SOURCE:" 'Books Like Firecrackers' and Mass Politics" and "The Trap of Personality," in The Drive for Self: Alfred Adler and the Founding of Individual Psychology, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1994, pp. 248-70, 325-30.

[In the following excerpt, Hoffman discusses a number of Adler's later publications in terms of their political context.]

The spring of 1930 saw the release of [Adler's] three new books, all aimed at a relatively popular audience. These were The Pattern of Life, Guiding the Child, and The Education of Children. Their nearly simultaneous publication in the United States clearly reflected Adler's own shift in professional emphasis from Europe to his present base of activity.

Based on his demonstration lectures at the New School two years before, The Pattern of Life presented twelve cases of schoolchildren with differing types of emotional difficulty, such as conduct disorders or extreme shyness. Many of the youngsters came from immigrant families (Italian, Jewish, or Slavic) populous in New York City during the 1920s and were of decidedly lower socioeconomic background. Yet, similar to Adler's other writings during this period, The Pattern of Life had little to say about cultural or economic factors that might be affecting such pupils. It was edited by the young psychiatrist Walter Beran Wolfe, who also provided a lucid overview of individual psychology.

The Pattern of Life presented transcribed accounts of Adler's comments about each case and his brief interviews with family members brought to the New School class. While it illuminated Adler's mode of interpreting specific kinds of childhood maladjustment, The Pattern of Life would have been a far stronger work for professionals had it contained a more detailed exposition of how he viewed each type of emotional disorder. Too often, his interesting comments appeared telegraphed, undoubtedly due to the book's transcribed lecture format.

Major reviewers generally found The Pattern of Life worth recommending. "Usually on the basis of the circumstantial evidence of the case," descriptively noted the New York Times, "[Adler] was able correctly to reconstruct the family situation to which he attributed the child's conduct. Afterward, the child's parents were brought in for questioning and advice, and finally, the child himself. The too docile, the rebellious, the neurotic, the feeble-minded and the maternally dominant child are some of the types analyzed."

More critical was the weekly Outlook and Independent, which regarded Adler's intense therapeutic optimism as unrealistic. "Dr. Wolfe's preface reveals the aspects of Adler's philosophy which have made some academicians place it in the realm of religion rather than science," its reviewer sarcastically remarked. "Essentially free will appears in a new dress. For the underlying idea of Individual Psychology is that 'Every human being can do everything.' The determinism of heredity, the limitations of environment, the stupidities of society are not, it is declared, insuperable obstacles to one who is facing forward to a goal of social usefulness. The [individual's] job is to understand his pattern of life and if his conduct is unworthy, and his goal useless and selfish, master his fate by turning in the right direction."

In the ensuing years of the Great Depression, many American intellectuals would likewise find Adler's buoyant confidence in individual self-determination as overly simplistic. In this sense, his strong socialistic outlook after World War I gradually shifted to a far vaguer perspective on how people are affected by wider social forces. Even during the heyday of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal legislation, rarely did Adler ever provide concrete proposals for actually improving America's social conditions. He instead seemed content in late middle age to offer what many perceived as moralisms instead of empirical findings. Thus, the Outlook and Independent archly suggested that Adlerian psychology had begun to acquire the trappings of a religion. "Perhaps that is why [he] is hailed by his followers as a prophet rather than a psychologist. A well known Jesuit priest in Germany has said that if Adler continues to expound his social ideals, although a Jew he will establish the first Christian psychology."

Less moralistic in tone was Adler's second new book issued that same spring of 1930, Guiding the Child: On the Principles of Individual Psychology. Published by Greenberg, it was an anthology of twenty-one articles written by Vienna's chief Adlerian practitioners. The translator was physician Benjamin Ginzburg, who had organized and edited Adler's The Science of Living, published the year before. Adler himself contributed only one essay, "A Case from Guidance Practice," although his daughter Alexandra (Ali), now a fledgling Viennese psychiatrist committed to individual psychology, provided two. Other contributors included Ferdinand Birnbaum, Alice Friedmann, Arthur and Martha Holub, Olga Knopf, Alexander Miller, Alexander Neuer, Regine Seidler, Lydia Sicher, Oskar Spiel, and Erwin Wexberg. Together with Ali, these men and women had become the most important Viennese clinicians to practice and promulgate Adlerian psychology.

Certainly, Guiding the Child was aimed at a professional rather than popular American audience. Its well-integrated chapters had originally appeared as articles in Adler's journal during the preceding year. Most were descriptive rather than theoretical, and showed concretely how Adlerian therapists diagnosed and treated maladjusted schoolchildren. The majority of cases were drawn from either child-guidance or teacher-training sessions that Adler's associates had led for Vienna's public schools in the late 1920s.

