Alfred Adler

Adler, Alfred 

Born Feb. 7, 1870, in Vienna; died May 28, 1937, in Aberdeen. Austrian doctor and psychologist, founder of the school of individual psychology. Adler originally affiliated himself with the adherents of Freud; later he founded his own school, which, with the creation of the International Society of Individual Psychology in 1924, became most influential during the 1920’s. In 1932 he left Austria and lived for the most part in the USA.

Although Adler was not in fact a student of Freud, they both agreed that instinctive drives and the unconscious play a definitive role in mental processes. In his work Study of Organ Inferiority (1907), Adler formulated a concept of illness as a disturbance of the balance in the relationship of the organ with its environment for which the organism tries to compensate. The principle of compensation, one of Adler’s fundamental concepts, is related to his subsequent teaching on homeostasis. Compensation is explained by Adler as the universal mechanism of psychological activity. Adler perceived the aspiration toward completeness and personal excellence, realized by compensation for the primary feeling of inferiority, as the basis of all human activity. This idea-goal, of which the individual is only dimly aware, becomes the center of the formation of personality, determining its psychic makeup. The character of the goal and the means for its realization create a unique life-style. The inferiority itself of the personality is revealed, however, only in relation to the environment; hence, Adler draws the conclusion that personality is social in its formation.

A number of the features of Adler’s system also appear in other psychological schools: the thesis of the primacy of the whole over separate psychological elements in gestalt psychology; the principle of compensation developed by German existentialist K. Jaspers and others; and the idea of the attainment of a “healthy society” with the help of therapy—by the so-called social Freudians, E. Fromm and K. Horney.

WORKS

Individual’no-psikhologicheskoe lechenie nevrosov. Moscow, 1913.
Praxis und Theorie der Individualpsychologie, 4th ed. Munich, 1930.
Menschenkenntnis, 5th ed. Zürich, 1947.
The Individual Psychology of A. Adler. New York, 1956.

REFERENCES

Orgler, H. A. Adler, the Man and His Work, 2nd ed. New York, 1950.
Way, L. A. Adler. An Introduction to His Psychology. London, 1956.

D. N. LIALIKOV