Today I have decided to blog about Alfred Adler a Austrian medical doctor, psychologist and founder of the school of individual psychology. Adler was part of the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement and was a central member to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Adler was the initial major figure to break away from psychoanalysis to establish his own independent school of psychotherapy and personality theory after Freud said Adler's ideas were to contrary. Adler emphasized the importance of equality in halting different forms of psychopathology and he adopted into his work the development of social interest and democratic family structures as the ideal way for bringing up children. Adler's most well known theories are the inferiority complex, which is related to the matters of self-esteem and its negative compensations. Adler's emphasis on power dynamics stems from the philosphy of Nietzsche. "Adler argued for holism, viewing people as holistically rather than reductively, the latter being the overriding lens for viewing human psychology".The online definition of holism is-"the theory that the parts of any whole cannot exist and cannot be understood except in their relation to the whole". Adler was also among the first in psychology to argue for the side of feminism and Adler is considered to be one of the founding figures of depth psychology, which emphasized the unconscious and psychodynamics. For 25 years Adler traveled and lectured promoting his socially orientated approach. Adler wanted to create a movement that would compete with and even take place of others in psychology by arguing for the holistic integrity of psychological well being with that of social equality. Adler's efforts were halted by World War 1 when he served as a doctor in the Austrian Army. After the war Adler's influence increased much further and in the 1930's he formed a number of child guidance clinics. From 1921 and onwards, Adler was a common lecturer in Europe and the USA, becoming a visitor professor at Columbia University in 1927. For clinical treatment for adults Adler tried to bring to light the hidden purpose of symptoms by using therapeutic functions of insight and meaning. Adler was interested in the overcoming of the superiority/inferiority dynamic and was one of the first psychotherapists to do away with for himself in therapy the analytic couch in return for two chairs. "Clinically Adler's method was not only about treatment after-the-fact but it extended out also to prevention by preempting future problems in the child". "Prevention strategies of Adler included the following: "encouraging and promoting social interest, belonging, and a cultural shift within families and communities that leads to the eradication of pampering and neglect (especially corporal punishment)". "Adler's popularity was associated with the comparative optimism and comprehensibility of the ideas he came up with in psychology". Adler would often write for the lay public in comparison to others in the field like Freud who's writings tend to be more exclusively academic. As a prominent member in the field Adler always retained a pragmatic approach that was task-orientated and these "life tasks" are occupation/work, society/friendship/ and love/sexuality and their success is reliant upon co-operation. Adler was influenced by the mental construct ideas of the philosopher Hans Vaihinger and the writing works of Dostoevsky. Alder developed a theory of organic inferiority and compensation that was the prototype for his later turn to phenomenology and the creation of his famous concept known as the inferiority complex. Adler was also influenced by the philosophy work of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rudolf Virchow and the statesman Jan Smuts who was the person who coined the term "holism". "Adler's School, known as "Individual Psychology", is both a social and community psychology as well as a depth psychology". "Adler was an early advocate in psychology for prevention and he was big on the matter of training parents, teachers, social workers and so forth in democratic approaches that allow a child to exercise their power through reasoned decision making while co-operating with others". Adler was a social idealist and known to be a socialist in Adler's early years with psychoanalysis. "Adler's following of Marxism dissipated over time however he retained Marxism social idealism but stayed further away from Marx's economic theories". "Adler was a practical person and he thought that lay people could make practical use of the insights of psychology and he sought to create a social movement united through principles of community feeling and social interest". "Adler was also a early proponent of feminism's in psychology and the social world believing feelings of superiority and inferiority were commonly gendered and expressed symptomatically in characteristic masculine and feminine ways and according to Adler these ways could form the basis of psychic compensation and lead to some mental health troubles". Interestingly I think, Adler had also spoke of "safeguarding tendencies" and neurotic behavior long before Anna Freud wrote about the same matter in her book "The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense". To give an overall view of Adlerian based scholarly, clinical and social practices the following is what Adler's studies had focused one: "Mental Health Prevention
Social Interest and Community Feeling
Holism and the Creative Self
Fictional Finalism, Teleology, and Goal constructs
Psychological and Social Encouragement
Inferiority, Superiority and Compensation
Life Style / Style of Life
Early Recollections (a projective technique)
Family Constellation and Birth Order
Life Tasks & Social Embeddedness
The Conscious and Unconscious realms
Private Logic & Common Sense (based in part on Kant's "sensus communis")
Symptoms and Neurosis
Safeguarding Behaviour
Guilt and Guilt Feelings
Socratic Questioning
Dream Interpretation
Child and Adolescent Psychology
Democratic approaches to Parenting and Families
Adlerian Approaches to Classroom Management
Leadership and Organisational Psychology."
