SOURCE: "Alfred Adler: Social Interest as Religion," in Scientists of the Mind: Intellectual Founders of Modern Psychology, University of Illinois Press, 1986, pp. 226-54.

[In the following excerpt, Karier offers a study of Adler's life and intellectual legacy.]

In the early morning hours of a day in late May 1937, Alfred Adler lay prostrate on a cobblestone street in Aberdeen, Scotland, stricken by a fatal heart attack. When, very much moved by the news, Arnold Zweig reported Adler's death to Sigmund Freud, the latter is said to have replied: "I don't understand your sympathy for Adler. For a Jew boy out of a Viennese suburb a death in Aberdeen is an unheard-of career in itself and a proof of how far he had got on. The world really rewarded him richly for his service in having contradicted psychoanalysis." For twenty-six years, Freud had nurtured a bitter hatred for Alfred Adler, cringing with each report of his former pupil's success. Why this was so is a complicated issue, owing to the existential circumstances and the characters and personalities of the people involved.

Adler was noteworthy on Freud's long list of friends who became his enemies. He was the first to break ranks from the Wednesday Society (later the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society) and the first to create a counter-movement. From 1902, when the Wednesday Society was formed, until 1911, when the final break with Freud came, Adler was an active, regular participant in Freud's inner circle. In the context of those weekly discussions, however, he gradually tested and shaped his own views about psychology. Particularly distressing for Freud was his belief that Adler not only was creating a complete system of character formation, something Freud thought impossible at the time, but that he seemed to be "creating" his system from many of Freud's constructs, loosely altering the terminology and simply watering down some of his teacher's most important ideas. The latter deceit moved Freud to write the "History of the Psychoanalytic Movement," and in it to proclaim to the world that "psychoanalysis is my creation." Freud never rested easy with what his students did with his "creation." Likening them to dogs, he complained, "They take a bone from the table, and chew it independently in a corner. But it is my bone!"

Adler's deviations were bitterly resented by Freud, who repeatedly referred to his once highly respected student as a "malicious paranoiac." As time went on, Freud described Adler as a shallow thinker who constantly reduced psychoanalysis to the "commonsense" simplicity of the man in the street. Although Adler would not have been insulted by such a remark, Freud meant it disparagingly. Reflecting on nine years of association with Adler, Freud regretfully concluded, "I have made a pygmy great." The intensity of his reaction is reminiscent of earlier conflicts with Josef Breuer and Wilhelm Fliess. In fact, Freud himself made the association. Shortly before Adler's final break, he wrote to Carl Jung: "It is getting really bad with Adler. You see a resemblance to Bleuler; in me he awakens the memory of Fliess, but an octave lower. The same paranoia." And a few days later: "I am very glad that you see Adler as I do. The only reason the affair upsets me so much is that it has opened up the wounds of the Fliess affair. It was the same feeling that disturbed the peace I otherwise enjoyed during my work on paranoia; this time I am not sure to what extent I have been able to exclude my own complexes, and shall be glad to accept criticism."

At this point one cannot help but be reminded of the nature of Freud's "own complexes" and of his analysis as to how his own childhood problems ultimately affected his adult relationships. Freud had clearly described how his death wish for his brother Julius, as well as his struggle for dominance with his nephew, John, would be reenacted over and over again with respect to any future close friends, turning them into enemies. They would all become ghostly figures, or revenants, out of his past. As Freud put it, "In a certain sense all my friends are incarnations of this first figure, 'which early appeared to my blurred sight'; they are all revenants." Breuer had become a revenant, while Fliess was just about to become one. The time when Adler and then Jung would join Freud's menagerie of ghostly figures remained in the not-too-distant future. While Freud's analysis of his attitude toward friends and foes is helpful in explaining the intensity of the break with Adler, it is so only in a partial sense. The other aspects of this dynamic situation are to be found in Adler's own personal history, in his character, and in the vast differences in fundamental ideas, values, and beliefs that existed between the two men. Alfred Adler's personality, life history, life-style, and fundamental values were all the near opposite of Freud's.

The very style of cognition to which Freud and Adler each adhered was quite different. Adler rejected the significance of dreams and the unconscious, calling dreams "the adversary of common sense." Common sense, on the other hand, was the key to cooperation and, in turn, the key to solving most of the world's problems. People who dream a lot, Adler insisted, are simply people who like to practice a form of self-hypnosis, deluding themselves into thinking they have found answers to their problems when they really have not. Adler disliked metaphors and symbols, complaining that they were too often used to hide the real meaning of our thinking because we lacked the courage to be forthright. He was a literalist, distrustful and unhappy with the playful world of the poet. As such, he attempted to destroy the significance that Freud attached to both the dream and the unconscious. Little wonder that Freud was angry. Adler argued that the poetic world of Freudian analysis was nothing more than the imaginary world of those spoiled and pampered children who lack the courage to speak in commonsensical terms: "If we speak plainly, without metaphors or symbols, we cannot escape common sense." In cognitive style as well as personality, character, life history, and fundamental social values, both men were near opposites. It is understandable why Adler's individual psychology turned out to be so very different from Freud's psychoanalysis.

In certain respects, however, Freud and Adler were similar. Both men looked deeply into their own troubled souls and found problems that also afflicted their patients and all of humanity. Both men created quasi-religious movements in an attempt to conquer the world: Freud, the Jew, wanted to lead the children of Israel and Rome out of their irrational bondage (by overcoming through sublimation his own obsessional neurosis, which he universalized to the world); Adler, the Jew turned Christian, wanted to overcome his own inferiority complex, which he also universalized to the world, by practicing the virtue of courage and preaching the gospel of social interest.

Alfred Adler was born of prosperous Jewish middle-class parents in 1870, in Penzing, a suburb of Vienna. His parents hailed from Burgenland, the home of composers Haydn and Liszt and a somewhat unique area of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in that Jews there enjoyed a most liberal social status, relatively untouched by anti-Semitism. Perhaps, as Henri Ellenberger suggests, that is why Adler never complained about anti-Semitism. Whatever the case, it is clear that his father's occupation as a prosperous corn dealer led Alfred into personal contact with both the rural, predominantly gentile, peasant population and the urban, modern, religiously diverse Viennese. Adler grew up in a suburb of Vienna in which there were few Jews, and most of his playmates were of the lower class. His family was musically inclined, affluent, and non-Orthodox, leaning in the direction of assimilation into a gentile world. Unlike Freud, Adler grew up in an environment that was conducive to crossing cultural as well as religious and social-economic class lines.

