Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor and psychotherapist who founded the school of the individual psychology. He was one of the first of the psychologists to emphasise the importance of the social factors in the development of the personality.

Early Life and Education

Adler was born in 1870 in Rudolfsheim near Vienna. He was the second of the seven children of a Jewish grain merchant.

He suffered from the rickets and the pneumonia as a child. The experience of the illness and the inferiority shaped his later theory.

He studied medicine at the University of Vienna and qualified in 1895. He practised as an ophthalmologist and then as a general physician.

The Individual Psychology

Adler joined the circle of Sigmund Freud in 1902 and became the president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He broke with Freud in 1911 over the differences on the theory.

He founded the school of the individual psychology. The school emphasised the importance of the social interest and the striving for the superiority.

He developed the concept of the inferiority complex. The concept holds that the feelings of the inferiority drive the behaviour and the striving.

He argued that the personality is shaped by the goals and the social context. The theory differed from the Freudian emphasis on the biological drives.

The Later Career

Adler served as a physician in the Austrian army during the First World War. The experience reinforced his belief in the importance of the social interest.

He established the child guidance clinics in Vienna. The clinics provided the advice to the parents and the teachers.

He emigrated to the United States in 1932 and taught at the Long Island College of Medicine. He lectured widely in Europe and the United States.

He wrote the books on the psychology and the education. The works include Understanding Human Nature and The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology.

The Legacy

Adler died in 1937 in Aberdeen in Scotland during a lecture tour. He was one of the most influential of the psychologists of his time.

His work influenced the development of the humanistic and the cognitive psychology. The concepts of the inferiority complex and the lifestyle have entered the common language.

He influenced the later theorists including Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. The emphasis on the social factors anticipated the modern approaches.

He is regarded as one of the founders of the modern psychotherapy. His work continues to be studied and applied.

Individual Psychology in Depth

Adler gave the name Individual Psychology to his system in order to stress that the person is an indivisible whole. He rejected every attempt to split the mind into competing agencies and insisted that thought, feeling and action always work together toward one goal. This holistic premise led him to study the style of life — the unique, self-consistent pattern of striving that a person adopts early and repeats throughout life. Because the style of life is a single unified strategy, a change in any part of it, he argued, produces a change in the whole.

Central to his theory is the distinction between the useful and the useless side of life. Fictitious goals that serve the community, he held, generate courage, cooperation and mental health, while goals pursued only for personal superiority generate discouragement, hostility and neurosis. In The Science of Living (1929) and What Life Could Mean to You (1931) he showed how the same striving for significance can be channelled in constructive or destructive directions. The therapist's task, in his view, is not to remove the striving but to redirect it.

Adler also developed the notion of social interest (Gemeinschaftsgefühl) into a measurable criterion of mental health. He regarded the capacity to feel with others and to contribute to the common good as the truest index of a well-adjusted life. Individuals who lacked it, he suggested, retreat into the private world of the neurotic, where symptoms serve as excuses for avoiding the tasks of friendship, work and love. His emphasis on social embeddedness anticipated later relational and community approaches to psychology.

Clinical Practice and Social Reform

Although trained as a physician, Adler turned increasingly toward prevention and public education. He opened the first child-guidance clinics in Vienna in the 1920s, where teachers, parents and physicians worked together to identify discouragement early. These clinics became a model for community mental-health services, and similar centres were established across Austria, Germany and the United States. Adler insisted that psychology should be practical and democratic rather than confined to the consulting room of the wealthy.

His lecture tours in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s made him one of the best-known psychologists of his day. He was appointed visiting professor at Columbia University in 1927 and later held a chair at the Long Island College of Medicine. Free public lectures in Vienna and New York drew thousands of listeners. Adler's ability to explain complex ideas in everyday language helped carry psychological thinking into schools, social work and even industrial management.

Politically, Adler was a committed democrat and an early critic of authoritarian child-rearing. He warned that humiliation and rigid obedience produce either broken or rebellious adults, and he advocated encouragement as the central educational method. This progressive stance, together with his Jewish origins, made his position in Austria untenable after the rise of the Nazi regime. He left Europe for the last time in 1934 and settled in the United States, where he continued to write and teach until his sudden death in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1937.

Influence and Legacy

Adler's influence spread far beyond his own school. His emphasis on purpose, choice and social context shaped the humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, the cognitive therapies of Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis, and the family-systems work of Rudolf Dreikurs and Virginia Satir. Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, explicitly credited Adler with the idea that emotional disturbance follows from faulty beliefs rather than from events themselves. Adler thus stands as a bridge between psychoanalysis and the cognitive revolution.

In education, Adler's principles underlie much of modern classroom management. The technique of logical consequences, the encouragement of effort over praise of talent, and the recognition of mistaken goals in children's misbehaviour all derive from his teaching. Parent study groups and teacher-training programmes around the world still use his diagnostic framework for understanding why a child acts out. His ideas have proved durable precisely because they are developmental and forward-looking rather than deterministic.

Adler's writings were for many years overshadowed by those of Freud, yet scholarly estimates place his direct influence on twentieth-century psychology as comparable in breadth. He published more than 300 articles and books and founded a journal, the International Journal of Individual Psychology. Over a hundred Adlerian institutes and societies operate today on five continents, and his conviction that every person is capable of change continues to define the optimistic strand of applied psychology.

See also

• Individual psychology
• Inferiority complex
• Psychotherapy
• Social interest