Alfred Adler studied war neurosis among WWI soldiers

Person: Alfred Adler
Lived: 1870–1937
Field: Individual psychology
From: Austrian

The story

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Alfred Adler was a well-established Viennese physician who had founded his own school, individual psychology, after breaking with Sigmund Freud. The war began badly for him personally: his wife Raissa had taken their four children to visit her family in Russia, and it was five months before they obtained permission to make the difficult journey home.

In 1916 Adler was drafted as a military doctor. He served with the Austro-Hungarian Army, first on the Russian front and later at a children's hospital. Part of his duty was to recommend which wounded soldiers had recovered enough to return to the trenches. According to his biographer, the novelist Phyllis Bottome, this caused him great distress, because he desperately wanted to let them off.

Many of his patients were suffering not only from physical wounds but from the psychological effects of combat, then usually called shell shock. Adler's observations led to lectures and articles on war neurosis, which Vision magazine describes as a forerunner of what is known today as post-traumatic stress disorder.

The war also transformed his thinking more broadly. During the conflict he began to articulate the concept he called Gemeinschaftsgefühl, social interest or community feeling. Galvanised by what he had seen at first hand, he argued after the war that social feeling, the sense of belonging and cooperation with others, is the primary trait underlying mental health, an idea that became the heart of his psychology. Some colleagues dismissed it as religious science, but in a society that had watched statesmen and religious leaders fail to prevent the slaughter, his views found a wide audience.

In 1925 Adler wrote that if the world was to be saved, humanity must be raised to a level where it would no longer, like a child with a loaded pistol, risk destroying itself through misuse of its own power. His wartime experience fed directly into the child guidance clinics he founded in Vienna from 1919, built on the belief that cooperation could be learned in childhood.

Why it matters

Adler was among the doctors who took the psychological wounds of war seriously, and his response to the war gave his psychology its central idea of social belonging.

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.

Read the full profile

Alfred Adler

1870–1937 · Individual psychology

View profile →