Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler was an Austrian physician who broke with Sigmund Freud in 1911 to found Individual Psychology, a school of psychotherapy centered on feelings of inferiority and the drive for social belonging rather than sexual instinct. Originally a member of Freud’s inner circle in Vienna, Adler proposed that neurosis arose from organ defects and compensatory striving rather than from repressed sexuality. His expulsion from the Freudian movement marked the first major schism in psychoanalysis and forced a distinction between “Freudian” and the broader category “psychoanalysis” that had previously seemed synonymous.
Life and Context
Adler’s own account of psychology begins not with autobiography but with a theoretical claim about the nature of mind itself. In Understanding Human Nature (1927), the popular lectures he delivered to a general audience, Adler opens with what amounts to his first principle: “We attribute a consciousness only to moving, living organisms. The existence of consciousness presupposes free motion.”(Adler, Alfred, 1927) From this biological starting point — consciousness arises from the need to adapt — Adler built a psychology that was always oriented toward the organism’s relationship to its environment rather than toward internal drives. The psyche, in his formulation, is “an organ for attack and defence” whose purpose is to guarantee survival and development.(Adler, Alfred, 1927)
By 1906 the group had grown to seventeen members, soon reaching twenty-two, and held meetings with scientific presentations and formal discussions in which every member participated, with Freud reserved the last word but the meetings not exclusively centered on him.(Makari, George, 2008) However, a 1907 visit by Max Eitingon revealed that members held wildly divergent views on the cause of neurosis, ranging from constitutional disposition to organ defects, sexual trauma, and psychic conflict, contradicting any notion of a unified Viennese school.(Makari, George, 2008)
Organ Inferiority and Compensation
In 1907 Adler presented his theory of organ inferiority to the Wednesday Society. Where Freud located the origins of neurosis in sexual conflict, Adler proposed that the body itself — its weak organs, its constitutional flaws — drove psychological development through compensation. A person born with a defective organ would develop psychological strategies to overcome that deficiency, and neurosis arose when compensation failed.
The reception was revealing. Freud himself praised Adler’s effort, saying “much of what Adler said may be correct,” and Hugo Heller called it “an impressive intellectual achievement” and “a continuation and supplement of Freud’s ideas.”(Makari, George, 2008) Makari’s analysis in Revolution in Mind (2008) identifies why Adler’s challenge succeeded where others failed: his theory was abstract and speculative, offering no direct clinical data that forced anyone to abandon Freud’s framework. It could be entertained as a “fascinating theoretical physiology” without competing with psychoanalytic theories of mind.(Makari, George, 2008) The contrast with Wilhelm Stekel’s clinical challenges — which did threaten Freud’s authority because they offered empirical evidence of cures achieved through non-Freudian methods — illuminates how the early psychoanalytic community tolerated theoretical dissent but not empirical refutation.
The Masculine Protest and the Break with Freud
On January 14, 1911, Adler delivered the first of two lectures to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society under the title “Controversial Problems of Psychoanalysis.”(Makari, George, 2008) He directly challenged Freud’s libido theory, arguing that libido was “artificially compounded and increased by masculine protest.”(Makari, George, 2008) A few weeks later he delivered a second lecture.(Makari, George, 2008) In these lectures, Adler proposed his theory of masculine protest, which held that aggression, not sexuality, was the core drive and that all neurosis involved repression of anything psychically deemed weak or feminine.(Makari, George, 2008)
Freud’s response was not empirical refutation. He did not prove Adler wrong. Instead, he declared that Adler’s views were “not psychoanalysis.” As Makari observes, Adler’s marginalization and expulsion from the Vienna Society resulted from three concurrent shifts: Adler had transformed himself into a competitor rather than a collaborator; Freud had become the leader of a movement intent on protecting itself; and the Society had changed from “a ragtag group of partial adherents into a community that enforced a commitment to its core beliefs.”(Makari, George, 2008)
Individual Psychology
After his resignation, nine members — mostly socialists who had joined the Society in 1910 — followed Adler to form the Society for Free Psychoanalytic Investigation. For the first time, there was a visible divide between “Freudian” and “psychoanalysis,” two words that had previously seemed synonymous.(Makari, George, 2008) After 1920, as Carl Jung adopted the name “Analytical Psychology” for his system, Adler renamed his group the Society for Individual Psychology, abandoning any claim to the psychoanalytic label.(Makari, George, 2008)
Adler’s system rests on several interlocking concepts, all presented in Understanding Human Nature as derived from clinical observation rather than theoretical speculation.
