- Person
- Alfred Adler
- Lived
- 1870–1937
- Field
- Individual psychology
- From
- Austrian
The story
As a child in Vienna in the 1870s, Alfred Adler suffered from rickets, which kept him from walking until he was four. He sat on the sidelines and watched with envy as his older brother ran and played. Soon afterwards he fell seriously ill with pneumonia and heard a doctor tell his father there was no hope. He recovered and decided then to become a doctor, so that he would have a better defence against death. He later traced some of his ideas to these early experiences of weakness.
After qualifying at the University of Vienna in 1895, Adler began as an eye doctor and then moved into general practice in a less affluent part of the city, across from the Prater amusement park. His patients included circus performers, and it has been suggested that their unusual strengths and weaknesses fed his insights. In one of his earliest major works, Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation, he described how the body responds to a weak organ by compensating, sometimes so strongly that a weakness becomes a strength, as when a child with a weak leg grows up to be a great runner.
Over time Adler moved from physical weakness to feelings of inferiority. Everyone, he argued, feels inferior at times, especially as small and dependent children, and that feeling is not a disease but a spur to healthy striving. It becomes a problem only when the sense of inadequacy overwhelms a person and, instead of motivating them, leaves them discouraged and unable to grow. For that persistent, isolating state he used the term inferiority complex. He pointed to classical examples such as the orator Demosthenes, who was said to have trained intensively to overcome a speech defect.
Adler held that such feelings could also produce a paradoxical striving for superiority, in which a person tries to dominate others to escape a sense of weakness. But he believed equally in people's creative power to change for the better, and his therapy aimed to encourage rather than to diagnose.
The inferiority complex became Adler's most famous concept and passed into everyday language. It spoke directly to the problem of self-esteem and its effects on health, and it shaped later work on how encouragement, belonging and realistic goals help people grow.
Why it matters
The idea of the inferiority complex helped generations of people understand problems of self-esteem and gave therapists and teachers a hopeful framework for overcoming them.
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 showed how birth order shapes personalityAlfred Adler argued that a child's place among siblings, first, middle or youngest, influences personality, extending psychology beyond the parent-child bond.
- 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
- Inferiority complex 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.