In contrast to Freud, who wrote of the "happy child of Frieberg," Adler often spoke of his childhood as having been most unhappy. Part of his suffering he attributed to the misfortunes of being a second-born son. He saw himself in the undesirable position of forever, either literally or symbolically, having to compete with his older, always successful brother. Toward the end of his life, Adler reported to Phyllis Bottome, "My eldest brother … is a good industrious fellow—he was always ahead of me—and for the matter of that, he is still ahead of me." From early childhood on, Alfred was no match for sibling competition. Suffering from a severe case of rickets, he could only watch his healthy older brother run and jump freely, with no pain and little effort. Adler also suffered from spasms of the glottis, which brought him near suffocation when he cried.

During Alfred's early years, a younger brother, Rudolph, drew the family's attention, especially his mother's, away from him. Then, when Alfred was almost four years old, his one-and-a-half-year-old brother died in the bed next to him. At that same age "he decided" to cure himself of spasms by refusing to cry or scream anymore. The traumatic experience of his brother's death seemed to have affected him deeply. Recall that Freud's brother's death in early childhood also deeply affected him. However, it affected Adler in a significantly different way than it had affected Freud. Whereas Freud took on the heavy burden of guilt associated with having wished his brother's death, Adler focused his feelings of resentment onto his mother, whom he believed had failed to give him the kind of pampered attention he had become accustomed to receiving before his younger brother's birth, and who now smiled too readily after his brother's death. Bottome notes [in her Alfred Adler: A Portait from Life]: "Alfred had always been much less attached to his mother than to his father. She was colder in her nature, and it is probable that she preferred her first-born to Alfred. Alfred did not understand, and never quite forgave her for smiling soon—he thought far too soon—after the sudden death of a little brother." Such a mother was not to be trusted, especially by a youngster who faced the daily competition of a more-favored brother, and who just as often faced the danger of suffocation whenever he cried.

No sooner had Adler decided to cure himself of his glottal spasms—by refusing to cry or scream ever again—than he, himself, faced imminent death. Suffering from a severe case of pneumonia, the five-year-old accidentally overheard the doctor advise his father that there was "no point in going to the trouble of looking after [him] as there was no hope of [his] living." Adler recalled: "At once a frightful terror came over me and a few days later when I was well I decided definitely to become a doctor so that I should have a better defence against the danger of death and weapons to combat it superior to my doctor's." Thus, at an early age, Adler chose an occupation that would help him in adult life to overcompensate for the insecurities of his childhood. In Adlerian terms he chose a life-style that would overcome his "organ inferiority." This kind of childhood experience later led him to write his first major book, Studies of Organ Inferiority (1907). Few would disagree with his professional claim, "I am the legitimate father of the Inferiority Complex."

As an adult, Adler admitted that his feelings toward his mother were mistaken, although this was the error upon which he had creatively built his own inferiority complex. Throughout his life, he identified most closely with his father, whom he thought was plentifully supplied with ego strength. In contrast to Freud's father, who meekly picked his new hat out of the gutter when an anti-Semite flicked it into the street with his cane, it is reported that Adler's father, "when he saw people with their legs crossed on a tram, … would push one foot down with his walking stick, saying politely, with a charming smile: 'I do not like to clean my trousers on your shoes as I pass!'" In later years, Adler would write a good deal about the necessity of "courage" in overcoming one's feelings of inferiority. Throughout his childhood, his father symbolized for him a courageous man who did everything he could to overcome his own physical and psychical defects. He made a lasting impression on his young son, especially when he took him on early morning strolls, during which time he taught him a variety of life's lessons. One such lesson, often repeated, was, "Never believe what anyone tells you!" Skepticism thus became a necessary trait for the young rebel.

Alfred Adler was a complex person whose childhood history was in many ways transparently related to the course of his adult life. Feeling a lack of support and warmth in his home, the youthful Adler took to the streets and found the needed support in the camaraderie of the street gang. It became for him an important window to the world, one that allowed him to study the diversity of human character and satisfy his psychic need for security. When Adler later developed individual psychology as a movement, he did so in the cafes of Vienna, not in the relative cloister of the academic community. He insisted throughout, even at the cost of some followers, that individual psychology must be kept free of the unnecessary abstract trappings of intellectuals and be clearly understandable to the people on the streets.

Some years after Freud graduated at the top of his class at the Sperl Gymnasium, Adler flunked mathematics there and had to repeat his form. "His teacher advised his father to take him out of school and apprentice him to a shoemaker because he was not fit enough to do anything else" [Hertha Orgler in Alfred Adler: The Man and His Work]. His father left him in school, however, and the next year young Alfred conquered his problem and became, by his own description, one of the best mathematics students in his class. He went on to pass all his examinations and entered the University of Vienna to study medicine, where his academic record was average. In 1895 he passed the university examinations without distinction and went to work in the Vienna hospital. At this point in his career he seemed to drift from being an eye specialist to becoming a general practitioner, although in the latter role he was uncomfortable, suffering a sinking feeling of helplessness every time a young patient died. In a sense, each terminal case was a special failing of a calling that had its roots in his childhood. Gradually, he shifted his attention to psychology and philosophy, and later he became a practicing psychiatric therapist. Aside from attending a few Kraft-Ebing lectures, Adler did not have any formal training in psychiatry. He was successful as a therapist, however; his personal characteristics allowed people to relate easily to him.

From the time Adler received his medical degree in 1895 until 1902, when he joined the Freudian circle, he served a short term in the Hungarian army, shifted careers into psychotherapy, became interested in the social causes of disease, and wrote a monograph entitled A Health Book for the Tailoring Trade, in which he outlined the social conditions leading to the particular diseases afflicting tailors. During this same period, Adler wrote a series of short articles dealing with a variety of human ailments and their possible social causes and cures. One such article, "The Physician as Educator" (1904), written shortly after joining the Freudian circle, clearly reveals the direction he would take later, after breaking with Freud in 1911. Adler's concern for courage in overcoming feelings of inferiority, and the need he felt to educate children so as to build their self-confidence, are themes he explicitly developed.