Guiding the Child predominantly featured children of lower- or workingclass Austrian families. Many of the youngsters had lost a parent to death or desertion, and their health was often poor. With little parental supervision, teenage youths were sexually active and several cases involved prostitution or pregnancy. Yet curiously, not a single contributor to Guiding the Child even discussed tangentially how socioeconomic factors like poverty or overcrowding might be relevant to such students' lives.

Nevertheless, Adler's associates offered a progressive view of early maladjustment. They decisively rejected the notion, still advocated by many at the time, that these youngsters represented "genetically inferior stock" associated with specific ethnic groups. Rather, the Adlerians optimistically emphasized that virtually all such cases could be treated successfully through the modern principles of psychology. Emphasizing esteem building rather than coercive forms of discipline, they specifically condemned corporal punishment as an outmoded way of treating children. Generally, though, Adler's collaborators expressed satisfaction with the growing enlightenment of Austria's parents and schoolteachers.

With its sober style and sharp focus, Guiding the Child received positive comments from most American reviewers. Typical of these was the New York Times, observing approvingly that the book "shows how children are readjusted to school work and home conditions through the application of [Adler's] principles in the Vienna free guidance clinics which now exist in every school district. Initially, some ten years ago, partly by the public school teachers themselves, they have been largely fostered by parents and teachers' associations."

In what may have set an American publishing record for the time, Adler authored yet another new book that same spring. The Education of Children marked his fourth work for Greenberg Publisher, and his sixth for the English-speaking world, in just three years. As was true for all his other volumes appearing in this brief period, The Education of Children mainly represented lecture material edited extensively for organization and readability. Combining this challenging task with translation from the German were Friedrich and Eleanor Jensen, a husband-and-wife team of Adler's Austrian associates. They performed their task well, for the book was probably Adler's most lucid since Understanding Human Nature. Unlike Problems of Neurosis, The Pattern of Life, and even Guiding the Child, this volume presented in detail Adler's insights on personality development. The Education of Children was too specialized for most parents, and had its widest appeal among those professionals already acquainted with Adler's name.

Arguing that all children suffer from feelings of inferiority, Adler attributed early behavioral problems to their intense desire to gain esteem and power. As he had long argued before, most childhood disorders are rooted not in sexuality but in the drive for mastery. Adler saw many problem behaviors as essentially strategies that youngsters unconsciously use to assert their will against much bigger and more powerful family members. In this sense, parents can start feeling helpless or enraged by a peevish child who will not sleep, who seems to eat nothing, or who continually soils the bedsheets.

"These weapons may be compared to [those] which nature has given animals for their protection—claws and horns. It is easy to see how they [originate] in the child's weakness, and his despair of being able to cope with life without such extraneous equipment. And it is remarkable how many things may serve for such weapons. There are some children who have [none] but their lack of control of stools and urine."

Adler advised parents to be gentle and understanding, rather than harsh, when faced with such problems. To threaten or actually carry out punishments is ultimately useless, and only exacerbates the difficulty. "What is essential is for us to see the child's situation with the eyes of the child himself, and interpret it with his own mistaken judgment. We must not suppose that the child behaves logically—that is to say, according to adult common sense—but we must be ready to recognize that children make mistakes in interpreting their own positions." Thus, for example, a five-year-old girl whose mother works a night shift may begin to develop a sleeping disorder. Its origin might lie in the youngster's fear of abandonment, and her intense desire, therefore, to actually witness her mother walk through the front door.

The Education of Children also offered Adler's rather detailed comments on [parental] sex education for children. Adopting a cautious viewpoint, he commented that, "There are many persons who are … insane on the subject… want [it] at any and all ages, and play up the dangers of sexual ignorance. But if we look into our own past and into the past of others, we do not see such great difficulties nor such great dangers as they imagine." As in previous writings, Adler stressed that parents should explain sexuality to children according to their degree of interest and intellectual capability.

Typical for Adler's earlier books, he highlighted the important role of schooling in aiding a child's emotional development. "An educator's most important task—one might almost say his holy duty—is to see to it that no child is discouraged at school, and that a child who enters school already discouraged regains his confidence through his school and his teacher. This goes hand in hand with the vocation of the educator, for no education is possible except with children who look hopefully and joyfully upon the future." In keeping with his optimistic faith in psychological progress as the key to social improvement, Adler ended his book by triumphantly declaring, "We are entering a period which is bringing with it new ideas, new methods, and new understanding in the education of children. Science is doing away with old worn out customs and traditions."

