A sickly boy on the edge of Vienna
Alfred Adler was born on February 7, 1870, at Mariahilfer Straße 208 in Rudolfsheim, then a village on the western edge of Vienna and now part of the city’s fifteenth district. He was the second of seven children of Leopold Adler, a grain merchant from a Hungarian-Jewish family, and Pauline Beer. The family was Jewish but attended synagogue only occasionally.
His childhood was a catalogue of frailty. Rickets kept him from walking until he was about four, and he watched with envy as his robust elder brother Sigmund ran and jumped. When he was not yet four, his younger brother Rudolf died of diphtheria in the bed beside him. Soon afterwards Alfred himself fell desperately ill with pneumonia and later recalled hearing the doctor tell his father that the boy was lost. He was also run over in the street, twice. Out of that early brush with death came a resolve to become a doctor, and, decades later, a psychology built on the idea that human beings strive all their lives to overcome a sense of weakness.
Doctor to tailors and acrobats
Adler studied medicine at the University of Vienna and graduated in 1895. He trained first as an eye doctor, then set up as a general practitioner in a modest district of Leopoldstadt facing the Prater, Vienna’s great amusement park. Among his patients were circus performers, acrobats and strongmen, many of whom had turned a physical weakness into an extraordinary strength through training. He came to believe that the body and mind constantly compensate for “organ inferiorities” an idea he later developed into a theory of the whole personality.
He also cared about the social causes of illness. In 1898 he published a Health Book for the Tailoring Trade, which argued that the cramped, poor working conditions of tailors made them sick, an early statement of the social medicine that would mark his career. The year before, in 1897, he had married Raissa Timofeyevna Epstein, a Russian-born student and committed socialist whom he met in Vienna. Through her circle the couple came to know Russian revolutionaries, among them Leon Trotsky.
Freud’s first great dissenter
In the autumn of 1902 Sigmund Freud invited Adler, who had defended Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, to join a small group of doctors who met at Freud’s home on Wednesday evenings. The Wednesday Society grew into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and Adler became one of its leading figures; in 1910 he was elected its president.
But he had never accepted Freud’s view that sexuality was the root of neurosis. In 1907 he published his Study of Organ Inferiority, and in 1908 he argued that aggression was a basic drive in its own right. Increasingly he saw the human being as a whole person moving towards goals rather than a battleground of buried instincts. The disagreements became personal, and in 1911 Adler resigned with a group of supporters, the first major split in the history of psychoanalysis. They founded the Society for Free Psychoanalytic Research, soon renamed the Society for Individual Psychology. Freud never forgave him.
Individual psychology
Adler called his system individual psychology, from the Latin individuum, that which cannot be divided: the person, he insisted, must be understood as a unity, and always within a social setting. Its central idea was that every child begins life small, dependent and weaker than the adults around it, and so experiences feelings of inferiority. How a person responds, whether by courageous effort, by withdrawal, or by an exaggerated drive for power over others, shapes a lifelong “style of life.” Adler coined the term “inferiority complex” for the paralysing form of that feeling, and described overcompensation as its mirror image.
Against the striving for personal superiority he set what he called Gemeinschaftsgefühl, usually translated as social interest or community feeling: the sense of belonging to and contributing to humanity. Mental health, for Adler, meant meeting the three great tasks of life, work, friendship and love, in a spirit of cooperation. He also pointed to the influence of birth order on character, read his patients’ earliest memories as clues to their private logic, and argued that a person’s goals mattered more than his past. His major books included The Neurotic Constitution (1912), Understanding Human Nature (1927) and What Life Should Mean to You (1931); in all he published more than 300 books and articles.
Healing and educating Vienna
During the First World War Adler served as a military doctor in the Austro-Hungarian army, first near the Russian front and later at a children’s hospital, and wrote on war neurosis. The slaughter deepened his conviction that social feeling was the decisive question for humanity.