During his student days at the University of Vienna, Adler became interested in socialism and attended socialist meetings. At one such meeting he met Raissa Timofeyevna Epstein, whom he married in 1897. Raissa came from a wealthy Jewish merchant family of Moscow; she had studied in Switzerland and now was a student in Vienna (females were not permitted to formally register, although they were permitted to attend lectures). Raissa was a strong-willed, beautiful young girl, notable for her fanatic honesty as much as for her neglected interest in formal dress. She knew that the world needed changing, and she was interested in changing it. An active, liberated woman, Raissa's social beliefs lay considerably to the left of her young doctor-husband. When the Leon Trotzkys lived in Vienna from 1907 to 1914, they frequently visited the Adlers, and Trotzky's wife became a close friend of Raissa's. During this period Adler accepted Yoffe, a Russian revolutionary, as one of his patients.

Early on, the Adler marriage seemed most happy and stable, blessed by the births of Valentine in 1898 and Alexandra in 1901. However, as the years passed, and with the births of Kurt in 1905 and Nelly in 1909, the marriage seemed to falter. Small conflicts surfaced, and Alfred and Raissa became increasingly estranged. Although their specific problems remain obscure, we can postulate a number of possible reasons for their difficulties. Obviously, considerable cultural differences existed between the middleclass Austrian concerned with liberal social reform and the upper-class Russian interested in radical revolution. Also, while Adler espoused equality for women, there were many practical differences between his theory and his life with a liberated woman. There is reason to believe that Adler had some difficulty making the transition between theory and practice.

Throughout his career, Adler insisted that women were not only equal but in many respects were superior to men. He perceptively analyzed the repressed role of women and the psychic consequences for both sexes. Nevertheless, his values with respect to the ideal family remained structurally typical, idealized, and middle-class. Nowhere in his work did Adler ever propose a radical restructuring of the family unit or the functional roles of husbands and wives. It is interesting to note that when he finally broke with Freud, Adler was giving a paper before the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society that dealt with what he called the "Masculine Protest." In it he suggested that sex-role competition, behind which could be found deep feelings of inferiority and superiority, was more important in explaining one's character development than Freud's Oedipus complex. Adler's life with Raissa, a very strong-willed person, no doubt made him aware of the importance of this concept.

The Adlers seemed destined to be on opposite sides. When, for example, Alfred was baptized in 1904 into the Protestant faith, along with his two daughters, Valentine and Alexandra, Raissa refused to join them. When World War I broke out, Raissa supported the cause of the Allies against the Austro-Hungarian Empire; once the war was over, Raissa supported the Russian revolution. Alfred, however, came out against the violence of the communists and predicted the ultimate failure of the revolution. Serious grounds thus existed for the estrangement between Alfred and Raissa that would last throughout most of the remaining years of their marriage. Not until late in life, when Adler took ill in America, did he and Raissa seem to reconcile their differences.

As Adler formulated his views about individual psychology within the Freudian circle, he found the Jewish faith too limiting and wished to "share a common deity with the universal faith of man." He gradually developed his own psychology and his own faith, both of which not only separated him from Raissa but clearly enabled him to become the most serious competitor of Freud's psychoanalytic movement.

The years (1902-11) that Adler spent within the Freudian circle were important developmental ones for him. During this time he published the Studies of Organ Inferiority (1907), which Freud believed supported his own ideas, and he also put together his unique ideas about neurosis. Thus, only a year after resigning from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Adler was able to publish his most important work, The Nervous Character (1912), which laid the groundwork for the individual psychology movement.

While many Freudian psychoanalysts have insisted that Adler was one of Freud's students, Adlerian psychologists have insisted that he was not. The issue ultimately depends on one's conception of the teacher-student relationship. If that relationship is such that the student learns and incorporates the teacher's ideas, then Adler was, indeed, not a student of Freud—or he was a very poor one. If, however, the proper teacher role is to act as a catalytic agent, spurring the student to develop his or her own ideas, then the Freud-Adler relationship was that of teacher-student, albeit, from Freud's standpoint, unintentional. Freud and his inner circle did serve as a counterfoil against which Adler could test his ideas. Clearly, many of his ideas had already germinated, having been expressed in a variety of forms before he actually joined the group in 1902. However, in the smoke-filled crucible of those heated Wednesday night discussions, Adler tested and sharpened his ideas against some of the very best critics.

Out of this experience Adler proposed a psychology that was the opposite of Freud's on virtually every issue. Freud believed that dreams were "wish fulfillments" which could be decoded in understanding the unconscious; Adler believed that dreams were little more than unnecessary distortions of the more important conscious world. Freud emphasized the role of the unconscious in determining behavior; Adler emphasized the role of consciousness. Freud looked for the causes of neurosis in the libido; Adler looked to the ego. Freud universalized his idea about the Oedipus complex to all humankind; Adler universalized his own inferiority complex to all humanity—"to be a human being means to feel oneself inferior." Freud's movement was to be theoretical and abstract, given to a heavy use of metaphor and poetic, symbolic interpretations; Adler's movement was common-sensical, concrete, and given to simple, practical interpretations. Freud saw the neurotic individual as divided against himself; Adler saw that same individual as a unity. Freud's psychoanalytic movement sought a causal explanation for neurosis; Adler's individual psychology sought a teleological explanation. And so on.

Although shortly after their break, Freud complained that "Adler's system is founded entirely upon the impulse of aggression. It leaves no room at all for love," later in life Freud himself wrote more about aggression, suggesting that there was, in fact, a "beast" in men and women to whom sparing their own kind was something alien. Adler, by contrast, eventually emphasized cooperation, insisting that human nature, if not innately good, carried the urge for perfection which was valued as good. To Freud, women occupied an inferior position in society for biological reasons; whereas Adler assumed that women were by nature superior, but because of faulty social reason, men dominated. Both men and women suffer, Adler insisted, from the masculine protest. While the woman errs in wanting to be a man, the man errs in his fear of not being manly enough. Striving for superiority, as a reflection of their drive for perfection, men become mixed up in the competition of the sexes and this symbolically affects all of their sexual behavior, even to the extent of their insistence on being on top during intercourse. The masculine versus feminine problem was not sexual, Adler insisted, but social, an issue of inferiority versus superiority within society's framework.