Despite its insights, The Education of Children offered little that was really new to Americans familiar with individual psychology. It covered ground that Adler himself had fully mapped in numerous earlier works, and to many reviewers who had initially been quite receptive to his writing, he was clearly rushing too many books into print. Rather harshly, the New York Times related that, "One finds much good sense in this book, much that is suggestive, and borne out by individual experience, but its form detracts from its value. The style is rambling, and the subject matter essentially unorganized. Juggling the titles of the chapters would not matter much. The book is descriptive and interpretative rather than explanatory in the scientific sense or practical in its effort to teach those responsible for children."

Although its tone was more cheerful, even the sympathetic Outlook and Independent could no longer shrug off the repetitive quality of Adler's recent writing. Conveying a backhanded compliment mixed with an unmistakable touch of sarcasm, its reviewer remarked that, "Alfred Adler's new books come off the presses with the rapidity of exploding firecrackers. The Education of Children is a third arrival within as many months. But we are not with those who suggest that Dr. Adler should be persuaded to practice Book Control. Even if he does say the same thing over and over, repetition is a well known educational device."

During that same year, the influential William Alanson White, former president of the American Psychiatric Association, scathingly wrote: "While it has slowly been growing in [my] mind that Adler's other books are becoming stereotyped, [I am] now becoming convinced that they are deteriorating… [I have] tried therefore to be tolerant and considerate and to see the good that was in the works of this author, but it is becoming painfully evident that an adverse note must be struck, and [I] therefore with this last work [cry] 'Enough!'

Why was Adler at the age of sixty inviting such unnecessary criticism at the risk of his formidable reputation? The answer is not altogether clear. Certainly, he had little to gain financially from authorizing the release of these "firecrackers" into the American zeitgeist. Greenberg Publisher's advances were not large, and none of his books since Understanding Human Nature had enjoyed sizable sales. Nor was Adler at this stage in his long career in need of professional recognition; his ideas were well known to colleagues throughout the world. From the almost casual manner that he entrusted free-lance editors to organize—even embellish—his books, it hardly seems likely that these works were important sources of ego gratification.

It may be that Adler decided that launching quickly done popularizations would be the most effective way to propel individual psychology into wider public awareness. From this perspective, he may have viewed books like The Education of Children as merely extending the seemingly successful approach he had initiated more than a decade before in postwar Vienna. By offering countless lectures to nonprofessionals at the People's Institute and by opening his society meetings to all comers, hadn't he greatly expanded the sphere of influence of individual psychology? Most of Adler's career had developed outside academia's groves, and as a social democrat at heart, he had always taken pride in rejecting the intellectual elitism that the University of Vienna medical faculty had long symbolized for him.

Nevertheless, Adler probably understimated the extent to which he began to alienate once-sympathetic American colleagues by his unbending effort to democratize his psychological system.…

Although Adler's work in the late 1920s had clearly blossomed in both Austria and the United States, matters were proving very different in England. There his nascent movement of individual psychology had become increasingly embroiled in extraneous social-political causes and factionalism. To restrengthen appropriate developments, Adler decided to make a special visit in January 1931.

Adler, of course, was aware that mental-health services in the British Isles still lagged behind those in the United States as well as in his native Austria. It had only been as recently as 1927 that British professional interest in child treatment had become organized. That year, the newly formed Child Guidance Council, based in London, had dispatched a fact-finding team to the United States to learn the latest interdisciplinary methods. Two years later, the first mental-health course for English social workers was offered at the London School of Economics. Likewise, the country's first child-guidance clinic and child study center was founded in the late 1920s.

Perhaps deciding that his approach might therefore be relatively unfamiliar to English practitioners, Adler offered a fairly rudimentary lecture to psychiatrists of the Royal Academy of Physicians. Published soon after in the British medical journal Lancet, "The Structure of Neurosis" was a formal presentation that emphasized a combination of social interest and co-operativeness as a key aspect of mental health. Summarizing his longtime perspective on personality development, Adler recounted how during our preschool years we each create a unique style of life designed to help us cope best with our powerful surrounding environment. "No two individuals are identical in their conceptions, perceptions, feelings, actions, and thoughts," he declared. "Each of these belongs to the style of life created by the child."

Adler explained that with repeated experiences of failure, children develop feelings of inferiority and subsequent difficulties in relating well to others. While conceding that the trait of cooperativeness probably had a hereditary component, he stressed that it was "not very deep and must be taught like history or geography … from the kindergarten onwards." Similar to Adler's prior remarks in books like Understanding Human Nature, he urged that mental-health prevention "be started at school [where] teachers look out for faulty styles of life and shrinking social interest."

In the brief question-and-answer period that followed, Adler addressed such topics as criminal behavior and its possible link to poverty, suicide as a form of revenge, and the value of traditional English education. The final questioner somewhat humorously challenged: "At what stage does the semisanity of us all become neurosis?"

