Individual, Psychology
Individual, Psychology
Alfred Adler’s individual psychology has rightfully been called the first psychological system that was developed in a social science direction. Adler considered man as an entity firmly embedded in society and unthinkable apart from his social relations—or their absence. In this respect, Adler is similar to such social theorists as James M. Baldwin, George H. Mead, and especially Charles H. Cooley.
The emphasis on the individual in his social setting was but one aspect of Adler’s holistic, humanistic, organismic, and personalistic orientation. He considered the views of Eduard Spranger, Wolfgang Köhler, William Stern, Kurt Goldstein, and Jan Smuts close to his own.
Adler’s main interest was the construction of a theory that would be serviceable for general human guidance in the school and the home, as well as in the psychiatrist’s office. Consistent with this endeavor, he was in expressed sympathy with the pragmatism of William James and the transaction-alism of John Dewey.
For Adler, the individual was not a mere product determined by circumstances but was an active determiner of his own life. Every human being, with the exception of the feeble-minded, was considered endowed with such creative power. Adler quoted from Johann H. Pestalozzi: “The circumstances make man, but man makes the circumstances,” a sentence that, incidentally, had been used also by Karl Marx in rejecting mechanistic materialism.
Seeing man as an active and creative, socially embedded whole, Adler held the unique self, or ego, to be the very center of psychology. He parted from Freud in 1911 precisely on this issue. The following represents the final development of Adler’s work.
Methodology
Phenomenology
The great contribution of Freud was that he listened to his patients. In this respect he used the phenomenological method. But he devalued the patient’s subjective accounts, his introspections, as mere signs, disguises, and screens for more objective underlying causes, which were supposedly deeply buried in the patient’s past and his unconscious and by which behavior could be explained—hence, the designation “depth” psychology.
Adler took the patient’s subjective accounts not as signs for something else but as samples of behavior of a self-consistently creative individual. From these accounts, an understanding of the person could be gained, provided they were seen in the context of other samples of behavior, subjective and objective, past and present, and provided it was assumed that the individual is oriented toward some goal of success. Adler’s psychology is then not a depth psychology but what might be called a “context” psychology.
Far from reducing the subjective accounts of the patient to objective causes in the past, Adler took the beliefs, attitudes, and goals in the future as the ultimate causes of overt behavior. Not objective facts but a person’s opinion of them, his subjective evaluation, will determine his behavior. Adlerian psychology is an attitudinal, cognitive, and relatively ahistorical psychology.
Operationism
Adler combined phenomenology with operationism by validating subjective data against overt action. “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
His operationism derived from his conception of life as movement, and of human life as movement toward a subjectively conceived goal of success. Thereby, the subject matter receives a dimension in space, becomes transactional and open to inspec-tion. One will not find in Adler terms or metaphors referring to inner, unobservable, and unreportable processes, such as repression, latent homosexuality, primary processes, and real self. Instead, his terms describe a movement with regard to a point outside, such as hesitating attitude, leaning, retreat, detour, distance.
Fictionalism
From the comparison of a person’s overt actions with his subjective reports, Adler drew inferences regarding the person’s purposes and goals beyond those expressed by the person. In doing so, Adler went emphatically beyond pure phenomenology—for example, as represented today by client-centered counseling—and beyond operationism.
But he did not mistake his inferences for “truths” that he had “discovered,” perhaps in the “unconscious.” Rather, he took the inferences as his inventions, as useful fictions, with the aid of which the patient would be able to reconstruct or reorganize his view of himself and the world.
Although Adler sometimes seemed to yield to the temptation of reifying the inference, he stated initially very clearly, for example, that a person’s final goal was fictional. And again, at the end of his life, he wrote: “I, myself, as the inventor of the ‘ inferiority complex’ have never thought of it as of a spirit, knowing that it has never been in the consciousness or unconsciousness of the patient but only in my own consciousness, and have used it rather for illumination so that the patient could see his attitude in the right coherence” (Adler 1937, p. 776).
This refinement in methodology can be traced to The Philosophy of “As If” of Hans Vaihinger, to whom Adler felt greatly indebted. Vaihinger is considered to have developed a German form of pragmatism.
Personality theory
Striving to overcome—goal of superiority
Adler conceived of human life as upward movement, consisting of activity, in social space. Life moves upward; it is growth. From this conception, Adler derived one master motive as required by a holistic theory of personality. He speaks variously of the upward striving, striving to overcome, or striving for superiority. This striving is “innate in the sense that it is part of life” (1956, p. 104). All other drives and motives are readily subsumed under this striving.