Adler's relationship with his wife no doubt helped him clarify his theory of masculine protest, just as his relationship with his mother initially helped understand his own inferiority complex. His will to power grew from his sense of inferiority, which resulted not only from his own organ inferiority, but also from his mother's withdrawal of her pampering support for him at the birth of his younger brother. He grew up distrusting his mother, and later came to believe that this was the error upon which he created the notion of an inferiority complex, which in turn set into motion his own life-style. It is notable that his adult relationship with his mother was characterized by overprotectiveness. Friends were very surprised at the extent to which Adler would interrupt his routine work to accompany his mother whenever she left the house. When asked why,

He answered gravely, "But I cannot let my mother go out alone; she is not used to that." He was especially careful in helping his mother to cross the street. He noticed later that though he crossed the street quietly when he was alone, he was always very careful about the person he was accompanying, and directed them right and left. Finally he found out that he wanted to overcompensate an old insecurity in this way. He had been run over twice when he was a child; that is to say, had had bad experiences, and wanted to demonstrate that he was the only one who could lead others across the street correctly. This insight enabled him to rid himself of this disagreeable habit [Orgler, Alfred Adler: The Man and His Work].

While this incident reflects Adler's insecurity stemming from his childhood accidents, it also very much reflects the insecurity he felt toward his mother. Although she had deserted him in those crucial childhood years, he was not going to desert her! Significantly, when it came time to select a mate, he chose someone he perceived in most respects to be the opposite of his mother, someone he felt he could trust. In Raissa he found an honest, forthright person. Still, she did not readily give him the mothering he had missed as a child.

A significant portion of individual psychology clearly grew out of Adler's personal problems. He saw in himself and in his patients a deep-seated feeling of inferiority, and he observed that both he and his patients attempted to overcompensate, playing tricks on themselves and the community through a variety of devices. He found his way out through a process of extending his "social interest." Like Freud, Adler expressed in his final work a religious-like faith. Freud's bore the mark of a stoic, fundamentally Hebraic kind of moral system, while Adler's led to a kind of humanized Christian dictum of "love thy neighbor as thyself." Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, had ridiculed this dictum as an impossible ideal, just as Friedrich Nietzsche once portrayed the same notion as the groveling weakness of spineless Christians. Clearly, Freud and Adler drew on vastly different ethical codes.

As opposed to Freud, who saw neurosis as the almost inevitable price we pay for civilization, Adler thought neurosis was a correctable error. Adler would sit facing his patients, and his brand of therapy led to a much quicker assessment of the patient's life-style, the errors made in its development, and the practical steps necessary for remediation. Errors in life-style were to be determined by the therapist's personal experiences, knowledge of individual psychology, and "a guess." This added method of guessing was viewed by Adler's followers as a distinctive contribution to the "science" of individual psychological therapy. One such follower, Rudolf Dreikurs, noted: "Adler frankly admitted that he used guessing in this procedure, thereby introducing into science a technique which up to then was considered the most 'unscientific approach to a problem. But Adler demonstrated that we can learn to 'guess in the right direction.'" While a "guess in the right direction" may or may not enhance the "scientific" validity of a diagnosis, it is clear from the standpoint of most observers that it did increase the speed with which any diagnosis could be made.

In comparison to Freudian therapy, Adlerian therapy was a "quick fix." In this regard Freud could say of Adler's therapy what he once had said of Otto Rank's therapy: it was designed to suit an American clientele. Americans, Freud believed, were not prepared to accept lengthy, drawn-out, expensive therapeutic practices. The issue here, however, is not so much one of European versus American as one of social and economic class differences. The upper classes Freud serviced could afford the cost of protracted analysis, while the middle and lower classes Adler—and later Otto Rank—serviced could ill afford such a lengthy process. Isidor Wassermann, of the Psychiatric Clinic of the Medical Academy, in Wroclaw, Poland, did a comparative study of the socioeconomic class differences of Freud's and Adler's patients and concluded that not only was the ability to pay significantly different in the two therapies, but also the very content appeared to be class-determined. In general, Adlerian concerns involving inferiority and the desire for power are typically lower-and middle-class problems; those involving sexual sublimation for cultural purposes are of more central concern to the upper classes, who have already overcome an inferior social position. The great bulk of Adler's patients were situated within or very near to the middle class. The middle-class values that permeated Adler's psychology clearly fit the class he was serving, while the upper-class elite values that permeated Freud's psychology were similarly appropriate for the class he served.

Although Freud evidently created a movement designed to serve the elite groups in society, and built this movement with a select priesthood of analysts possessing esoteric knowledge, he repeatedly argued for a "lay" movement. However, Freud did not want a movement that was simple and easily understood by all concerned, which might include the lower classes; rather, he wished to keep psychoanalysis out of the controlling hands of medical doctors. Freud lectured to medical students at the university, but that served his personal status needs more than anything else. He wanted to create a new lay cadre of analysts unencumbered by established medical practice. Had the rise of fascism not occurred and the holocaust not wiped out Freud's "lay" movement in Europe, that thrust of psychoanalysis might well still exist. Very much to the dislike of Freud, psychoanalysis in America developed as the special domain of medical doctors. Thus, as a consequence of World War II, America became the stronghold of psychoanalysis and the field became dominated by the medical profession.

While Freud failed to develop a lay movement free of medical practitioners in America, he did develop a select group of lay elite expert analysts in Europe. Adler, on the other hand, created a lay movement on both sides of the Atlantic that was clearly geared away from the notion of a select priesthood possessing expert, esoteric knowledge. While he would have liked to lecture to medical students, as Freud did, he purposely designed and championed a movement that would be easily and clearly understood by all concerned. Indeed, when his individual psychology movement was well underway, there were several among his followers who pushed hard to create a more esoteric knowledge and thus a functional role for a new priesthood. At the price of some defectors, Adler insisted on keeping his analysis simple, unabstract, practical, and guided by common sense. He intended to create a truly lay movement, to spread his gospel among the people as far as possible. While Freud lectured to medical students at the university, Adler lectured in cafes and eventually to larger groups at the Pedagogical Institute of Vienna, as well as the city's schools and guidance clinics. His audiences were composed primarily of teachers, teacher trainees, parents, child guidance counselors, and rank-and-file mental health workers from the growing therapeutic community.

