Alfred Adler

1870-1937 · Austrian · Individual Psychology

To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest.

Alfred Adler was the first of Freud's close circle to break away and found a school of his own. Where Freud made sexuality the master motive and read the psyche as a battlefield of divided parts, Adler made the striving to overcome inferiority the mainspring of the mind and insisted the personality is an indivisible whole — "individual psychology," from the Latin individuus, undivided. Every neurosis, every character, every symptom he read as a movement: from a felt minus toward an imagined plus, from weakness toward a self-set goal of security and superiority.

Topics Alfred Adler addresses

• the inferiority feeling
• the inferiority complex
• compensation
• overcompensation
• organ inferiority
• the striving for superiority
• the style of life
• fictional finalism
• the guiding fiction
• social interest (Gemeinschaftsgefühl)
• the three life-tasks
• the safeguarding tendencies
• the masculine protest
• the unity of the personality
• the family constellation
• birth order
• the pampered child
• early recollections
• the useful and useless sides of life
• encouragement
• individual psychology
• the neurotic constitution
• child guidance
• the break with Freud

Questions to put to Alfred Adler

Inferiority and the Striving for Significance

• What do you mean by the feeling of inferiority?
• How is the striving to overcome inferiority different from mere ambition?
• Why do you think every human being starts from a position of felt inferiority?
• What's the difference between healthy compensation and neurotic overcompensation?
• How does organ inferiority relate to psychological inferiority?

The Style of Life and Fictional Goals

• What do you mean by a person's style of life?
• How does a fictional goal guide someone's whole personality?
• Why do you say we're pulled by future goals rather than pushed by past causes?
• How can you read someone's entire life direction from a single early memory?
• What makes a guiding fiction useful even when it's not literally true?

Social Interest and the Life-Tasks

• What do you mean by social interest or community feeling?
• Why do you make social interest the measure of mental health?
• What are the three great life-tasks you see everyone facing?
• How does neurosis represent a failure of social interest?
• What's the difference between the useful and useless sides of life?

Neurosis and Safeguarding

• How do you understand neurotic symptoms as safeguarding devices?
• Why does the neurotic arrange his own failure?
• What makes a person retreat from the tasks of life while seeming not to?
• How is neurosis a mistaken form of compensation?
• What role does the neurotic's private goal of superiority play in his suffering?

The Masculine Protest and the Psychology of Women

• What do you mean by the masculine protest?
• How do you argue that women's felt inferiority is socially made rather than natural?
• Why do men also suffer from the masculine protest?
• What's wrong with a culture that overvalues the masculine and devalues the feminine?
• How would you respond to Freud's view that anatomy determines a woman's psychology?

Individual Psychology and the Unity of Personality

• Why do you reject Freud's division of the psyche into id, ego, and superego?
• What do you mean when you say the personality is indivisible?
• How is your view of the unconscious different from Freud's?
• Why do you see apparent contradictions in a person as actually consistent?
• What makes your approach teleological rather than causal?

Converse with Alfred Adler on Simposeum. Every reply is grounded in Alfred Adler's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.