- Person
- Alfred Adler
- Lived
- 1870–1937
- Field
- Individual psychology
- From
- Austrian
The story
Alfred Adler was born in 1870 in Rudolfsheim, on the western edge of Vienna, the second of seven children of a Jewish grain merchant of Hungarian origin and his wife. His family life left a deep mark. He grew up in a strong rivalry with his older brother Sigmund, believed that his mother preferred his brother, and as a small child was confined by rickets while his brother ran and played. When Alfred was about three, a younger brother died of diphtheria in the bed next to him.
Such experiences may have sharpened his interest in a question every parent asks: why do children raised in the same family grow up with such different personalities? Adler's answer was that siblings do not really share the same environment. The oldest child grows up in a family with younger siblings, the middle child with both older and younger ones, and the youngest only with older ones. The position each child holds in what he called the family constellation shapes how that child sees the world.
In writings from 1908 onward he sketched how this might work. A firstborn enjoys the full attention of new parents until a second child arrives and the firstborn feels dethroned. Youngest children risk being overindulged, which can leave them less able to empathise with others. Middle children experience neither dethronement nor overindulgence, and may be most likely to succeed, but also to rebel and to feel squeezed out. Adler also distinguished a child's actual birth position from the psychological role the child takes on: a second child might, for example, behave like a firstborn.
Adler did not produce scientific proof for these specific predictions, and later research has been mixed. Large modern studies have found that earlier-born children score slightly higher on average on intelligence tests but have found little or no robust effect of birth order on personality traits. Writers such as Frank Sulloway, in his 1996 book Born to Rebel, have nonetheless continued to explore the idea.
The lasting value of Adler's hypothesis lay elsewhere. It extended psychology's attention beyond Freud's focus on parents to the influence of brothers and sisters. Adlerian therapists still use it not as a fixed rule but as a way to explore how a person's experience among siblings shaped what Adler called their style of life, the habitual way they approach friendship, love and work.
Why it matters
Adler's focus on siblings and family position opened a new way of understanding how families shape who we become, and it remains one of the most widely discussed ideas in popular psychology.
About Alfred Adler
Viennese physician who broke with Freud to found individual psychology, coined the “inferiority complex” and opened the world’s first child guidance clinics.
More about Alfred Adler
- Alfred Adler coined the term inferiority complexAlfred Adler introduced the idea of the inferiority complex, describing how feelings of inadequacy can shape personality and how people strive to compensate.
- Alfred Adler founded the school of individual psychologyAfter leaving Freud's circle in 1911, Alfred Adler founded the Society for Individual Psychology in 1912, the first major independent school of psychotherapy.
- Alfred Adler's first book linked health to social conditionsIn 1898 Alfred Adler published a health book for tailors arguing that their illnesses must be treated in light of their social and economic conditions.
- Alfred Adler influenced Maslow, Frankl and EllisAlfred Adler's ideas shaped later giants of psychotherapy, including Abraham Maslow, Viktor Frankl, Albert Ellis and Rollo May.
- Alfred Adler linked mental health to caring for othersAlfred Adler made social interest, or Gemeinschaftsgefühl, the core of mental health: a sense of belonging and a desire to contribute to the welfare of others.
- Alfred Adler replaced the analyst's couch with two chairsAlfred Adler was one of the first psychotherapists to discard the analytic couch in favour of two chairs, so therapist and patient could sit as equals.
- Alfred Adler studied war neurosis among WWI soldiersAs an army doctor in World War I, Alfred Adler treated traumatised soldiers and lectured on war neurosis, a forerunner of what is now called PTSD.
- Alfred Adler championed parent education and equalityAlfred Adler urged that children be raised as equal members of the family, opposed corporal punishment, and argued early for women's equality in psychology.
- Alfred Adler opened Vienna's first child guidance clinicIn 1919 Alfred Adler started the first child guidance clinic in Vienna; he and his associates went on to open 28, making Vienna the first city to give schoolchildren free therapy.
Sources
- Alfred Adler Wikipedia
- Alfred Adler: To Heal and to Educate Vision
- Birth order Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.