Given the remarkable, vast differences between Alfred Adler and Sigmund Freud, we might seriously wonder what was in Adler's mind during the nine years he was a member of Freud's Psychoanalytic Society. Ernest Jones's impression of him during those days was that he was argumentative, "a morose and cantankerous person, whose behavior oscillated between contentiousness and sulkiness. He was evidently very ambitious and constantly quarreling with the others over points of priority in his ideas." Inasmuch as Adler used the group to clarify his own contrasting ideas, then this view seems reasonable. Many years after their initial encounters, Jones noticed a change in Adler: "I observed that success had brought him a certain benignity of which there had been little sign in his earlier years." Success no doubt helped Adler overcome his inferiority complex and thus bring under control the inordinate drive for superiority that was so much a part of his personal character. Competitive from childhood, hating to stand in the shadow of his older brother, Sigmund, Adler reportedly told Freud at the end, "Do you believe that it is such a great pleasure for me to stand in your shadow my whole life?" We can only speculate as to which Sigmund's shadow Adler felt most heavily.

The break with Freud was not a clean one. As it dragged on people took sides, and when Adler finally resigned from the Psychoanalytic Society, he and those who left with him created a competing organization with the unfortunate name "Society for Free Psychoanalysis" (rather quickly changed to "Society for Individual Psychology"). There were some who wished to remain active in both organizations, which Adler permitted; Freud, however, moved his organization to exclude any member who attended Adler's group, with the exception of a very special friend, Lou Andreas-Salomé. She kept Freud informed as to what the renegade group was doing, while at the same time pursuing her own course of psychological inquiry.

Shortly after Adler published The Nervous Character in 1912, he wrote to Hertha Orgler, "With this book, … I have founded the school of Individual Psychology." In it he described what he believed to be the origin of neurosis, the development of feelings of inferiority, the development of psychic compensations to overcome that inferiority, as well as the fictions individual neurotics choose to create, around which they build a life-style. Throughout this and other works, Adler attempted to create distance between himself and Freud, suggesting that while Freud sought causal factors for neurosis, he (Adler) was more concerned with the life-style the individual created as a consequence of some early childhood problematic experience.

Adler argued that early experiences were so laced with fictions that precise causal factors could not be determined. Furthermore, even if we could know the exact causal factor or factors, we could not change the original experience, only evaluate our present life-style, constructed over time, and its supporting operational fictions. In this stance, Adler aligned himself with typical twentieth-century ahistorical thinking. He treated the patient's life-style as the cause of his or her current ailment, and usually traced the creation of that life-style back to the age of three to five years, where, in the context of too much or too little pampering by father, mother, sister, or brother, a certain lifestyle was chosen. For the neurotic personality the choice was an error, but one that could ultimately be corrected by therapy.

While Adler claimed he did not deal with exact causal factors, whenever he spoke about the "correct" or the "best" child-rearing practices, he implicitly assumed that certain causal factors were productive of the neurotic personality. Even so, he repeatedly turned away from what he considered to be the fictitious history of the patient, stressing instead the current fictions and possible pragmatic consequences for the future of the patient. Thus Adler insisted that the teleological purposes or "fictitious goals" of the individual could tell us more about the individual's problems than any lengthy inquiry into the unconscious, itself laced with imaginative creations.

Throughout this work and his later exposition of individual psychology, Adler relied on H. Vaihinger's The Philosophy of ""As-If"" for the key to interpreting neurotic behavior. Adler saw the individual almost as a monad, always situated in a social environment in which he or she acted and reacted. In this life process the individual creates ideas and self-conceptions that collectively reflect his or her overall life-style. Within this life-style, purposes emerge that serve as teleological goals, which become so when the individual acts upon them as if they were, in fact, real. Thus individual "fictions" are created about self and world, and by acting ""as-if"" these fictions were true, individuals create their own meaningful, unified world. Whether neurotic or normal, the world of the individual is always unified.

The individual was thus never completely determined by the environment but was actively shaping that environment. Paraphrasing Johann Pestalozzi to that effect, Adler said, "The environment molds man, but man molds the environment." Heinz and Rowena Ansbacher point out that Adler's position here is similar to the one taken by Marx and Engels: "The circumstances make men just as men make the circumstances." Like Marx, Adler saw individuals as creative actors who shaped not only their physical but also their psychical and spiritual worlds. Neurosis occurs when individuals err in their psychic creations and generate a sense of self that leads them away from legitimate social interest. The issue is not so much whether a particular idea about one's self is true or false, but more importantly, where that particular idea may lead. The neurotic's ideas about self usually lead toward an increasingly alienated state, until insanity and death ultimately ensue. Neurosis can be cured, Adler believed, if the individual can be taught to see and understand the error of these "fictions," be encouraged to create new, more socially desirable fictions, and to act on those ideas ""as-if"" they were true—in effect, to be reeducated to an entirely new life-style.

Adler's psychology was a holistic one which combined both material and spiritual concerns. It was a total way of life. His psychology touched upon all aspects of human character formation: avarice, sloth, and envy, as well as spiritual virtue and the meaning of God. The Nervous Character began Adler's movement, which he preached throughout Europe and America from 1912 to 1937. He was bent on replacing psychoanalysis with a total psychology, created from a theory about character formation that was based on a view of aggression as involving the struggle for superiority, especially in terms of the sexes. Freud's key concept of a universal Oedipal complex, around which all psychosexual repression occurs, was, from Adler's standpoint, nothing more than his own notion of the masculine protest dressed up in mother's clothing: "A proper insight for instance into the 'Oedipus complex' shows us that it is nothing more nor less than a figurative, sexually clothed conception of what constitutes masculine self-consciousness, superiority over woman.… "Adler described these neurotics, like Freud, who suffered from an Oedipus complex, as nothing more than "pampered children," spoiled by a doting mother who ill prepared them for the world of cooperation and social interest. Thus Adler not only attempted to replace Freud's psychology, but he thereby attempted to explain away Freud's own neurosis as well.

Once the individual psychology movement was underway, Adler applied for the title of Privat Dozent at the University of Vienna, so that he also might lecture to medical students. He submitted The Nervous Character as evidence of his scholarship, but in 1915 a faculty of twenty-five voted unanimously against his appointment. Although they found his ideas imaginative, facile, and ingenious, they also found them totally lacking in any kind of rigorous, scientific, disciplined methodology: "… it is dangerous for research when it is only ingenious. The products of imagination must undergo the refining process of criticism, which Adler's writings show themselves not even to have begun." The door to the medical students of Vienna was closed to Adler from the beginning of his movement.