Subjectively, this striving is expressed in the individually conceived goal of superiority, perfection, or success. Here Adler often distinguished between the individual’s concretized goal, corre-sponding to an actually conscious goal similar to Kurt Lewin’s level of aspiration, and the individual’s fictional goal. The latter may mean the ultimate goal of which the individual is only dimly aware or the psychologist’s inference or hypothesis regarding the ultimate goal.
Superiority in itself does not mean superiority over others. This is the case only in the “failures in life,” in mental disorder, where social interest is underdeveloped. In mental health it means superiority over the general difficulties of life, a goal of superiority not at the expense of others but in which the benefit of others is automatically included.
Inferiority feelings are the normal outcome and counterpart of the striving. “In comparison with unattainable ideal perfection, the individual is continuously filled by an inferiority feeling and motivated by it” (1956, p. 117). This is a reversal of Adler’s earlier view, in which he saw the striving as a compensatory effort for primary inferiority feelings and which actually paralleled drive-reduction theory, which at best does justice only to deficit motivation, not to growth motivation. The later reformulation represents a great improvement in theory.
Activity—opinion of oneself
One factor, or dimension, of the striving process is activity, including the concepts of strength, temperament, and personal tempo. A uniform kind of activity, acquired in childhood, can always be observed, and is in constant supply, enduring throughout life.
Subjectively, degree of activity, an energy concept, would seem to have its counterpart in a person’s appraisal of his physical and mental resources, his opinion of himself, his self-esteem. Adler had no doubt that “every individual conducts himself in life as if he had a definite idea of his power and his capacities” ([1933], p. 19 in 1938 edition). The more active people will probably have a greater feeling of strength and a lesser feeling of incompletion, insecurity, or inferiority.
Social interest—opinion of the world
Adler’s most important concept, and most specific to him, is Gemeinschaftsgefühl, generally translated as “social interest.” It represents the second dimension, with activity as the first, in a two-dimensional, dynamic theory of personality structure.
Adler rejected the view that man is by nature self-centered, let alone that his socialization depends on repression of an antisocial and partly destructive animal nature. Instead, man is viewed as having an innate readiness or aptitude for a positive social orientation, which, however, must be trained.
Objectively, social interest is expressed in the direction of the individual’s striving. With adequate social interest, this striving will be on the socially useful side of life; without such interest, it will be on the useless side. Social interest includes making contact, cooperating, contributing to the common welfare, making spontaneous social efforts, and behaving as part of mankind.
Subjectively, social interest is a positive opinion of the world, including identification with others, empathy, feeling of belonging, feeling at home on this earth, in harmony with the universe. Lack of social interest correspondingly is a negative opinion, with feelings that one is in enemy country. Social interest is similar to Durkheim’s sentiments of sympathy and solidarity; lack of social interest is similar to the psychological aspects assumed by concepts such as Durkheim’s “anomie” and Marx’s “alienation.” [SeeAlienation; Sympathy and empathy; and the biography ofDurkheim.]
Style of life
Individual psychology becomes outstandingly idiograpmc through the concept of the style of life, the individually unique totality of life. All general processes such as drives, feeling, thinking, and perception are at the command of the whole, the life style. A particular life style will include a particular schema of apperception.
“The child builds up his whole life, which we have called concretely style of life, at a time when he has neither adequate language nor adequate concepts. When he grows further in the sense [of his style of life], he grows into a movement which has never been formulated into words and therefore, unassailable to criticism, is also withdrawn from the criticism of experience” (1956, p. 191).
The life style, or style of living, is not something the individual has. It is the individual as an ongoing process, an individually unique way of living and goal-striving. It is very similar to what the existentialists have since named “mode-of-being-in-the-world.”
Developmental factors
The life style is not the product of heredity and environment. These furnish only the bricks, so to speak, from which the individual creatively fashions his life style like a work of art. Nevertheless, Adler attributed great significance to organic and social factors as providing probabilities and allurements for the individual.
Organic factors. Adler’s first monograph, on organ inferiorities, pointed to the importance of all aspects of the physique for the development of the life style. Sex, physiologically, is merely one of the organic factors, although, to be sure, very important.
Organ inferiorities will—with a certain probability—be compensated for, be responded to, unfavorably. Yet the relationship is not one of direct causation, so that in exceptional cases the outcome can be very positive.
