quickness of thought. His broad interests, cinema, cafés, music (he had a fine singing voice), drama, and hiking, established many points of contact with his auditors. It was while on a lecture tour that Adler died at age sixty-seven of a heart attack on Union Street, Aberdeen, Scotland, on May 28, 1937. His daughter, Alexandra, then a research fellow in neurology, completed the tour. Adler’s teaching was institutionalized by a series of five international congresses he directed between 1922 and 1930 and since his death by the International Association of Individual Psychology.

Adler believed that the principal human motive was a striving for perfection. He argued in 1907 in Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation that physical disability or inadequacy in the child may result in psychical compensation. Overcompensation can occur. Ludwig van Beethoven, who was losing his hearing, became a master musician. Demosthenes, a stutterer, became a compelling orator. Compensation, however, can produce not only genius but also neurotic and psychotic adaptations to life. In The Neurotic Constitution, Adler admitted that inferiority feeling was a condition common to all children. Children respond with an aggression drive (or, later, a striving for superiority). Adler spoke of a masculine protest (found in both males and females), which is any “attempt to overcome socially conditioned feelings of weakness” (such weaknesses being perceived as feminine).

Behavior, Adler taught, is goal oriented. For that reason, his individual psychology is teleological, not causal, as was Freud’s. Adler concentrated on the consequences as much as the antecedents of actions. By the age of four or five, Adler insisted, the child has set goals for himself. These goals grow out of the self-image the child has evolved, as well as his or her opinion of the world. The self is a product not only of objective or external factors, such as birth order, but also of subjective or internal factors, such as interpretation and opinion. A person’s creative power resides in “the ability to choose between various ways of reacting to a situation.” As a person seeks maturity and wholeness, he or she selects goals that promise fulfillment and the means by which to attain them. A lifestyle becomes apparent.

Life, for Adler, consisted in meeting three main problems or fulfilling three main tasks that are “inseparably tied up with the logic of man’s communal life.” These tasks are occupational, associational, and sexual. A choice of work or vocation reveals the primary influences present in the child before the age of thirteen. Association with others, the development of a significant and healthy system of interpersonal relationships, is crucial. Love and marriage, or sex, is the most important of those associations, for from this relationship comes the next generation.

Failures in life, that is, neurotics (mildly dysfunctional) and psychotics (severely dysfunctional), are those who do not develop social interest. Self-bound, they are crippled with intense inferiority feelings and become obsessed with themselves. Withdrawal from life may result because of a belief that one is unable to compete. Another unhealthy adaptation is the evolving of a superiority that is useful only to themselves. Normality or health for Adler meant moving toward constructive social interest, where the person functions creatively for the welfare of all.

Adler’s wide range of activities and his inclusive and practical teachings caused him to become a major new influence in psychiatry in the years following World War I. That impact has been a constant through the subsequent decades.

Significance

Through a creative career on two continents as an educator, author, therapist, and lecturer, Adler indicated new directions for the infant science of psychiatry. A contemporary of such physicians of the mind as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in Europe and William James in the United States, Adler became one of the founders of the science of mental health. A persuasive and popular communicator, Adler was able to involve the general public in the application of the findings of psychiatry. As a result, what once had been seen as an arcane field provided conversation for cocktail parties. Capitalizing on this widespread public interest, Adler pioneered the application of mental-health techniques to pedagogy, child psychology, school reform, and the teaching and training of an entire generation of educators.

Social work in the United States is also greatly indebted to the insights of Adler, yet it is in the field of psychotherapy that he has had his most lasting influence. Subsequent practitioners of the art of healing the mind, as diverse as Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, Franz Alexander, and Ian Suttie, have been assisted by the teachings of Adler. Adler remains one of the giants of medicine and psychiatry and of twentieth century creative thought.

Bibliography

Adler, Alfred. The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. Edited by Heinz L. Ansbacher and Rowena R. Ansbacher. New York: Grove Press, 1956. An excellent anthology of materials by Adler, culled from lectures by two of his disciples. The extracts are accompanied by a complete bibliography and critical annotations of the essays.

Bottome, Phyllis. Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939. 3d ed. London: Faber & Faber, 1957. The author’s husband was Adler’s secretary. For that reason, the information offered in this 315-page biography rests on eyewitness observation and access to primary papers. Bottome believed Adler to be “at once the easiest of men to know and the most difficult, the frankest and the most subtle, the most conciliatory and the most ruthless.”

Dreikurs, Rudolf. Fundamentals of Adlerian Psychology. New York: Greenberg, 1950. This concise study initially appeared in 1933. Originally written in German, it dates from the decade of Adler’s death and reflects his later thinking. It should be supplemented by more recent works.

Grey, Loren. Alfred Adler, the Forgotten Prophet: A Vision for the Twenty-first Century. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998. A relatively brief overview of Adler’s life and his ideas about psychotheraphy.

Orgler, Hertha. Alfred Adler, the Man and His Work: Triumph Over the Inferiority Complex. 3d rev. ed. London: G. W. Daniel, 1963. This classic study, first published in 1939, is a must for beginning research. Drawing on both contemporary and second-generation opinion of Adler and individual psychology, Orgler’s book attempts to view the subject in the light of his own growth toward wholeness.

Rallner, Joseph. Alfred Adler. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983. This work by a German scholar is concise yet comprehensive in its treatment.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: 1904: Freud Advances the Psychoanalytic Method; 1930’s: Jung Develops Analytical Psychology.