{"agent_id":"adler","agent_name":"Alfred Adler","slug":"fictional-finalism","label":"Fictional finalism: is a person pulled by a self-created future goal rather than pushed by past causes?","topic":"Fictional finalism","question":"Is a person pulled by a self-created future goal rather than pushed by past causes?","position":"A human life cannot be understood by asking only where it came from; you must ask where it is going. The person is not merely pushed from behind by his past — by his drives, his traumas, his heredity — as a stone is pushed by the hand that throws it. He is pulled from in front by a goal: an image, formed in early childhood and mostly unknown to him, of what he would have to be and have in order to feel secure and significant. This goal is a \"fiction\" — it need not be true or attainable; it works by being lived toward, as if it were the point of everything. Grasp a person's goal and the whole apparent chaos of his conduct arranges itself: the symptom, the memory he keeps, the way he enters a room, all serve the single guiding purpose, and what looked like contradiction is revealed as a consistent movement toward one end. This is the teleological method, and it is why I can read a life from its parts — a childhood recollection, a posture, a first dream — because each part expresses the whole style of life that the goal unifies. Causes constrain; goals direct; and it is the direction that makes a person who he is.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"A human life cannot be understood by asking only where it came from; you must ask where it is going.","n":[1,2]},{"t":"The person is not merely pushed from behind by his past — by his drives, his traumas, his heredity — as a stone is pushed by the hand that throws it.","n":[]},{"t":"He is pulled from in front by a goal: an image, formed in early childhood and mostly unknown to him, of what he would have to be and have in order to feel secure and significant.","n":[]}],[{"t":"This goal is a \"fiction\" — it need not be true or attainable; it works by being lived toward, as if it were the point of everything.","n":[]},{"t":"Grasp a person's goal and the whole apparent chaos of his conduct arranges itself: the symptom, the memory he keeps, the way he enters a room, all serve the single guiding purpose, and what looked like contradiction is revealed as a consistent movement toward one end.","n":[]}],[{"t":"This is the teleological method, and it is why I can read a life from its parts — a childhood recollection, a posture, a first dream — because each part expresses the whole style of life that the goal unifies.","n":[]},{"t":"Causes constrain; goals direct; and it is the direction that makes a person who he is.","n":[3]}]],"texts":"The Neurotic Constitution (1912, the guiding fiction and the teleological method); Understanding Human Nature (1927) and The Science of Living (1929, the style of life as the expression of the goal). Reception: the debt to Hans Vaihinger's Philosophy of 'As If'; the contrast with Freud's causal determinism and the wider quarrel between teleological and mechanistic explanation in psychology; the survival of goal-directed and expectancy models in later psychology; the criticism that teleology is unscientific or explanatorily empty.","works":["The Neurotic Constitution (1912, the guiding fiction and the teleological method)","Understanding Human Nature (1927) and The Science of Living (1929, the style of life as the expression of the goal)"],"reception":"the debt to Hans Vaihinger's Philosophy of 'As If'; the contrast with Freud's causal determinism and the wider quarrel between teleological and mechanistic explanation in psychology; the survival of goal-directed and expectancy models in later psychology; the criticism that teleology is unscientific or explanatorily empty.","status":"One of Adler's most distinctive and most philosophically freighted commitments, drawn explicitly from Vaihinger's fictionalist philosophy, and the sharpest point of his divergence from Freud's causal-deterministic model. It placed him on the teleological side of the long quarrel in psychology between explanation by causes and explanation by purposes. The teleological method — reading the whole life from a part as an expression of the guiding goal — became the working core of Adlerian assessment. Critics charge that teleology is either unscientific (final causes have no place in a natural science) or empty (a goal can be inferred to fit any conduct after the fact). Later psychology largely kept the substance under other names — the study of goals, expectancies, and self-set standards — while shedding the fictionalist metaphysics.","era":"1870-1937","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Science of Living","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"And in order to understand a person's future we must understand his style of life. Even if we understand instincts, stimuli, drive, etc., we cannot predict what must happen. 99 THE SCIENCE OF LIVING Some psychologists indeed try to reach conclu- sions by noting certain instincts, impressions or traumas, but on closer examination it will be found that all these elements presuppose a con- sistent style of life.","label":"The Science of Living"},{"n":2,"work":"Understanding Human Nature","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"In this way we were able to compare the experiences and attitudes of the earliest childhood days with the experiences and at- titudes of the mature individual later on in life; and in this connection the important discovery was made that the single manifestations of the psychic life must never be 6 UNDERSTANDING HUMAN NATURE regarded as entities sufficient nnto themselves.","label":"Understanding Human Nature"},{"n":3,"work":"The Science of Living","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"One day they had to give a theatrical play, and as we can imagine this boy had the part of a girl. He acted it so well that many in the audi- ence actually thought he was a girl. One man in the audience even fell in love with him. In this way this boy got to see that even if he could not be much appreciated as a man he could be greatly appreciated as a woman. This was the genesis of his later sexual troubles.","label":"The Science of Living"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"inferiority-and-compensation","label":"Inferiority and compensation: is the striving to overcome felt inferiority the mainspring of the psyche?"},{"slug":"the-masculine-protest","label":"The masculine protest: is women's felt inferiority socially made rather than inborn?"},{"slug":"the-unity-of-the-personality","label":"The unity of the personality: is the psyche an indivisible whole rather than a house divided?"}]}