The bitterness of this rejection faded from Adler's immediate consciousness as he faced more pressing problems. As war clouds gathered, Raissa took their four children for a visit to Russia. When the Archduke was shot, Adler telegraphed Raissa to return home at once. At first she refused; then she became entrapped, and it took five months to arrange return passage for her and the children. Raissa returned from Russia a pro-ally; Alfred left for the Russian front to do his duty for Austria-Hungary. Their strained marriage was not helped when Russia sued for a separate peace and slid into the communist revolution which Raissa supported. When Adler returned to his beloved Vienna after the war, he became actively involved in the Social Democratic party and the reform committees which swept political radicals into office. Raissa took up the cause of the Trotzky revolutionaries; Alfred argued against their violent methods. Pitting himself against his wife, as well as many of his radical friends, Adler argued in the cafes and in print that violence would breed violence, and in the end, the communist revolution would fail, unable to achieve its dreamed-of goals. Adler slowly but clearly steered his individual psychology movement away from the choppy waters of radical revolution and toward the calmer waters of liberal reform, where it eventually took anchor.

As the old group congregated at the Cafe Central, after the war, to hear and discuss with Adler his ideas about psychology and philosophy, it became apparent that they all had passed through the portals of the twentieth century. Each person was different; the world they faced was different. Adler himself sounded different, insisting that what the world needed and wanted was Gemeinschaftsgefühl, "'community feeling." Over the next twenty years he would develop the meaning of that term, teaching and preaching his gospel of social interest, the new religious faith of Alfred Adler. While some thought it to be a bland oversimplification, and walked away in disgust, others stayed and listened. His new faith was interpreted by one of his critical followers in this way:

there was a law binding man to the universe, moving always in the same direction, and towards a goal that could never be reached, but which never varied; and as man obeyed this law and co-operated with it, he would develop in a direction that furthered universal welfare—but his co-operation with others was the price he must pay for this development. The egocentric goal must be broken up. Social Interest was the only goal for mankind; and every human being must be trained towards it in childhood, until it became as natural to him "as breathing or the upright gait" [Bottome, Alfred Adler: A Portrait from Life].

Although both Marx and Adler dreamed the impossible dream of a perfect social order, Marx saw the road to his vision paved with class conflict, while Adler insisted that it must be paved with cooperation. Unlike Marx, who turned to revolutionary praxis to change his world, Adler turned to educational praxis. He and his followers now became actively engaged in educational reform in Vienna. Through the influence of a close friend and follower, Carl Furtmiller, Adler was introduced to the new minister of education, Otto Glöckel. Glöckel was impressed with Adler and his small band of followers and thus gave them entrance to the school system, where they fostered ongoing educational reforms. They helped make the Vienna school system the educational showplace of Europe in the 1920s. Adler's group was directly involved in creating experimental schools, which attracted international attention, and in developing institutes and workshops for teacher training, on a regular basis. They formed and supervised over thirty child guidance clinics, attached to the Vienna schools. Through his forthright lectures to both parents and teachers, Adler helped to develop a strong attitude toward the use and acceptance of therapeutic practices in educating children in both the school and the home. Adler assumed the post of lecturer at the Institute of Pedagogical Studies in Vienna, clearly reaching the high-water mark of his career. All Vienna seemed to react positively to his ideas. His fame spread from Vienna to Germany, England, France, and America, and in 1930 his beloved city awarded him the title "Citizen of Vienna."

From 1926 to 1934, Adler divided his time between American and Viennese audiences. New Adlerian groups were forming in America, and he was rapidly finding a second home there. He talked to overflowing, appreciative audiences in some of the major academic centers, lecturing in extension courses at Columbia University from 1929 to 1931. His friends there prematurely put him up for a chair, for which he was rejected. By 1932 he was teaching as a regular member of the faculty at Long Island Medical College. Although his individual psychology, especially its "born-again-of-the-spirit" message, did not set well with the established Freudians in the United States, Adler made an impact on social workers, penal institution officers, guidance counselors, mental health workers, family therapists, and parents and teachers. While his American lectures received limited coverage in the more-established psychotherapeutic journals, they received extensive coverage in the Police Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Parents Magazine.

By 1934, Adler's divided home life between America and Vienna came to a close. The national socialists had taken power in Vienna, and all his reform work was halted. In that same year he became seriously ill with an untreated carbuncle and was hospitalized. Raissa, hearing of his illness, immediately joined him, and the results were therapeutic for both his physical health and their marriage. "His illness and Raissa's instant response to his need of her changed both their lives. For the first time, Adler realized how deep his wife's devotion to him really was; and his whole nature responded to it, and to her care for him." [Bottome, Alfred Adler: A Portrait From Life]. Recall that illness had played an important role in Adler's own early childhood character formation. His inferiority feelings, as he had analyzed them, lay in his response to his mother's inability to satisfy his need for attention when ill. He had married someone he thought was different, but through the years her emancipated outlook tended to undercut his overwhelming need for security. Yet when Raissa quickly responded to his need for attention during his first and only illness as an adult, their marriage was at last reconciled, and they remained together until Adler's death three years later.

The three great problems of life, or so Adler argued, were community feeling, work and occupation, love and marriage. Gemeinschaftsgefühl, "community feeling," must permeate all activities of life. We must turn away from our selfish ways, not through self-sacrifice so much as through self-development—indeed, through the continuing expansion of social interest. The key word in all this was "cooperation": men and women must learn to cooperate, for their own individual good and for the good of humanity. Problems with friends, work, or family always could be solved by increasing cooperation, or social interest. Individual problems of crime, delinquency, drug addiction, alcoholism, and sexual perversion were all similar, in the sense that each showed a lack of social responsibility and each erred against any true social interest. In response to a critic who had accused him of making a religion out of his notion of social interest, Adler said, "I have propounded religion as a constructive step towards the advancement of co-operation so much that I was frequently suspected of being a Philistine.… I refuse to teach religion being not qualified for it, and leave it to others. I only represent the viewpoint of science which, in its application in fact often corresponds with the commandments of religion. We do not demand anything, however, we merely explain."

