Primer of Adlerian Psychology

The Analytic - Behavioural - Cognitive Psychology of Alfred Adler

Harold Mosak, Michael Maniacci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135057817
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

A Primer of Adlerian Psychology offers an accessible, yet very learned, introduction to Adlerian Psychology. Also known as Individual Psychology, the approach stresses the unity of the individual, the subjective choices he or she makes and the goals the individual works towards he or she moves through life. Therapists can apply this theory in a variety of settings with populations of all ages, making it a highly practical and valuable approach. Written by two scholars with extensive knowledge and experience in this school of thought, this book covers the basic tenets of Individual Psychology geared toward those students and clinicians who are yet unfamiliar with Adler's work.

Alfred Adler and Adlerian Psychology: An Overview

It is one of the peculiar ironies of history that there are no limits to the misunderstanding and distortion of theories….

Erich Fromm (1961)

Alfred Adler: A Biographical Sketch

Adler was the second of six children born to a Jewish family on February 7, 1870. He was a sickly child who had rickets and suffered from spasms of the glottis. At the age of 3 years, his younger brother died in bed next to him (Mosak & Kopp, 1973). A year later, he contracted pneumonia and became seriously ill. Later, as an adult, he remembered the physician saying at that time to his father, “Your boy is lost” (Orgler, 1939/ 1963, p. 16). As if these experiences were not enough to impress him, he was twice run over in the streets. Though he reported no memory for how these incidents happened, he did remember recovering consciousness on the family sofa. Adler became very aware of death and vowed to become a physician in order to overcome it (Adler, 1947).

Adler was raised on the outskirts of the intellectual capital of his day, Vienna. The area in which he lived was not predominantly Jewish, and he and his family were minority-group members.

These issues of belonging, inferiority, and weakness had a large influence upon the young Adler. He was a poor student with bad eyesight who was physically clumsy and felt uncoordinated, primarily because of his numerous physical ailments. His mathematics teacher recommended to his father that Adler leave school and apprentice himself as a shoemaker. Adler's father objected, and Adler embarked upon bettering his academic skills. Within a relatively short time, he became the best math student in the class. Adler became embroiled in a conflict with a classmate, and a fight broke out. Adler struck the boy, and hurt him. He vowed not to fight again.

Adler studied medicine at the University of Vienna and in 1895 graduated with his medical degree and a specialization in ophthalmology.¹ He became interested in politics and began attending meetings of the rising socialist movement. Through these meetings, he met Raissa Timo-feyewna Epstein, and they were married in 1897. She was a socialist and a feminist (R. Adler, 1899) who continued her active interest in political affairs throughout their marriage (Hoffman, 1994).

He started his private practice. His practice soon switched to internal medicine, and he observed that many of the patients who sought his services suffered from diseases that traced their origin to the social situations in which they lived and worked. As Ansbacher (1992a, b) notes, Adler's practice was located in an area that exposed him to lower socioeconomic classes, and his first publication was on the health of tailors (Adler, 1898). In it, Adler noted how the social conditions in which people worked and lived greatly influenced the diseases and disease processes that affected them. This seems to have been historically the first essay into community outreach (Papanek, 1965a). Along a similar line, Adler often treated the performers from the local circus, what used to be referred to as the “sideshow freaks,” and Adler was greatly impressed by how their physical abnormalities influenced their choice of vocation and how their bodies appeared to “compensate” for such abnormalities.

Adler and Freud: Adler as a Psychoanalyst

Freud's life and work has been documented and detailed in numerous biographies, for example by Jones (1953, 1955, 1957) and Stone (1971). It is also referred to by Ellenberger (1970).

Freud was an eldest son of an upperclass Jewish family. He was brilliant, and as Mosak and Kopp (1973) note, provocative in personality. An early recollection of his suggests long self-training in this direction. At age 7 or 8 years, “Freud recalls having urinated [deliberately] in his parents' bedroom and being reprimanded by his lather, who said, ‘That boy will never amount to anything’“ (Jones, 1953, p. 16; Mosak & Kopp, 1973).

He was unalraid of being negatively perceived. Freud wanted to be a scientist, and his intellectual “forefathers” were men who were bound to the scientific tradition.

Freud (1900/1965) published his seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams, in 1899 (though the work carried the year 1900, it was published in the Winter of 1899 but postdated). As the editor of the English translation, Strachey notes in the introduction, it sold poorly (only 351 copies in the first 6 years) and was roundly criticized. Freud fell into a depression shortly after its publication and general rejection. It was into this atmosphere Adler stepped.

