for the Adler Curious

Who was Alfred Adler?

Alfred Adler was a physician, philosopher, psychologist, counselor, educator, coach, parent, friend, and loved by those he walked with in life. Above these honors, he was a student, and he was always curious. In the beginning, Alfred Adler specialized as an ophthalmologist aimed to see the world through the eyes of others. Later, he settled on general practice working to connect organ inferiority to psychological experience. Adler worked at hearing with the ears of others, and walking in the shoes of others, to understand their labor and the efforts they’ve made to make sense of their life’s journey with the physical endowments they were given.

Biographically, his story began on a crisp chilly Monday. Thrown in the world like Heidegger’s Dasein, Alfred Adler landed in the zeitgeist of Vienna on February 7th, 1870. Adler and 726,000 other lives fashioned the culture of Vienna, Austria. A city of high culture and modernism, recognized for composing the First Viennese School (Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) and Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern). Vienna raised the Vienna Secession art movement, set the stage for shaping the architectural legacy of Adolf Loos, and acted as an ideological breeding ground for the Vienna Circle; a group of philosophers and scientists unified by manufacturing philosophy scientifically using modern logic.

Although there are no accounts of Alfred Adler’s participation in any of the aforementioned movements, we can imagine how these ideas influenced a curious student and physician like Alfred Adler. In his own teachings, he includes concepts from thinkers like Hans Vaiginer (Fictionalism), and Frederick Nietzsche (Will to Power). In Adler’s direct path however was a growing movement within Austria established by the works of Sigmund Freud, the Psychoanalytic Society. Sigmund Freud was influenced by logical empiricism, determined to transform psychology into a hard science by means of explaining human behavior through biology and sexual trauma. Sigmund Freud successfully captured Alfred Adler’s curiosity with his book called, “Dream Interpretations”, but he did not capture Alfred Adler’s spirit, as Adler never agreed with Freud’s interpretations.

Before reading Freud, Adler had been studying the health conditions of tailors at work and wrote a book three years after graduating with his M.D. degree at the University of Vienna. In Adler’s first book, he kept a central tenant that would follow him throughout his entire life, to understand a person, the person must be viewed as a whole, as a functioning entity, reacting to their environment as well as to their physical endowment, rather than as a summation of instincts, drives, and other psychological manifestations.

In 1902, Freud invited Adler to the Psychoanalytic Circle where Freud promised to hear out Adler’s ideas. Adler was collecting material on patients with physical handicaps and studying both their organic and psychological reactions to them. Freud did not give Adler much room to express his ideas and in 1907 Adler published his book on organ inferiority and its compensation. The theory diverged from Freud’s original theories that mental difficulties were caused exclusively by sexual trauma, theories that Adler never accepted from the beginning of their relationship. Adler also opposed the generalizations when dreams were interpreted, in each instance, as sexual wish fulfillment. 

By 1911, Adler left Freud’s circle with eight colleagues and formed the psychological system, “Individual Psychology”. The term, Individual - as its Latin derivation meant “indivisible” - the reference was tied to the essential unity of a person and their unity to a system of people. Adler would continue his teachings between the U.S. and Europe, Spending May to October in Vienna, and the academic year lecturing in the States from 1926 to May 28, 1937, the day he collapsed on the streets of Aberdeen, Scotland, on his way to deliver his lectures before his heart failed within minutes. 
Adler’s comprehensive contribution to the field of psychology is plenty. He pioneered ideas and techniques that have become the basis for most contemporary work including Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Reality Therapy, Solution-Focused Therapy, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, Existential Therapy, Holistic Psychology, and Family Therapy. Theorists as diverse as Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow, Albert Ellis, and Aaron T. Beck credit Adler’s work as an important basis for their own contributions. In some sense, Adler developed the first Positive Psychology and Transpersonal or Third Wave Psychology.

He was one of the first to utilize a short-term, active, focused, and solution-oriented approach to psychotherapy. Adler’s work to this day is still used in professions and practices of school psychology, school counseling, the community mental health movement, parent education, and mental health services. His work has even expanded into business as organizational behavior and a need for understanding human relationships within organizations continues to be a paramount conversation in the 21st century. The work of Alfred Adler opened a dynamic and vital view of human development, and as the North American Society of Adlerian Psychology, we are excited to celebrate the continuing growth and thriving of Adlerian Psychology in an ever-evolving world searching for solutions to social challenges.