After the war, Red Vienna, the city governed by the Social Democrats, gave him room to act. In 1919 he opened the first child guidance clinic in Vienna, and with his colleagues he went on to establish 28 of them, attached to schools, where teachers, parents and children could be counselled together, often in front of an audience of teachers in training. Vienna became the first city to offer schoolchildren free educational therapy. Adler lectured at adult education centres, trained teachers, and helped to found an experimental school run on individual psychology principles. He was an early advocate of equality between the sexes, arguing that the cultural overvaluation of masculinity harmed women and men alike.
A Jew in Vienna, a convert in name
Adler was born a Jew, and that identity shaped his fate even though he did not practise the religion. In 1904 he and his two eldest daughters were baptised at the Protestant church in Vienna’s Dorotheergasse. Biographers disagree about what the step meant: it seems to have owed more to assimilation into Viennese society, and perhaps a dislike of any faith confined to one people, than to Christian belief, and his family described themselves as freethinkers. Some modern accounts, including Wikipedia, regard the evidence for his conversion as thin and describe him as having remained ethnically Jewish throughout his life.
Whatever his formal status, others saw him as Jewish. As Austrian politics turned authoritarian and antisemitism rose in the early 1930s, his child guidance clinics were closed, largely, by most accounts, because of his Jewish origins. By then Adler had already begun to build a new base in the United States.
America and a death in Aberdeen
From 1926 Adler made long lecture tours of the United States, where his clear, practical ideas found an eager public. He taught at Columbia University as a visiting professor at the end of the 1920s and then accepted a chair in medical psychology at the Long Island College of Medicine in New York, which became his home in the mid-1930s. He was a warm, sociable man who held court in Viennese cafés, and a lecturer who spoke in plain language to large audiences rather than only to specialists.
In the spring of 1937 he set out on a European lecture tour. On May 28, 1937, after a morning walk in Aberdeen, Scotland, he suffered a heart attack and died in the ambulance taking him to hospital, aged 67. He was cremated in Edinburgh, but his ashes went unclaimed and were lost for decades; they were rediscovered at Warriston Crematorium in 2007 and in 2011 were returned to Vienna for burial. Freud remained hostile even then, remarking in a letter that the world had rewarded Adler richly for contradicting psychoanalysis.
A family in the century’s storms
Adler and Raissa had four children. Alexandra and Kurt both became psychiatrists in New York and carried on their father’s work. Their eldest daughter, Valentine, a writer and committed communist, moved to the Soviet Union with her Hungarian husband, Gyula Sas. In January 1937, months before her father’s death, she was arrested in Moscow during Stalin’s Great Purge, convicted of “Trotskyite activities” and sentenced to ten years; she died in a Gulag camp in 1942. The family learned her fate only after the war, when Albert Einstein, a family friend, intervened to discover what had happened. Raissa Adler died in New York in 1962.
Legacy
Adler’s vocabulary passed into everyday speech so completely that his name is often forgotten: the inferiority complex, compensation, the significance of birth order and lifestyle are now common currency. His insistence that people are goal-directed, social beings who can change by understanding the meanings they give to their lives influenced a whole generation of psychologists, including Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, Viktor Frankl and Albert Ellis, and anticipated much of humanistic and cognitive therapy. Through his student Rudolf Dreikurs, Adlerian ideas shaped parent education and classroom practice across the United States.
Adlerian societies, training institutes and journals continue his work around the world, and school counselling owes a direct debt to the clinics he opened in Vienna in 1919. A 2002 survey of the most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century ranked him 67th. The frail child who had heard a doctor give him up for lost built his life’s work on a hopeful proposition: that weakness can be the beginning of strength, and that the measure of a person is what he contributes to others.
Sources & further reading
Alfred Adler, Wikipedia · Alfred Adler: To Heal and to Educate, Vision · Alexandra Adler, Adlerpedia · Valentine Adler, Wikipedia · Alfred Adler, Wikiquote · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.