"No general rules can be laid down," Adler gently replied, "for all individuals differ. The degree of social interest is the best guide to [our] amount of neurosis."

Two days later, Adler offered his next major lecture before the London branch of the International Society for Individual Psychology. This was the lay group founded at Gower Street four years earlier by Dimitrije Mitrinovic and his fellow intellectuals, artists, and writers. Although initially focused clearly on Adlerian psychology, they had become steadily immersed in Mitrinovic's eccentric mixture of occult study and the advocacy of pan-European guild socialism. It must have been somewhat uneasily, therefore, that Adler addressed this audience with a formal lecture entitled "The Meaning of Life." It was published shortly thereafter in the journal Lancet, and later formed the nucleus for Adler'swell-acclaimed book, What Life Should Mean to You.

Unlike his presentation before the Royal Academy of Physicians, Adler's talk was both more philosophical and eloquent. "The problem I want to discuss tonight is a very old one. Probably human beings have always asked such questions as: 'What is life for? What is the meaning of life? Perhaps they have said that life has no meaning at all. You hear it still in our own time."

Adler specifically attached Freud's gloomy assessment of human nature. Without mentioning his former mentor or Civilization and its Discontents even once by name, Adler nevertheless declared, "It is often said that human beings are governed by the 'pleasure principle.' Many psychologists and psychiatrists, however, are sure that this is not true." All emotionally healthy people, Adler insisted, "strive for the happiness of others; this is the true pleasure principle of the socially interested person." In contrast, to search for physical gratification is "the striving of a person who is only interested in himself and not others."

Adler went on to highlight the difference between the emotionally secure and the neurotic. He identified the latter as tending toward pessimism rather than optimism, seeking transient pleasure rather than enduring happiness, and living selfishly for themselves rather than cooperating with others. Those who grow up with such a negative outlook, Adler emphasized, are "not rightly prepared for life.… They always feel irritated and are always irritable, because they are not living [fully] in the world."

How can more people acquire true social feeling? The earlier this emphasis begins in life, the better. "We say that the ability to cooperate can be and must be trained.… On all points, we can prove that that meaning of life must be, for the greatest part, cooperation. And now we have to make it [alive]."

The following evening, Adler offered a third and quite different public lecture. It was sponsored by the Medical Society of Individual Psychology and was soon excerpted by the British Medical Journal. Later in the year, Adler's medical supporters in England published his presentation as a complete monograph entitled The Case of Mrs. A.

In order to demonstrate vividly his particular approach to personality diagnosis, Adler created an unusual and almost theatrical format. He pre-arranged with a few medical colleagues, that a completely unfamiliar psychiatric case history be given to him on the lecture platform. Then sentence by sentence, he read the notes aloud while immediately voicing specific deductions about the woman's life, attitudes, and relationships—all based solely on his thirty years of clinical experience.

In a way, this format resembled that of Adler's book The Case of Miss R, published in 1929. He was now, however, interpreting case material extemporaneously as a teaching device. More broadly, Adler's predilection for a Sherlock Holmes-style analysis of small clues to unmask one's basic personality had long been part of his professional repertoire. Indeed, in later years Adler confessed to greatly admiring Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous literary creation.

"Mrs A." was a thirty-one-year-old married woman with two young children. She had been raised in a working-class family with an alcoholic, physically abusive father. Mrs. A's husband had been vocationally ambitious, but due to a war injury was relegated to menial shop labor. Frustrated and embittered, he had expressed his urge for dominance by the continual bullying of family members. Mrs. A. felt little sympathy for him; in fact, for the past eighteen months, she herself had been suffering from a variety of phobias, anxieties, and violent compulsive thoughts, including suicide and the murder of their two small children. As a result, Mr. A. was forced to be at home constantly with never-ending vigilance, lest his wife or offspring come to physical harm.

In Adler's remarkably contemporary viewpoint, the case could best be understood in terms of family dynamics revolving around the vital axis of power. He declared Mrs. A's life-style a "masterpiece" of creativity, for she had developed a complex of seemingly debilitating symptoms whose end result actually gave her true power in the family. "By her neurosis," explained Adler, "she had given [her spouse] rules which he must obey. He became a husband under command. He was required to assume responsibility for her, and she utilized and exploited him.… By this strange route," Adler pointedly concluded, "she had conquered and subjected her husband."

Adler's audience was delighted with his artful demonstration of case analysis.…

Today, Adlerian institutes and therapeutic training centers are growing modestly throughout the United States, Central Europe, and elsewhere: Although he surely would be dissatisfied with Freud's unquestionably greater impact upon Western civilization, it seems likely that Adler would be content to see how much of his impassioned life's work has proven beneficial to the world.