Alfred W. Adler was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology.
Background
Alfred Adler on February 7, 1870 in Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus, Vienna, Austria , the second oldest of six children of Leopold and Pauline Adler. His father, Leopold Adler, had come to Vienna from the Burgenland as a youth and was a grain merchant. Alfred's younger brother died in the bed next to him, when Alfred was only three years old. Alfred was an active, popular child and an average student who was also known for his competitive attitude toward his older brother, Sigmund. Early on, he developed rickets, which kept him from walking until he was four years old.
Education
Adler first decided to become a physician at the age of four. His teacher suggested to his father that Alfred be apprenticed to a cobbler rather than continue his schooling. To give his teacher a lesson, Alfred started to study hard, and soon became the best student in class.
After studying at University of Vienna, he specialized as an eye doctor, and later in neurology and psychiatry.
Career
From 1900 on, Adler's chief interest centered around psychiatric problems related to general medicine. In 1902, as one of the few who reacted with positive interest to Sigmund Freud's book on dream interpretation, he wrote a favorable review of it in a Viennese daily paper. Freud sent him a note inviting him to join his weekly discussion circle, in which new avenues of approach to the understanding of mental disease were being explored. Adler hesitated at first, since at that time he was already interested in a different field, namely, the influence of physical difficulties upon the development of the personality. However, when assured by Freud that many different views would be discussed, he accepted the invitation.
Adler never agreed with Freud's theory that the origin of mental disease is derived from an early sexual trauma, and he continued to oppose Freud's method of dream interpretation. From the beginning each of the two men tried to draw the other into his own special field of investigation, an attempt that was doomed to failure in view of the strong personalities involved.
Finally, in 1911, Adler left the circle of Freud, together with eight friends, developing from then on his own school of thought. He first named his group "Verein fürfur Freie Psychoanalytische Forschung". In 1912 he chose the term "individual psychology" for his school.
After publishing the book "The Neurotic Constitution" he was prevented from teaching in the medical school, so Adler lectured at many of the Viennese schools of higher education for adults.
During the war he served for two years as a military doctor near the Russian front, returning to Vienna in 1916 as head of a large hospital for wounded and shell-shocked cases.
From 1926 on, after his appointment at Columbia University, Adler spent only the summer months in Vienna, where he continued to lecture, to teach, and to see his patients. In 1932 he also began lecturing at Long Island College of Medicine. Although he had started to learn English only a few months before his first trip to New York, he established contact with his audience as easily in English as in his native German, and his lectures were always crowded.
Adler lectured extensively at many educational centers in the United States and Europe, and his last trip took him to Holland, France, England, and Scotland.
Adler was alienated from his Judaism. He did not want to be a member of a religion limited to one ethnic group. At the age of thirty-four, he had himself and his children baptized and became a Protestant. Late in life, in dialogues with a Lutheran minister, he attempted to reconcile psychology with religion and psychotherapy with salvation.
Politics
He was a social idealist, and was known as a socialist in his early years of association with psychoanalysis.
Views
Adler was an early advocate in psychology for prevention and emphasized the training of parents, teachers, social workers and so on in democratic approaches that allow a child to exercise their power through reasoned decision making whilst co-operating with others. Adler was pragmatic and believed that lay people could make practical use of the insights of psychology. Adler was also an early supporter of feminism in psychology and the social world, believing that feelings of superiority and inferiority were often gendered and expressed symptomatically in characteristic masculine and feminine styles.
He argued that human personality could be explained teleologically: parts of the individual's unconscious self ideally work to convert feelings of inferiority to superiority (or rather completeness).
Adler often emphasized one's birth order as having an influence on the style of life and the strengths and weaknesses in one's psychological make up. Adler believed that in a three-child family, the oldest child would be the most likely to suffer from neuroticism and substance addiction which he reasoned was a compensation for the feelings of excessive responsibility "the weight of the world on one's shoulders" and the melancholic loss of that once supremely pampered position. As a result, he predicted that this child was the most likely to end up in jail or an asylum. Youngest children would tend to be overindulged, leading to poor social empathy. Consequently, the middle child, who would experience neither dethronement nor overindulgence, was most likely to develop into a successful individual yet also most likely to be a rebel and to feel squeezed-out.
Adler had classified 'homosexuals' as falling among the "failures of life". Adler believed that he had established a connection between homosexuality and an inferiority complex towards one's own gender.
Quotations:
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.
Membership
Society for Individual Psychology
Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
1910 - 1911
Personality
His common therapeutic tools include the use of humor, historical instances, and paradoxical injunctions.
Interests
Music
Philosophers & Thinkers
Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rudolf Virchow, Jan Smuts
Connections
During his college years, he had become attached to a group of socialist students, among which he had found his wife-to-be, Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein, an intellectual and social activist from Russia studying in Vienna. They married in 1897 and had four children, two of whom became psychiatrists. Their children were writer, psychiatrist and Socialist activist Alexandra Adler; psychiatrist Kurt Adler; writer and activist Valentine Adler; and Cornelia "Nelly" Adler.
Author and journalist Margot Adler was Adler's granddaughter.