Alfred Adler
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Alfred Adler (February 7, 1870 – May 28, 1937) was an Austrian medical doctor and psychologist, founder of the school of individual psychology.
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[edit] Education and studies
Born in Rudolfsheim, Vienna, Austria, and raised in Vienna, he was the second of six children. His childhood was difficult and unhappy; he suffered from rickets, a disease that affects the bones, making walking difficult. His mother neglected him after she gave birth to his younger brother. When he was three years old he witnessed his brother die in the bed next to him. Twice while he was a child he was run over in the streets. This was when Adler began to fear death, but later in his life he decided his interest in becoming a doctor came from his near-fatal illness. In school he was an average student. He excelled in math and ended up studying medicine at the Unversity of Vienna. Adler practiced with Freud in Vienna during the 1920s and 1930s, but they didn't associate with each other.
[edit] Early career
Adler was influenced by then mental construct ideas of Hans Vaihinger and developed a theory of organic inferiority and compensation Society of Individual Psychology in 1912.
[edit] Adler's approach to human personality
He wrote a book defining his key ideas in 1912: Über den nervösen Charakter (The Neurotic Character). He argued that human personality could be explained teleologically, separate strands dominated by the guiding purpose of the individual's unconscious self ideal to convert feelings of inferiority to superiority (or rather completeness). The desires of the self ideal were countered by social and ethical demands. If the corrective factors were disregarded and the individual over-compensated, then an inferiority complex would occur, fostering the danger of the individual becoming egocentric, power-hungry and aggressive or worse.
Adler took a holistic approach to human personality. The name of his teaching -"individual psycholgy" was chosen to reflect it. Adler believed that personality can be distinguished into the Getting, Avoiding, Ruling, and Socially Useful types. The Getting or Learning type are those who selfishly take without giving back. These people also tend to be anti-social and have low activity levels. The Avoiding types are those hate being defeated. The may be successful, but have not taken any risks getting there. They are likely to have low social contact in fear of rejection or defeat in any way. The Ruling Dominant type strive for power and are willing to manipulate situations and people, anything to get their way. This type of people are also prone to anti-social behavior. The Social Useful types are those who are very outgoing and very active. They have a lot of social contact and strive to make changes for the good. Although many of these ideas differed from Freud in many ways, he did agree with Freud that early childhood experiences are important to development.
Alfred Adler believed a great deal of the affect that birth order has on an individual. Adler believed that family constellation, where one's position was in birth order, played a crucial part in individual development. From here, Adler developed theories on each child in birth order(oldest, middle, youngest, only, etc.) with a set of different personality traits and characteristics that vary greatly. According to Adler, older children tend to be more intelligent, goal oriented, over achievers, etc. Second children tend to be more competitive and ambitious, as if they are always trying to catch up to the first born. Middle children tend to display characteristics of both younger and older siblings. They are usually more social, having a strong group of friends, creative, and are good mediators. Youngest children are more dependent. Adler recognizes that the youngest child can easily be spoiled, and if so, this could lead to a tendency toward dependency into adulthood.
[edit] On homosexuality
Along with prostitution and criminality, he classified homosexuality among the "failures of life." In 1917, he began his writings on homosexuality with a 52 page brochure and sporadically published more thoughts throughout the rest of his life. The Dutch psychiatrist Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg underlines how Alfred Adler came to his conclusions for, in 1917, Adler believed that he had established a connection between homosexuality and an inferiority complex towards one’s own gender.
[edit] Adler becomes a well known figure in psychiatry
His efforts were halted by World War I, during which he served as a doctor with the Austrian Army. Post-war his influence increased greatly into the 1930s, he established a number of child guidance clinics from 1921 and was a frequent lecturer in Europe and the United States, becoming a visiting professor at Columbia University in 1927. Therapeutically his methods avoided the concentration on adult psyche by attempting to pre-empt the problems in the child by encouraging and promoting social interest and also by avoiding pampering and neglect. In adults the therapy relied on the exclusion of blame or a superior attitude by the practitioner, the reduction of resistance by raising awareness of individual behaviour and the refusal to become adversarial. Common therapeutic tools included the use of humour, historical instances, and paradoxical injunctions. Adler's popularity was related to the comparative optimism and comprehensibility of his ideas compared to those of Freud or Jung. He famously commented, "The test of one's behavior pattern: relationship to society, relationship to one's work, relationship to sex."
[edit] Emigration and early death
In 1932, after most of his Austrian clinics were closed due to his Jewish heritage, Adler left Austria for a professorship at the Long Island College of Medicine. His death from a heart attack in Aberdeen, Scotland during a lecture tour in 1937, was a blow to the influence of his ideas although a number of them were taken up by neo-Freudians.
Nonetheless, there exist presently several schools dedicated to carrying on the work of Alfred Adler such as The Adler School of Professional Psychology which was founded as The Alfred Adler Institute of Chicago by Adler's protégé, Rudolf Dreikurs, and the Alfred Adler Institutes of San Francisco and Northwestern Washington, dedicated to Adler's original teachings and style of psychotherapy. There are also various organizations promoting Dr. Adler's orientation towards mental and social wellbeing. These include ICASSI and the North American Society for Adlerian Psychology (NASAP).
[edit] Publications
His key publications were The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1927), Understanding Human Nature (1927) and What Life Could Mean to You.
The Alfred Adler Institute of Northwestern Washington has recently published the first ten of the twelve-volume set of The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, covering his writings from 1898-1937. An entirely new translation of Adler's magnum opus, The Neurotic Character, is featured in Volume 1.
- Volume 1 : The Neurotic Character — 1907
- Volume 2 : Journal Articles 1898-1909
- Volume 3 : Journal Articles 1910-1913
- Volume 4 : Journal Articles 1914-1920
- Volume 5 : Journal Articles 1921-1926
- Volume 6 : Journal Articles 1927-1931
- Volume 7 : Journal Articles 1931-1937
- Volume 8 : Lectures to Physicians & Medical Students
- Volume 9 : Case Histories
- Volume 10 : Case Readings & Demonstrations
- Volume 11 : Education for Prevention
- Volume 12 : The General System of Individual Psychology