Teleology. All psychological phenomena are goal-directed.(Adler, Alfred, 1927) “The life of the psyche is inconceivable without a goal towards which all our efforts are directed,” Adler writes.(Adler, Alfred, 1927) This goal is formed in the first months of life through environmental influences and shapes the individual’s lifelong behavior pattern.(Adler, Alfred, 1927) The striving for a goal is a fundamental fact, both in conscious and unconscious life.(Adler, Alfred, 1927)
Social feeling (Gemeinschaftsgefuhl). In Understanding Human Nature Adler insists that the human psyche cannot be understood independently of social relationships; these person-to-person relationships are governed by the nature of the cosmos and determined by human institutions.(Adler, Alfred, 1927) Human beings are among the weaker animals, unable to live alone, and communal living with division of labour became necessary for survival.(Adler, Alfred, 1927) Adaptation to the community is therefore “the most important psychological function,” and virtues such as responsibility and loyalty are expressions of the universally valid principle of communal life.(Adler, Alfred, 1927) [GAP: A definition of social feeling as a capacity for identification and orientation toward the common welfare is not present in the cited cards.] Where Freud claims children’s love is directed toward their own bodies, Adler asserts that children’s love is always directed outward toward others, a trait observable in children over two years old.(Adler, Alfred, 1927)
The inferiority complex and compensation. The feeling of inferiority is universal in childhood — “the driving force and starting point from which every childish striving originates.”(Adler, Alfred, 1927) Adler draws the analogy to organic compensation: just as the heart enlarges in circulatory disorders, the psyche develops compensatory mechanisms to overcome perceived deficiency.(Adler, Alfred, 1927) Organ inferiority — whether expressed through difficulties with movement, inadequate organ function, or generally low resistance to infection — does not merely disadvantage the child physically; it colors the entire subsequent development of character and shapes the child’s habitual response to the world.(Adler, Alfred, 1927) Children’s striving for security leads to a secondary drive toward dominance and superiority over their environment.(Adler, Alfred, 1927) When inferiority feelings are intensified to pathological levels, the compensatory striving becomes so exaggerated that ordinary life relationships are never satisfying — the inferiority complex proper.(Adler, Alfred, 1927) What matters is not objective reality but the child’s interpretation of their situation: “subjective perceived inferiority drives behavior, not actual inferiority.”(Adler, Alfred, 1927)
Birth order. Adler was among the first theorists to argue that position in the family constellation shapes character. The eldest child tends toward conservative, power-respecting characteristics; second-born children develop “a persistent racecourse attitude” striving to surpass the firstborn; youngest children, stimulated by perceived helplessness, sometimes become the most capable family members.(Adler, Alfred, 1927)(Adler, Alfred, 1927) Only children, receiving unbroken parental attention, are prone to dependency and inability to face independent challenges.(Adler, Alfred, 1927)
Adler explicitly rejected the belief that character is hereditary, calling it harmful because it hinders educators in their task and enables them to shirk their responsibilities.(Adler, Alfred, 1927) Adler references Marx and Engels’ materialist stratification as a partial truth, while noting that Individual Psychology reveals when individuals give mistaken responses to socio-economic demands.(Adler, Alfred, 1927)
Ethics and the Cooperative Ideal
Szasz, in The Myth of Mental Illness (1960), draws a distinction between two antithetical ethical orientations within psychoanalysis. Freud’s ethical values — rationalism, self-discipline, and the preservation of social arrangements — were drawn from medicine, nineteenth-century science, and Western philosophy, but were presented as value-neutral science. Adler, by contrast, explicitly articulated his ethical ideals, centering them on cooperation and social interest.(Szasz, Thomas, 1960) Where Freud insisted that the analyst-analysand relationship must be “that of a superior and a subordinate,” Adler’s Individual Psychology envisioned therapy as cooperation between equals.(Szasz, Thomas, 1960)
Falsifiability and the Legacy Question
Adler’s departure from Freudian orthodoxy had an unexpected philosophical consequence. Karl Popper, working with children in post-World War I Vienna, encountered both Adlerians and Freudians and was struck by their ability to offer “totally dissimilar but seemingly irrefutable accounts” of the same events. This experience became foundational to Popper’s theory of falsifiability: if a theory could explain any outcome equally well, it was not scientific. Psychoanalysis — both Freudian and Adlerian — became Popper’s paradigmatic example of unfalsifiable theory.(Makari, George, 2008)
Adler emigrated to the United States in 1934, accepting a professorship at the Long Island College of Medicine. He died on May 28, 1937, of a heart attack while on a lecture tour in Aberdeen, Scotland. He was sixty-seven. His influence on subsequent psychology — particularly on humanistic psychology through Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, on cognitive therapy through Albert Ellis, and on family systems therapy through Rudolf Dreikurs — was arguably wider than his reputation. Many of his core ideas (the inferiority complex, birth order effects, the importance of social context in psychopathology) entered the common vocabulary of psychology without retaining their Adlerian label.
See Also
- sigmund-freud
- carl-jung
- psychoanalysis
- individual-psychology
- karl-popper
- thomas-szasz
- anti-psychiatry
- wilhelm-stekel