Adler was doing something much more than explaining, however; he was, in fact, preaching a particular way of life, a kind of middle-class, liberal, religious humanism. In Understanding Human Nature (1927), What Life Should Mean to You (1931), Religion and Individual Psychologie (with Ernest Jahn, 1933), and Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind (1936), Adler detailed the values that "ought" to be taught in the home, the school, the workplace, and the general community. All of this led Freud, late in his life, to refer to the Adlerians as "buffoons … publishing books about the meaning of life(!)" Buffoons or not, Adler and his followers were preaching a religious faith laced with conventional middle-class values: the ideal family was based on a monogamous marriage in which the role of motherhood was exhorted; masculine and feminine social roles remained separate and distinct, by nature. "The bisexuality of the human race conditions another division of labor. Woman, by virtue of her physical construction, is excluded from certain activities, while on the other hand, there are certain labors which are not given to man, because man could better be employed at other tasks."

Although the term "individual" in Adler's individual psychology placed emphasis on the individual as a choosing being, Adler did not see individuals as an end in themselves; rather, their very value or worth was to be determined by a communal measure: "Any man's value … is determined by his attitude toward his fellow men, and by the degree in which he partakes of the division of labor which communal life demands." A productive system requiring ever-greater divisions of labor reflected, to Adler, a system that was evolutionary, advancing, and progressing; it reflected increasing degrees of cooperation and therefore was viewed in a positive way. The problem facing the individual was simply to find a place within this vast system of work in which to satisfy his or her need to contribute to the social interest. All occupations, Adler argued, were equally useful, and therefore the wishes of the child must be honored in the selection of an occupation. "We must let him value as he chooses; since we ourselves have no means of saying which occupation is higher and which is lower. If he really does his work and occupies himself in a contribution to others, he is on the same level of usefulness as any one else. His only task is to train himself, try to support himself, and set his interest in the framework of the division of labor."

Repeatedly, Adler treated the productive system as a positive "given" that was socially desirable and fundamentally sound. In 1931, Adler viewed the unemployment situation with "alarm." Dangerous, antisocial interests lurked in the large army of unemployed persons who did not fit into the existing division of labor. One of the worst effects of unemployment was that it impeded those who were "trying to improve cooperation." When Adler himself considered what should be done, he did not advocate changing the means of production or the economic system of distributing wealth; rather, he called for training the unemployed to improve their skills and their social interest, so that they might better fit into the prevailing division of labor. In his analysis of work, he escaped reality through a process of idealization. For example, Adler felt that if we all do our jobs, then somehow we are all equal, because we are all contributing to the commonweal. This may be true in an ideal society but not in the real world of sharply differentiated pay scales. To suggest, as Adler did, that we have "no means of saying which occupation is higher or lower" is pure idealization. A similar kind of false consciousness emerged when Adler blamed unemployment on the unemployed, rather than on the economic system and its failure to provide work opportunities. This displacement of blame occurred when he sought solutions to the unemployment problem in education rather than the economic system. This same false consciousness has served repeatedly to protect our current economic system from critical scrutiny.

Significantly, this therapy, which presumes to be so heavily oriented toward practical, ongoing life, repeatedly returns at critical junctures to a benign idealization of that social existence. The net consequence was an obfuscation of social reality. In the midst of severe economic dislocation in the monopoly-capitalist system of the West, Adler called for group cooperation in place of class struggle. "What we must disagree with is the view of life in which people are looking only for what is given them, looking only for a personal advantage. This is the greatest conceivable obstacle to individual and common progress. It is only through our interest in our fellows that any of our human capacities develop." The solution, then, to all problems was to expand one's social interest. Neurosis itself would thus be overcome. Adler said, "As soon as he can connect himself with his fellow men on an equal and cooperative footing, he is cured." He urged teachers, psychological counselors, and mental health workers to teach the values of cooperation: "All that we demand of a human being, and the highest praise that we can give him, is that he should be a good fellow worker, a friend to all other men, and a true partner in love and marriage. If we are to put it in a word, we may say that he should prove himself a fellow man."

As Adler's audiences increased in size and he received more support, it was almost possible to sense in him a growing confusion between the world as he thought it ought to be and the way it actually was. With the dark clouds of fascism gathering on the near horizon, Freud wrote about human nature "as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien," while Adler insisted that human nature was basically good:

Thus the long-standing dispute as to whether man is good or evil by nature is settled. The growing, irresistible evolutionary advance of social feeling warrants us in assuming that the existence of humanity is inseparably bound up with "goodness". Anything that seems to contradict this is to be considered as a failure in evolution; it can be traced back to mistakes that have been made—just as in the vast experiments of nature there has always been material in the bodies of animals that could not be used.

Adler often quoted Christ's command, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," which Freud had concluded was a false expectation that ran counter to human nature itself. Given man's beastly aggressiveness, Freud suggested, Heinrich Heine's dictum, "One must, it is true, forgive one's enemies—but not before they have been hanged," was perhaps more appropriate. Adler, of course, charged that Freud's psychology was derived from a "pampered child," and that it was fundamentally unethical and immoral.

At times, however, Adler seemed to waver regarding his conception of human nature. For example, he said, "Man is not born good or evil, but he can be trained in either direction. Whose fault is greater? That of the erring community or that of the erring child?" In general, however, he returned to his normative ideal of social interest, which he found implanted in the evolutionary progress of humankind. Just as individuals carried with them a goal for perfection, so did the collective community carry within its evolution a guiding normative goal of perfection. For Adler, this idealized goal lay beyond immediate experience; it rested in a new, yet-unborn, ultimate synthesizing of ideas. He said, "I must admit that those who find a piece of metaphysics in Individual Psychology are right." His faith was total, resting on a metaphysics of his own creation; the very purpose of life was perfection. Adler continued: "We conceive the idea of social interest, social feeling, as the ultimate form of mankind, a condition in which we imagine all questions of life, all relationship to the external world as solved. It is a normative ideal, a direction-giving goal. This goal of perfection must contain the goal of an ideal community, because everything we find valuable in life, what exists and what will remain, is forever a product of this social feeling."

Thus, for Adler, humankind's quest for superiority was in reality an evolutionary quest for perfection, directed at "mastering the environment." However, it errs—indeed, fails—when it is directed at people.

Individual Psychology has uncovered the fact that the deviations and failures of the human character—neurosis, psychosis, crime, drug addiction etc.—are nothing but forms of expression and symptoms of the striving for superiority directed against fellowmanship, which presents itself in one case as striving for power, in another case as an evasion of accomplishments by which another might benefit. Such erroneous striving leads to the psychological decline and fall of the individual, as any biological erroneous striving has led to the physical decline and fall of entire species and races.

