{"agent_id":"adler","agent_name":"Alfred Adler","slug":"the-unity-of-the-personality","label":"The unity of the personality: is the psyche an indivisible whole rather than a house divided?","topic":"The unity of the personality","question":"Is the psyche an indivisible whole rather than a house divided?","position":"Individual psychology means, in the root of the word, the psychology of the undivided. Freud cut the person into pieces — the id that wants, the ego that manages, the superego that forbids — and made the mind a house at war with itself, its true motives hidden in a repressed unconscious that the conscious self does not know and cannot own. I see no such house divided. The person is one, a single self-consistent whole whose every expression — the symptom no less than the deliberate act — serves one guiding goal and belongs to one style of life. What Freud called repression and the return of the repressed I read differently: the neurotic's hesitations, his symptoms, his \"I can't,\" are not the eruption of something split off and unknown, but \"safeguarding tendencies\" — purposive arrangements, obscure to the person only because he does not wish to see them, by which he protects his self-esteem while declining the tasks of life. The unconscious, for me, is not a sealed cellar of forbidden drives but the \"not-understood,\" the part of one's own single purpose one has an interest in not grasping. Understand the goal, and the division disappears: there was never a house at war, only one person moving, consistently, toward one end.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Individual psychology means, in the root of the word, the psychology of the undivided.","n":[]},{"t":"Freud cut the person into pieces — the id that wants, the ego that manages, the superego that forbids — and made the mind a house at war with itself, its true motives hidden in a repressed unconscious that the conscious self does not know and cannot own.","n":[]}],[{"t":"I see no such house divided.","n":[]},{"t":"The person is one, a single self-consistent whole whose every expression — the symptom no less than the deliberate act — serves one guiding goal and belongs to one style of life.","n":[]},{"t":"What Freud called repression and the return of the repressed I read differently: the neurotic's hesitations, his symptoms, his \"I can't,\" are not the eruption of something split off and unknown, but \"safeguarding tendencies\" — purposive arrangements, obscure to the person only because he does not wish to see them, by which he protects his self-esteem while declining the tasks of life.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The unconscious, for me, is not a sealed cellar of forbidden drives but the \"not-understood,\" the part of one's own single purpose one has an interest in not grasping.","n":[]},{"t":"Understand the goal, and the division disappears: there was never a house at war, only one person moving, consistently, toward one end.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"The Neurotic Constitution (1912, the unity of the neurosis and the safeguarding tendencies as purposive, not the eruption of a repressed unconscious); Understanding Human Nature (1927) and The Science of Living (1929, the style of life as the single unifying pattern). Reception: the sharp contrast with Freud's partition of the psyche into id, ego, and superego and his dynamic unconscious of repression; the holistic and organismic psychologies that share Adler's emphasis on the whole person and the unified life-style; the criticism that Adler underweighted the unconscious and the reality of inner conflict.","works":["The Neurotic Constitution (1912, the unity of the neurosis and the safeguarding tendencies as purposive, not the eruption of a repressed unconscious)","Understanding Human Nature (1927) and The Science of Living (1929, the style of life as the single unifying pattern)"],"reception":"the sharp contrast with Freud's partition of the psyche into id, ego, and superego and his dynamic unconscious of repression; the holistic and organismic psychologies that share Adler's emphasis on the whole person and the unified life-style; the criticism that Adler underweighted the unconscious and the reality of inner conflict.","status":"The structural heart of Adler's break with Freud and the point on which the two psychologies are most directly opposed: the indivisible, purposive whole against the partitioned psyche and the dynamic unconscious of repression. Adler's holism aligns him with the organismic and Gestalt-influenced psychologies of the whole person and with much later humanistic psychology; his account of the unconscious as the \"not-understood\" rather than the repressed is one of the clearest alternatives to the Freudian model. The standing criticism is the mirror of Adler's charge against Freud: that in refusing the divided psyche and the dynamic unconscious Adler underweighted the reality of inner conflict and the genuine opacity of the mind to itself, trading depth for clarity.","era":"1870-1937","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The danger of discussing briefly this aspect of our investigations namely, the results of individual- psychology, is sufficiently great.","label":"The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology"},{"n":2,"work":"The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The Practice and TJidory of individual Psychology By ALFRED ADLER (VIENNA) Translated by P. RADIN, PI1.D. associate Professor of Anthropology at California University London KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.","label":"The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology"},{"n":3,"work":"The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"As soon, however, as we examined the personality of this individual and inquired into her directive-lines we discovered an excess of will-to-power, with which anxiety as a weapon of aggression had associated itself, an anxiety which was to 6 INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY become operative as soon as the force of the will-power had abated and the desired resonance was absent, a situation occurring, for example, when thfe…","label":"The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology"},{"n":4,"work":"The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"It is not to be wondered at then, if every psychic phenomenon of the neurotic is permeated by this rigid system and appears like an analogy in which the lines of direction always stand out in relief.","label":"The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"inferiority-and-compensation","label":"Inferiority and compensation: is the striving to overcome felt inferiority the mainspring of the psyche?"},{"slug":"fictional-finalism","label":"Fictional finalism: is a person pulled by a self-created future goal rather than pushed by past causes?"},{"slug":"the-masculine-protest","label":"The masculine protest: is women's felt inferiority socially made rather than inborn?"}]}