Adler greatly appreciated the work of Ernst Kretschmer on Physique and Character and Walter B. Cannon’s The Wisdom of the Body. In keeping with this tradition of taking physiology fully into account, Adlerian psychiatrists today are very receptive to the advances of drug therapy in conjunction with psychotherapy.
Social factors. A child’s entire early social setting was considered by Adler of great importance for later development, although it is again the way in which the child responds to the situation that is crucial. Thus Adler would note the birth-order position and the interaction not only with the parents but especially also with siblings and other significant persons. Described sociemetrically, Ad-ler’s concept of the child in the tamily is in the form of a network of interactions among all the group members. Frevd. by contrast, in the so-called oedipal situation, emphasized the relationship of each child to his parents, the authority figures.
The importance of sex in the child’s development rested for Adler, who referred every process to its larger, societal context, primarily in the sexual role into which the child learns to grow and in his conception of this role.
Psychotherapy
Mental disorder
In keeping with the simplicity of a unitary theory of motivation and a two-dimensional theory of personality structure, Adler presented a unitary theory of mental disorders. These are not considered different illnesses but the outcome of a mistaken way of living. They are all “failures in life”; however, each is unique as all individuals are.
The mistake consists in striving for exaggerated personal superiority, without enough social interest. It is the pampered life style, an immaturity in which a person expects everything while contributing nothing, leaning on, or exploiting others. It is the person’s own creation, for which the parents are not wholly to be blamed and may be found in the absence of actual pampering and even in neglect. Except in very special circumstances, it will lead to failure because the important problems in life—occupation, friendship, and sex—are all social problems requiring cooperation for their successful solution.
Symptoms originate when such a person faces a problem that is too difficult for him because of his inadequate social interest. They serve as excuses to safeguard the self-esteem when the person is threatened with defeat and will persist as long as the problem does.
In a broader sense, neurotics, psychotics, criminals, alcoholics, problem children, perverts, and prostitutes are all failures in life because they are lacking in social interest.
Treatment
From interviews and observations, including the patient’s early recollections, his dreams, his birth-order position, the therapist gains an understanding of the patient’s unique life style, how it all started, and the self-consistency and constancy with which the patient continues to fashion his life in the manner that led to the present predicament.
One aspect of treatment is to get the patient to recognize the mistake in his life style, the striving for a self-centered fictive goal of superiority as the therapist has understood it. While this is in principle not a complicated process and relatively not lengthy, the difficulty lies in the patient’s biased schema of apperception and private sense of reasoning, which prevent him from seeing his situation in a common-sense fashion. It therefore becomes necessary to use the material from further interviews to interpret to the patient again and again how all his expressions fit his life style.
But primarily, treatment is a training in cooperation and responsibility in which the patient is deficient. This begins by the therapist showing great social interest toward the patient in order to give him the opportunity for experiencing a trustworthy fellow man. Thereby the patient will be encouraged to develop his own potentiality for social interest. What are otherwise called “permissive atmosphere” and “transference” are, operationally, aspects of social interest. “Psychotherapy is an exercise in cooperation and a test of cooperation” (1956, p. 340). With this understanding, Adlerian therapists have from the start been active in all forms of group psychotherapy.
If the patient could originally be “seduced” by circumstances to develop a mistaken style of life, it is conceivable that the cure can also be accomplished without “insight.” Different circumstances could seduce him toward the socially useful side. Thus Adlerian psychology has always been favorably disposed toward milieu therapy, the therapeutic community, and various forms of social psychiatry or community psychiatry.
Whatever the treatment, “As soon as he [the patient] can connect himself with his fellow men on an equal and cooperative footing, he is cured” (1956, p. 347).
Mental health. While the definition of positive mental health is today still an extensively discussed problem, Adler resorted to a pragmatic answer by making the criterion cooperation and social usefulness, i.e., a well-developed social interest.
Mental health in this sense does not mean conformity to any existing social group but a spontaneous social effort contributing toward a better society. This is likely to imply the changing of existing norms in the interest of a better community rather than conforming to them. Mere conformity “would be nothing other than an exploitation of the accomplishments of the striving of others” (1956, p. 107). It is rather a sign of neurosis than of mental health.
Relevance to social science
Adler’s psychology is directly relevant to a number of concepts and areas in the social sciences. The relationship of the concepts of anomie and alienation to lack of social interest has already been mentioned. The concept of status is directly related to the striving for superiority and success. Some of the general areas are:
International relations. Adler saw no intrinsic motivation toward war, such as a death instinct. Wars are the outcome of a mistaken striving for power and can be abolished with the further development of social interest.