Errors on the part of the individual in creating his or her guiding fictions lead to psychological decline just as errors in biological development lead to the disappearance of the species. Under Adler's leadership, individual psychology had discovered a special formula for overcoming the errors that would lead to the decline of human civilization: "Individual Psychology has found a special formula for the correct striving for perfection of man: The goal which the individual must pursue must lie in the direction which leads to the perfection of all of mankind sub specie aeternitatis." Virtue was defined as the advancement toward the common goal of the cooperating community, not as in the existing community, but in the yet-unborn ideal community where all people would be striving for perfection. "This is how the Individual Psychology concept of social interest (Gemeinschaftsgefühl) is to be understood."

God could be found in this individual and collective quest for perfection, in this final and ultimate goal which sheds grace on humankind in its continual upward striving on the path of life. "Whether one calls the highest effective goal deity, or socialism, or, as we do, the pure idea of social interest, or as others call it in obvious connection with social interest, ego ideal, it always reflects the same ruling, perfection-promising, grace-giving goal of overcoming." Adler's individual psychology would light the path to the "sanctification of human relations." While the true Gemeinschaftsgefühl had not yet arrived, it was on its way. The psychology advanced by Adler would replace traditional religion when its most profound insights were acted upon and lived, as if true. He wrote: "… profound recognition of interconnectedness, which closes all doors to error and proves that virtue is teachable, has not as yet become realized by many. Religious faith is alive and will continue to live until it is replaced by this most profound insight and the religious feeling which stems from it. It will not be enough only to taste from this insight; mankind will have to devour and digest it completely" [critic's italics].

Adler perceived the promised land as a place where "error" was no more and "virtue" abounded. For him and his followers, individual psychology was the holistic faith that would lead men and women out of the bondage of antisocial errors. In Adler's world, sin had disappeared and was replaced by error. His social message was well within that eighteenth-century Enlightenment tradition which saw human nature as "good, but susceptible to error." Ignorance would eventually be banished and all evil thus would be overcome. In Adler's quasi-religious-therapeutic world, we would no longer suffer from the Christian sense of guilt but from the anxiety of having erred. Adler believed people were trying to escape the responsibility of those errors in the life-styles they had created for themselves, just as Cain had attempted to escape the error of his sin by asking, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Adler's answer would have been "Yes!"

In the unified but insulated world that neurotics tend to create, Adler saw their escape from responsibility as an escape from community, one that would lead them away from humanity and toward individual isolation, insanity, and ultimately death, for both themselves and the community. In the real, alienating world of industrial capitalism, where "competition," not "cooperation," reigns supreme and we are each pitted against the other for our very physical existence, the path we tread is clearly not one of Adlerian neighborly love, but that of a sickly, alienating society where the term Gemeinschaftsgefühl is difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend. This loss of community is clearly reflected in much of the literature of the Western world—in Marx's radical utopian vision, in Dewey's liberal view of community, or in Adler's Gemeinschaftsgefühl.

In Adler's beloved Vienna, the "City of Dreams," where Martin Buber studied philosophy and art and discovered the communal values of Hasidism, and where Theodor Herzel cultivated his liberal philosophy and discovered Zionism as a way toward a Jewish community, Adolf Hitler, during his Viennese years, cultivated his early hatred of the Jewish people. As Hitler's anti-Semitism gradually bore its bitter fruit, Adler's voice could still be heard urging his fellow citizens to "love thy neighbor as thyself." It was much like listening to Norman Vincent Peale's varied claims for the power of positive thinking during the time of the holocaust. As Adler lectured in cafes about "loving thy neighbor," the violent sounds of the fascists taking over the streets of Vienna were clear enough for all to hear. His benign, nonrevolutionary, nonviolent social gospel of cooperation might have been harmlessly incongruous, except that Adler's faith created for him a social cocoon, one that in the end insulated him from the noise of the streets. Early on, Raissa had sensed the problem—by ignoring the political and economic roots of the pending disaster and ministering to the psychological needs of the victims, and by ignoring the social roots of the disease and preaching an idealized metaphysical future, Adler was creating a consciousness which, in the end, can and often does easily lead one to blame the victims. It also creates the necessary social blindness that allows one to preach brotherly love during the very birth of Austrian fascism.

While we are struck by the distance between Adler's benign cooperative world and the actual competitive world of the streets he thought he understood, we are also struck by the fact that the psychologist who prided himself on his "commonsense" philosophy and his psychology of "practical solutions" in the end propounded a faith for humanity that was far afield from where men and women actually lived and died. In the modern world of alienated existence, a one-eyed psychology of praxis, blind in the other eye to the social-economic vested interests of power, is a psychology that can be expected to create a world of false security by creating a world of false consciousness. The philosophy of ""as-if"," as applied in Adlerian psychology, thus easily slips into a kind of consciousness which, through its idealization of the cooperative way, actually protects the nihilistic competitiveness it abhors.

The legacy left by Alfred Adler is a strange one. While, on the one hand, there are today relatively few Adlerians—or at least people who admit to being Adlerians—on the other hand, his ideas heavily permeate the modern therapeutic community as well as the general public. Adler was clearly an important forerunner in the field of psychosomatic medicine, thanks to his original work on the psychic effects of organ inferiority, but in general, his most lasting impact can be found in the Adlerian concepts and terms that have become commonplace. In psychiatric hospitals or on the streets, we hear about "inferiority complex," "overcompensation," "life-style," "masculine versus feminine psychosexual roles," "ego psychology," "the child's place in the family," the psychology of ""as-if"," and "organ inferiority." It is ironic that the term Adler believed to be most important—Gemeinschaftsgefühl—the key to his therapy, did not take hold.

In many ways the religion that Adler ended up preaching in the cafes of Vienna and the lecture halls of America was, in the end, just another failed religion—a "quick fix," an opiate to help people produce an ""as-if"" fiction, an optimistic euphoria that momentarily overcame the "soulless conditions" of a "heartless world." Nevertheless, those who continue to struggle to overcome the crippling effects of alienation in American society, with its growing signs of fascism, by preaching a gospel of practical "social relatedness," "interpersonal relations," and "communication," devoid of any serious social critique, do not appear to be far afield.