Home > International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis > Adler, Alfred (1870-1937)

An Austrian physician, psychologist, and psychotherapist, Alfred Adler was born February 7, 1870, in Vienna and died May 28, 1937, in Aberdeen, Scotland. The son of a grain merchant, he was raised in Vienna and received his medical degree in 1895. After opening his medical practice, he took an interest in social issues and, in 1902, became part of Sigmund Freud's circle of friends. He was one of the most active members of the group and one of the most original. After creating the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) in 1910, he became the head of the Vienna group and, with Stekel, became co-editor of the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, founded the same year.

In 1911 he left the IPA with nine other members because of irreconcilable theoretical differences and founded the Verein für Freie Psychoanalytische Forschung (Society for Free Analytic Research), which he transformed in 1913 into the Verein für Individual psychologie (Society for Individual Psychology). After 1914 he was editor (with Carl Furtmüller) of his own publication, Zeitschrift für Individual psychologie (Journal of Individual Psychology), the publication of which was interrupted in 1916, becoming, in 1923, the Internationale Zeitschrift für Individual psychologie (International Journal of Individual Psychology). In 1912 he tried to obtain a research position at the University of Vienna, but was refused.

Interested in practice and educational issues in particular, after 1919 he established a number educational clinics (for teachers, parents, and students), which served as models for practitioners abroad. In 1929 he created the first dispensary of individual psychology (for adults and children). He was also involved in the training of teachers, for he had worked at the Vienna teacher's college since 1924, which brought him closer to the city's educators, on whom he exercised considerable influence.

After 1926 he gave lectures throughout Europe and the United States, initially at Columbia University, then, after 1933, as professor of medical psychology at the Long Island College of Medicine in New York, as well as a consultant at the hospital. To honor him for his scientific achievements, he was named an honorary citizen of the city of Vienna in 1930 and was made a doctor honoris causa in the United States, to which he had emigrated in 1935, primarily for political reasons.

His two major works are A Study of Organ Inferiority and its Psychological Compensation: A Contribution to Clinical Medicine (1907) and The Neurotic Constitution (1912/1972), in which he makes a clear break with Freud. The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1927), Understanding Human Nature (1927), and Die Technik der Individual psychologie (1928-1930) were the result of his many talks, and were intended for a broader public.

Adler rejected Freud's theory of the libido and, with the creation of individual psychology, which was developed as a new direction in psychotherapy, he created the first significant schism in the psychoanalytic movement. He considered the individual as a complete being, including social and sociological aspects that began with the infant's feelings of inferiority, compensation, and the search for power and supremacy, as well as the sense of belonging to a collectivity. Adler considered psychic development to be the formation of an unconscious life plan, or even a lifestyle, starting with early childhood, and that later symptoms had to be taken into account from this point of view—in this sense Adler's approach was teleological. As an ego-centered psychology, Adler's individual psychology has had its greatest influence on other psychotherapeutic currents, such as humanist psychology and neoanalysis.

HELMUT GRÖGER

See also: Aggressiveness; Austria; Femininity, rejection of; Monism; Masculine protest (individual psychology); ; Inferiority, feeling of; Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society; Wiener psychoanalytische Vereinigung.