Adler's book "The Neurotic Character" defines his earlier central ideas. Adler disputed that human personality could be explained teleologically, "separate strands dominated by the guiding purpose of the individuals 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 needs of a sort." "If the corrective factors were forgot about and the individual over-compensated, then an inferiority complex would stir about, fostering the danger of a person becoming egocentric, power-hungry and aggressive or worse". Regular therapeutic tools brought about by Adlder include the use of humor, historical instances, and paradoxical injunctions. Adler believed that human psychology is psychodynamic by nature and is guided by goals and is motivated by a yet unknown creative force. "Adler's fictive goals are mainly unconscious and these goals have a "teleological" function". As a psychodynamic system, Adlerians dig up the past of a client/patient so to alter their future and increase integration into community in the 'here-and-now'. "The 'here-and-now' aspects are especially significant to those Adlerians who are big on humanism and/or existentialism in their approaches. Metaphysical Adlerians believe that spiritual holism is important". "The pragmatic and materialist aspects to contextualizing members of communities, the creation of communities and the socio-historical-political forces that help develop communities matter significantly when it comes to understanding a persons psychological make-up and functioning". "This aspect of Adlerian psychology maintains a high amount of synergy with the field of community psychology". "However, Adlerian psychology, is not similar to community psychology in the aspect that Adlerian psychology is holistically concerned with both prevention and clinical help after-the-fact". "Adler founded a scheme of the so called personality types and these 'types' are to be looked at as provisional or heuristic since Adler did not, in essence, believe in personality types". "According to Adler the danger with typology is to lose sight of a persons uniqueness and to look reductively, acts that Adler opposed". "Adler also attempted to recognize patterns that could denote a characteristic governed under the altogether style of life". "Adler commonly emphasized one's birth order as having an impact on the Style of Life and the strengths and weaknesses in one's psychological make up and Birth Order referred to the placement of siblings within the family". Adler had thought that the firstborn child would be loved and nurtured by the family until the procreation of a second child. This second child would influence the first born to suffer feelings of dethronement, no longer being the center of attention according to Adler. Adler believed that in a three-child family, the oldest child would be the most likely to deal with neuroticism and substance addiction, which Adler reasoned was a way to make up for the feelings of excessive responsibility. "As a result, Adler also predicted that this child was the most likely to end up in jail or an asylum and youngest children would tend to be overindulged, influencing poor social empathy". "Consequently, the middle child, who would go through neither dethronement or overindulgence, was most likely to develop into a successful person yet also most likely to be a rebel and to feel left out in a way". Adler never actually created any scientific support for his interpretations on birth order roles. "Adlerians will spend time therapeutically looking into the influence that siblings (or lack thereof) had on the psychology of their clients". "The idiographic approach encompasses an excavation of the phenomenology of one's birth order position for the probable influence on the subject's Style of Life". Adler's ideas in relation to non-heterosexual sexuality and different social forms of deviance have been controversial for some time. As well as prostitution and criminality, Adler had also classified 'homosexuals' as being "failures of life". "In 1917, Adler started his writings on homosexuality with a 52-page brochure, and sporadically published more ideas throughout the remainder of his life". The Dutch psychiatrist Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg examined how Alfred Adler came to his consensus and it was was then understood in 1917 that Adler believed he had established a connection between homosexuality and an inferiority complex towards one's own gender. Towards the end of Adler's life, in the mid 1930s, his view towards homosexuality began to shift about some. Elizabeth H. McDowell, a New York state family social worker recalls being in supervision with Adler on a male client who was "living in sin" with another man in New York city. Adler had said to Elizabeth, "is he happy, would you say?" "Oh yes," McDowell then replied. Then Adler went on and stated, "Well, why don't we leave him alone."Adler emphasized treatment and prevention and a psychodynamic psychology and Adlerian's promote the foundational importance of childhood in developing personality and any tendency towards different forms of psychopathology. "The best route to aid against what are now called"personality disorders" (what Adler had called the "neurotic character"), or a tendency to various neurotic conditions (depression, anxiety, etc.), is to teach a child to be and feel an equal part of the family". "This incorporates developing a democratic character and the ability to use power reasonably rather than through compensation". "The responsibility to the best development of the child is not limited to the Mother or Father but also to teachers and society as well". "So Adler also argued that teachers, nurses and so on need training in parent education to be able to complement the work of the family with the fostering of a democratic character". "According to Adler when a child does not feel equal and is abused by pampering or neglect they are more prone to develop inferiority or superiority complexes and various accompanying compensation strategies". These strategies can create social issues by influencing greater divorce rates, the breakdown of the family, possible criminal habits and subjective suffering in the various ways of psychopathology and so Adlerian's have for a long time promoted parent education groups. Adler had argued his vision of society in writing which said the following: "Social feeling means above all a struggle for a communal form that must be thought of as eternally applicable... when humanity has attained its goal of perfection... an ideal society amongst all mankind, the ultimate fulfillment of evolution." Adler then follows this statement with a defense of metaphysics: "I see no reason to be afraid of metaphysics; it has had a great influence on human life and development. We are not blessed with the possession of absolute truth; on that account we are compelled to form theories for ourselves about our future, about the results of our actions, etc. Our idea of social feeling as the final form of humanity - of an imagined state in which all the problems of life are solved and all our relations to the external world rightly adjusted - is a regulative ideal, a goal that gives our direction. This goal of perfection must bear within it the goal of an ideal community, because all that we value in life, all that endures and continues to endure, is eternally the product of this social feeling." "This social feeling for Adler is Gemeinschaftsgefühl, which is a community feeling in which one feels they belong with others and have developed an ecological link with nature and the cosmos as a whole, sub specie aeternitatus". So clearly, Adler had little trouble with using a metaphysical and a spiritual point of view to support his theories. "However his overall theoretical yield provides ample room for the dialectical humanist (modernist) and separately the postmodernist to explain the importance of community and ecology through differing views "(even if Adlerians have not fully considered how deeply divisive and contradictory these three threads of metaphysics, modernism, and post modernism are)". Having studied psychology for years Adler has been a name that had become familiar to me so I am glad I delved further into some of his many primary influences and there were certainly a lot to read about since this entry had taken me several days to complete at this point.