Prejudice. Prejudice is one form of the depreciation tendency, an expression of the striving for superiority at the expense of others. It is widespread because depreciation of others is an easy way to boost one’s own self-esteem. Prejudice as scapegoating would be, in Adlerian terms, a way of providing excuses for one’s own inadequacies.
Industrial morale. Assuming that the striving to overcome is basic, one would predict, everything else being equal, morale to be higher when a man is working than when he is idle. Studies during World War II in U.S. shipyards support this hypothesis, as do morale studies in the army.
Unemployment and old age. The mental hardship in both unemployment and old age is that one is prevented from contributing and thus feels useless. Older people should, as long as possible, be given an opportunity for working and striving.
Leadership and group morale. A main component of group morale is a common goal, and a main function of the leader is to formulate the goal and give the group a sense that it can be attained. Leadership requires, according to Adler, social interest, optimism, self-confidence, and quick action.
Religion. For Adler the idea of God is a con-cretization of a goal of perfection, greatness, and superiority in which an entire culture can share. Reversing Freud’s characterization of religion as an illusion, Adler held the unpremised mechanistic position to be an illusion, because it lacks goal and direction without which a mentally healthy life is not possible. As for the ceremonial part of religion, Adler saw in it a sanctification of human relations in accordance with social interest.
Heinz L. Ansbacher and
Rowena R. Ansbacher
[See also the biography of Adler.Other relevant material may be found in Phenomenology; Positivism; Psychoanalysis.]
WORKS BY ADLER
(1909-1920) 1964 The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology. Translated by Paul Radin. Rev. ed. New York: Harcourt. → First published in German. Contains 28 papers originally published in medical journals between 1909 and 1920.
(1927) 1946 Understanding Human Nature. New York: Greenberg. → First published as Menschenkenntnis. Based on lectures delivered in the 1920s before an adult-education audience. A paperback edition was published in 1965 by Premier Books.
(1928-1937) 1964 Superiority and Social Interest: A Collection of Later Writings. Edited by Heinz L. Ansbacher and Rowena R. Ansbacher. Evanston, III.: Northwestern Univ. Press. → Supplementing Adler 1956, this book contains 21 selections, including Adler’s essay on religion and a biographical essay by Carl Fürtmuller; introduction and commentaries by the editors; and a bibliography of over 300 items.
(1929) 1964 Problems of Neurosis: A Book of Case Histories. With an Introduction by Heinz L. Ansbacher. New York: Harper. → Contains 37 case histories interwoven with theoretical considerations. See especially the Introduction, which includes a summary of the theory.
(1930) 1963 The Problem Child : The Life Style of the Difficult Child as Analyzed in Specific Cases. With an Introduction by Kurt A. Adler. New York: Capricorn. → First published in German. Twenty case-study chapters of interviews with children, their parents, and their teachers in Adler’s open-community child guidance center.
(1931) 1960 What Life Should Mean to You. London: Allen & Unwin. → A paperback edition was published in 1958 by Capricorn Books. Includes chapters on crime and its prevention, adolescence, school, love, and marriage.
(1933) 1939 Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind. New York: Putnam. → Adler’s last presentation of his views in book form. First published as Der Sinn des Lebens. A paperback edition was published in 1964 by Capricorn Books.
1937 Psychiatric Aspects Regarding Individual and Social Disorganization. American Journal of Sociology 42: 773-780.
1956 The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. Edited by Heinz L. Ansbacher and Rowena R. Ansbacher. New York: Basic Books. → A systematic compendium of selections from all of Adler’s writings, with commentary and bibliography. A paperback edition was published in 1964 by Harper.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adler, Kurt A.; and Deutsch, Danica (editors) 1959 Essays in Individual Psychology: Contemporary Application of Alfred Adler’s Theories. New York: Grove Press. → Contributions by some fifty authors.
Dreikurs, Rudolf 1957 Psychology in the Classroom: A Manual for Teachers. New York: Harper. -→ Based on Adlerian principles.
Journal of Individual Psychology. → Published since 1940; title varies.
Oliver Brachfeld,F. (1936) 1951 Inferiority Feelings in the Individual and the Group. New York: Grune. → Family, unemployment, race, nationality, etc., are discussed in this broadly based book. First published as Los sentimientos de inferioridad.
Way, Lewis 1950 Adler’s Place in Psychology. New York: Macmillan. → A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Collier.