- Person
- Alfred Adler
- Lived
- 1870–1937
- Field
- Individual psychology
- From
- Austrian
The story
After his split from Sigmund Freud in 1911, Alfred Adler built an independent school, individual psychology, that stressed social belonging, goals and the creative power of each person to change. He travelled and lectured for some 25 years to spread his socially oriented approach. From the mid-1920s he lectured regularly in the United States, taught at Columbia University and later held a chair at the Long Island College of Medicine. He died of a heart attack in 1937 while on a lecture tour in Aberdeen, Scotland.
His influence can be traced in the work of several of the most important figures in later psychotherapy. Abraham Maslow, while doing research at Columbia University in the 1930s, found in Adler a mentor; he went on to found what he called humanistic psychology. Rollo May, a leading voice of existential psychotherapy, studied with Adler, and his later work shares theoretical similarities with Adler's.
Viktor Frankl joined Adler's circle as a young man and in 1925 published a paper in Adler's International Journal of Individual Psychology before the two parted ways over Frankl's insistence that meaning was the central human motive. In his bestselling Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl defined his own Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, logotherapy, in relation to the schools of Freud and Adler. Albert Ellis, who in 1957 set out the first form of cognitive behavioural therapy, listed Adler among the writers who shaped his thinking.
Adler's writings also anticipated, and were at times strikingly consistent with, later insights of Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm. The historian of psychiatry Henri Ellenberger wrote that it would be hard to find another author from whom so much had been borrowed without acknowledgement.
Through the work of Rudolf Dreikurs, who in 1952 founded the North American Society of Adlerian Psychology, and many others worldwide, Adlerian ideas remain strong more than 80 years after his death. Organisations such as the International Association for Individual Psychology support teaching institutes in countries from Austria and Israel to Japan and Peru, and journals in North America and Britain are devoted to his approach.
Why it matters
Many of today's most widely used therapies carry Adler's emphasis on meaning, choice, encouragement and social connection, often without his name attached.
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 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 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
- Viktor Frankl Wikipedia
- Abraham Maslow 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.