Alfred Adler
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Alfred Adler (February 7, 1870 – May 28, 1937) was an Austrian medical doctor and psychologist, founder of the school of individual psychology.
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[edit] Early career
Adler was influenced by the mental construct ideas of Hans Vaihinger and the literature of Dostoyevsky, and developed a theory of organic inferiority and compensation. He founded the Society of Individual Psychology in 1912. He decided that he wunted 2 b a psycoloalogist at the age of fetus.
[edit] Adler's approach to human personality
Adler's 1912 book, Über den nervösen Charakter (The Neurotic Character) defines his key ideas. He argued that human personality could be explained teleologically, separate strands dominated by the guiding purpose of the individual's unconscious self ideal to convert feelings of inferiority to superiority (or rather completeness). The desires of the self ideal were countered by social and ethical demands. If the corrective factors were disregarded and the individual over-compensated, then an inferiority complex would occur, fostering the danger of the individual becoming egocentric, power-hungry and aggressive or worse.
Adler took a holistic approach to human personality. The name of his teaching -"individual psychology" was chosen to reflect it. Adler developed a scheme of the personality types:
- The Getting or Leaning type are those who selfishly take without giving back. These people also tend to be anti-social and have low activity levels.
- The Avoiding types are those that hate being defeated. They may be successful, but have not taken any risks getting there. They are likely to have low social contact in fear of rejection or defeat in any way.
- The Ruling Dominant type strive for power and are willing to manipulate situations and people, anything to get their way. People of this type are also prone to anti-social behavior.
- The Social Useful types are those who are very outgoing and very active. They have a lot of social contact and strive to make changes for the good.
Although many of these ideas differed from Freud's in many ways, he did agree with Freud that early childhood experiences are important to development.
[edit] On birth order and its effects on personality
Many of Adler's theories on individual psychology focus on birth order, referring to the placement of siblings within the family. Adler believed that the firstborn child would be loved and nurtured by the family until the arrival of a second child. This second child would cause the first born to suffer feelings of dethronement, no longer being the center of attention. This is not what my textbook says!! This info on birth order is wrong Adler believed that in a three-child family, the oldest child would be the most likely to suffer from neuroticism and substance addiction. As a result, Adler 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 overindulgence, was most likely to develop into a successful individual.
While Adler argued this viewpoint throughout the early 1900s, he never produced any scientific support for the birth order roles. Recent research has confirmed the importance of birth order in shaping personality but recent investigation by multiple researchers has shown little evidence of a neurotic firstborn and a successful middle child.
[edit] On homosexuality
Along with prostitution and criminality, he classified homosexuality among the "failures of life." In 1917, he began his writings on homosexuality with a 52 page brochure and sporadically published more thoughts throughout the rest of his life.
The Dutch psychiatrist Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg underlines how Alfred Adler came to his conclusions for, in 1917, Adler believed that he had established a connection between homosexuality and an inferiority complex towards one’s own gender.
Recently it has been noted that his theory regarding homosexuality is so deeply entrenched in the dominant culture of the time that a revision is needed and in contemporary Adlerian thought homosexuality is no longer considered one of the "failures of life".
[edit] Adler becomes a well known figure in psychiatry
His efforts were halted by World War I, during which he served as a doctor with the Austrian Army. Post-war his influence increased greatly into the 1930s, he established a number of child guidance clinics from 1921 and was a frequent lecturer in Europe and the United States, becoming a visiting professor at Columbia University in 1927. Therapeutically his methods avoided the concentration on adult psyche by attempting to pre-empt the problems in the child by encouraging and promoting social interest and also by avoiding pampering and neglect. In adults the therapy relied on the exclusion of blame or a superior attitude by the practitioner, the reduction of resistance by raising awareness of individual behaviour and the refusal to become adversarial. Common therapeutic tools included the use of humour, historical instances, and paradoxical injunctions. Adler's popularity was related to the comparative optimism and comprehensibility of his ideas compared to those of Freud or Jung. He famously commented, "The test of one's behavior pattern: relationship to society, relationship to one's work, relationship to sex."
[edit] Emigration and Death
In 1932, after most of his Austrian clinics were closed due to his Jewish heritage, Adler left Austria for a professorship at the Long Island College of Medicine. His death from a heart attack in Aberdeen, Scotland during a lecture tour in 1937, was a blow to the influence of his ideas although a number of them were taken up by neo-Freudians.
Nonetheless, there exist presently several schools dedicated to carrying on the work of Alfred Adler such as The Adler School of Professional Psychology which was founded as The Alfred Adler Institute of Chicago by Adler's protégé, Rudolf Dreikurs, and the Alfred Adler Institutes of San Francisco and Northwestern Washington, dedicated to Adler's original teachings and style of psychotherapy. There are also various organizations promoting Dr. Adler's orientation towards mental and social wellbeing. These include ICASSI and the North American Society for Adlerian Psychology (NASAP).
[edit] Publications
His key publications were The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1927), Understanding Human Nature (1927) and What Life Could Mean to You.
The Alfred Adler Institute of Northwestern Washington has recently published the first ten of the twelve-volume set of The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, covering his writings from 1898-1937. An entirely new translation of Adler's magnum opus, The Neurotic Character, is featured in Volume 1.
- Volume 1 : The Neurotic Character — 1907
- Volume 2 : Journal Articles 1898-1909
- Volume 3 : Journal Articles 1910-1913
- Volume 4 : Journal Articles 1914-1920
- Volume 5 : Journal Articles 1921-1926
- Volume 6 : Journal Articles 1927-1931
- Volume 7 : Journal Articles 1931-1937
- Volume 8 : Lectures to Physicians & Medical Students
- Volume 9 : Case Histories
- Volume 10 : Case Readings & Demonstrations
- Volume 11 : Education for Prevention
- Volume 12 : The General System of Individual Psychology
