Biography of Alfred Adler, the creator of individual psychology

Alfred Adler was a Viennese doctor who had a great impact on theories about the human mind. Together with Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung closes the circle of “the big three” or, in other words, the founders of what is known as “depth psychology.”

Adler was born in Vienna (Austria) on February 7, 1870. He was the second of six children. His father was a Jewish grain merchant and his mother a housewife. He spent his childhood in the suburbs of the Austrian capital. I had a health very fragile, since he suffered from rickets and was also hit by a car on one occasion.

One of his brothers died of diphtheria when he was 4 years old and he did not get sick, even though they slept in the same bed. However, at the age of 5 he contracted a brutal pneumonia that left him marked forever. It was then that he made the decision to become a doctor. Otherwise, it was a child normal who was distinguished by being very outgoing and playful. He did not feel particularly inclined towards studying, but on the other hand he was very competitive.

He received his degree as a doctor at the University of Vienna in 1895. He began working as an ophthalmologist. He came into contact with people who had visual disabilities and his ideas about the human mind began to be forged. Later he switched to general medicine and there he treated circus people, which also influenced the ideas of inferiority and superiority, which he would develop after him. He later worked as a neurologist and then as a psychiatrist.

The meeting between Alfred Adler and Freud

Thanks to his medical practice, Alfred Adler began to be interested in the phenomena of the human mind. Without yet having a clear objective, The young Viennese doctor began to collect material on the physical and psychological consequences of disabilities or organic limitations. In 1902 he personally met Sigmund Freud and was very attracted to his ideas.

Freud himself He invited him to be part of his closest circle. Alfred Adler began participating in the famous gatherings at Freud’s house, or the “Wednesday Psychological Society,” which would later be called the “Vienna Psychoanalytic Association.” In 1904 he expressed his first disagreements with Freudian theory, but remained within the psychoanalytic society at the express request of his mentor.

In 1910 he began to edit the “Review of Psychoanalysis”, together with Freud and Stekel. Adler was the director of the publication. Tensions with Freud’s theory grow and In August 1911 he decided to leave traditional psychoanalysis forever.. She announces it through an editorial in the magazine she edited.

Adler’s disagreements with classical psychoanalytic theory

Alfred Adler shared many of Sigmund Freud’s postulates. In fact, he never completely separated himself from them. However, also had serious reservations about certain emphases and approaches of the father of psychoanalysis. Basically it showed disagreements on two major points:

Adler did not believe that the sexual was the essential regulator of human behavior. Nor did he believe in the absolute determinism of the unconscious.

Unlike Freud, Adler thought that the basic drive of the human being was the will to power and not the sexual instinct.. His thinking was strongly influenced by the philosophy of Nietzsche. He was convinced that the will to power in human beings was as important or even more important than the sexual impulse. He maintained that his frustration gave rise to an inferiority complex, which over time became the breeding ground for different psychological disorders.

At the same time, Alfred Adler rejected the idea that the first experiences were fixed in the unconscious and became the determinants of psychic life.. On the contrary, he placed enormous value on the individual’s ability to direct and give meaning to his life in the here and now.

Adler laid the foundations for his theory based on what he had observed in his patients. Many of them had a long history of physical limitations. In this sense, he found that while some converted these experiences into sufficient motivation to develop original ways to compensate for them, others remained anchored to his frustrations and were unable to move forward. Starting from this, Adler gave enormous importance to the human will to get out of difficulties.

The individual psychology of Alfred Adler

Adler founded the “Free Psychoanalytic Society” in 1911, which in 1912 was renamed the “Society of Individual Psychology.”. The name individual psychology may seem contradictory since Adler places great importance on social and environmental factors in the formation and well-being of people. In this sense, the label of individual is coined and identified with Adler because he thought that although this social influence was great, it had a different effect on each person. A reasoning similar to what we did before with disability.

One of the first concepts postulated by Alfred Adler was that of “compensation.” It was based on the “constitutional pathology” model and stated that the body, on its own, offers compensation for any organic failure. That compensation, in principle, took place in the mind and was then translated to the body. As an ophthalmologist, he himself noticed that several patients, with significant vision deficiencies, became excellent readers.

The main force in each individual is the will to power, according to Adler. However, When this drive is frustrated, what he calls “inferiority complex” appears.. It is a neurotic feeling of inability or incompetence, derived from experiences and the environment. To compensate for this condition, a “superiority complex” also arises through which the individual develops disproportionately high perceptions and desires for his or her own person.

In those cases, the clearing process brings up two options. One, that the individual compensates for his feeling of inferiority through the development of new potentialities. The other, which the individual becomes trapped in his feeling of inferiority and develops an unhealthy superiority complex that leads to cynicism, frustration, indolence and even crime.

The legacy of Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler’s theories had a great impact in his time. They not only gained great popularity in Europe, but also in the United States, where he was a successful lecturer and even professor at prestigious universities. This despite the fact that his books and ideas were banned in his homeland and in various places in Europe during the rise of Nazism.

The emphasis on the will of the individual and the ability to modify his destiny had a great impact on later currents, such as humanistic psychology, the social psychoanalysis of Erich Fromm and the Logotherapy of Viktor Frankl. Likewise, many of his postulates are recurrently used by the so-called “self-help” psychology.

The basic approaches of individual psychology were enshrined in the work “The Neurotic Character.”, published in 1912. Other works that collect Adler’s legacy are “The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology” (1920); “Knowledge of Man” (1926); “Understanding human nature” (1928-1930); “The education of children” (1929); “The science of living” (1957); and “Superiority and social interest” (posthumous work of 1965).

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