Legend has it that amidst all the criticism and negativity surrounding The interpretation of Dreams, Adler published a vigorous defense of it in a local paper; this “paper” has never been found. Freud, reportedly, was grateful to have found someone who was willing to openly defend his position and, in 1902, invited Adler to meet with him on a Wednesday evening, to discuss these and similar issues. The Wednesday Night Meetings, as they became known, led to the development of the Psychoanalytic Society. Adler became its first president, though he was 14 years younger than Freud. Adler (1931/ 1964b), even years after their split, had this to say about those early “meetings” and Freud's initial attempts to understand human nature:

Despite the many scientific contrasts between Freud and myself, I have always been willing to recognize that he has clarified much through his endeavors; especially, he has severely shaken the position of positivistically [materialistisch] oriented neurology and opened a wide door to psychology as an auxiliary science to medicine. This is his chief merit, next to his detective art of guessing, (pp. 217–218)

In two footnotes to that paper, Adler continues to note that:

I remember very well when as a young student and medical man 1 was very worried about and discontented with the state of psychiatry and tried to discover other ways, and found Freud was courageous enough, actually to go another way to explore the importance of psychological reasons for physical disturbances and for neuroses, (p. 218)

and that

A psychological system has an inseparable connection with the life philosophy of its formulator. As soon as he offers his system to the world, it appeals to individuals, both laymen and scientists, with a similar trend of mind and provides them with a scientific foundation for an attitude towards life which they had achieved previously, (p. 218)

Adler was not a “disciple” of Freud; he was a collaborator (Ansbacher, 1962; Hoffman, 1994; Maslow, 1962). The comments by Ansbacher and Ansbacher, found inAdler (1956), clarify this position. Adler had his own philosophy and was beginning to develop it before his association with Freud. As Adler astutely noted, the clash between him and Freud had to do with their respective personalities as much as with their respective theories, for their theories were outgrowths of their personalities (Stepansky, 1983). Adler became a “Freudian” and attempted to continue his train of thought within orthodox Freudian guidelines. He found, however, that his fundamental assumptions were different than Freud's, and tensions began to increase between the two men. As Ansbacher and Ansbacher (Adler, 1956, pp. 21–75) detail, even within the Freudian system, Adler originated these concepts within psychoanalysis, and Freud readily adopted them (sometimes, years after having split with Adler):

The confluence of drives (Adler, 1908)

The transformation of a drive into its opposite (Adler, 1908)

The direction of a drive to one's own person (Adler, 1908)

The aggression drive and the relationship of aggression to anxiety (Adler, 1908)

Safeguarding tendencies (defense mechanisms) (Adler, 1912/1983b)

The concept of the “ego-ideal” (Adler, 1912/1983b)

The emphasis upon “ego” psychology (Colby, 1951)

Colby (1951) and Furtmüller (1964) discuss the notes of the meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and the eventual split of the group, with Adler and nine other members resigning their membership and Adler resigning not only his presidency but his position as coeditor of the psychoanalytic journal, in February of 1911.

Adler was a subjectivistic, socially oriented theorist who had a feel for the “common people” (Ansbacher, 1959b), and he placed a great deal of emphasis upon philosophy. He cited, as his principle influences, the works of Kant, Nietzsche, Vaihinger, Goethe, Shakespeare, and the Bible. His early work was concerned with public health, medical and psychological prevention, and social welfare (Ansbacher, 1992b). As he continued his work, he wrote papers on and lectured extensively about:

Children at risk, especially delinquency (Adler, 1930/1963, 1930/1983c, 1935)

Women's rights and the equality of the sexes (Adler, 1978)

Women's rights to abortion (Adler, 1978)

Adult education (Hoffman, 1994)

Teacher training (Adler, 1924a, 1929b)

Community mental health and the establishment of family counseling clinics (Adler, 1929b)

Experimental schools for public students (Birnbaum, 1935; Hoffman, 1994; Spiel, 1956)

Brief psychotherapy (“The Father of Self-Help,” 1995; Maniacci. 1996a)

Family counseling and education (Sherman & Dinkmeyer, 1987)

This work stands in sharp contrast to Freud, who maintained a relatively neutral stance towards many of these issues and never openly addressed most of them. Adler's split with Freud was as much about Adler returning to the doctrines that had preoccupied him prior to his association with the psychoanalytic movement as it was about the theoretical and technical issues he and Freud debated.

The final break with Freud centered around two key issues that are touched on only briefly here—the masculine protest (Adler, 1939; Mosak & Schneider, 1977) and the nature and origin of repression (Adler, 1911, 1956). Adler felt that the “driving force” behind “psychic disturbances” was the “masculine protest.” The masculine protest was the attempt of some people to deal with society's overvaluation of masculinity. Men who subscribed to this overvaluation wanted to be “like a real man” or, in other words, powerful. If they failed to meet this standard, they became discouraged, became resigned, “withdrew,” or over-compensated. Women who similarly overvalued masculinity competed with men, identified with men, overcompensated, became resigned, or “withdrew.” Adler felt that the striving of the disturbed individual was of a socially useless nature, and that this striving “to be above others” had its roots in the prevailing social orientation of the day; that is, masculinity was viewed as dominant, and those who felt “weak, or inferior” viewed themselves as “feminine.”² Adler felt that this was a result of both psychological dynamics taking place within the individuals and the social values of the day. Freud wholeheartedly disagreed and respond...