[In the following review, Kallen offers a skeptical summary of Adler's system of individual psychology.]

Nowadays, when people talk of the "new psychology," they mean prevailingly the ideas about the human mind deriving from the work of Freud and his associates. Although the custom is to lump this work in a single, solid, homogeneous mass, it is, in fact, still nebular, with three definite heads distinguishable in it. At the centre is the system of human nature constructed and stated, more or less architecturally, by Freud himself and accepted as the incontrovertible orthodoxy by the congregation of the faithful. To the right and to the left are the heterodoxies of Jung, the Swiss, and Adler, the Austrian. Both heterodoxies consist primarily in a rejection or deprecation of the cardinal orthodox dogma regarding the supreme role of sexuality in the life of man from birth to death. Jung absorbs this sexuality in a prior and wider stream of activity which turns his speculations regarding human nature into a metaphysical sentimentalism of the type of Eucken or Bergson. Adler subordinates this sexuality to a prior and wider "will-to-power" which allies his speculations concerning human nature with a metaphysical voluntarism of the type of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Vaihinger. Both philosophers of mind differ from their metaphysical relatives in that they generate their speculative dogmas out of the material provided by means of the technique of psychoanalysis, of which both are practitioners. This technique is the common denominator of the three sects. The rest may be considered what Alder would call "arrangements" of the material drawn out by the technique.

[The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology] is a redundant compilation of Adlerian "arrangements." It consists of a collection of twenty-eight occasional pieces, the earliest dating from 1911. Their sequence has been made, as nearly as it could be, logical rather than temporal, and the themes mount in technicality and range as the essays proceed. There are subjects as varied as the psychic treatment of trigeminal neuralgia and Dostoevsky; myelodysplasia and the individual-psychology of prostitution. Nevertheless, the essays do not avoid being boresomely repetitious. Dr Radin, in his work of translation, seems not to have succeeded so well as he might have in reducing the unnecessarily technical, involved, and pontificating style of the originals to a direct and readable English. Those who are familiar with Dr Adler's German will, however, not too greatly blame him. They will remember how much worse that is than even the bad German most of the German-speaking psychoanalysts seem to have fallen into.

Adler calls his system of human nature the system of "individual psychology." He intends by this phrase that the psyche of each man is always to be considered an organic and indissoluble unity. It is a whole, as the Hegelians used to say, with a capital W. In every single act or aspect of a life, no matter how contradictory any may be to any other, this whole is present as the effective agent. Its essence is to be a goal, generating the means of its attainment by its reactions upon its environment; its quality is of drive or will aiming at power, at superiority over its settings. The specific conditions it reacts to will provide the instruments with which it establishes its superiority in feeling, and the moulds of character in terms of which this superiority is pursued and maintained. The process begins in earliest infancy. Indeed, the first cry of the new-born is a sign of felt insecurity; an insecurity extended and intensified by its manifold relations to the adult world on which it depends. The child early begins to feel inferior, often because of some sensed or perceived inferiority of organ in itself. The whole of its life soon becomes a persistent effort to overcome this feeling of inferiority, and to replace it by a feeling of superiority and security. Such a feeling need not, and hardly ever does, register a real superiority and security. It is not a recognition of reality and an adjustment thereto; it is an aversion from reality, an evasion of it, a compensation for it. The feeling of superiority is attained by means of autogenous fictions and in the pursuit of a "fictitious goal." Sometimes it is created by bullying, aggression, self-assertion; sometimes by submission, weakness, all the frailties and perversions, many sorts of disease. Sexuality and sex-relations are often its instruments, and merely instruments.

The feeling of superiority, centred in the fictitious goal, is striven for universally. Everybody is doing it, but doing it without knowing, hiddenly. Everybody has a "secret life-plan" that dominates and directs every phase of his conduct and evinces itself in his carriage, his postures, his fantasies, his dreams, his dogmatisms, his intolerances, his envies, his pleasure in the misfortunes of others, and so on. These are all substitutes for the struggle with reality, short-cuts to security; as a rule their intensity exceeds the requirements of self-preservation in the struggle. All the relationships they designate are reducible to the basic one of superior-inferior and this is especially symbolized in terms of the relationships of the sexes. The superior is always masculine, the inferior always feminine; Alder designates the demand for superiority as "the masculine protest." It stands out in neurotics.

The urge to superiority is not, however, the all of the Adlerian system of human nature. Over against the will-to-power is set "the eternal, real, physiologically-rooted community feeling." This Adler signalizes as the source of tenderness, love of neighbour, friendship, and love. His system of psychology, in fact, is described as seeking to make the "community-feeling" dominant—"to gain a reinforced sense of reality, the development of a feeling of mutual goodwill, all of which can be gained only by the conscious evolution of a feeling of the common weal and the conscious destruction of the will-to-power."

Well …

In the matter of systems of psychology, you can pay your money and take your choice. The limen at which observation drops out and speculation sweeps in is very low. The body of observed and verifiable data is not too large and is neutral to the inferential systems which abut upon it. It will set at the same time with equal indifference and equal ease into the mutually contradictory elaborations of Freud, of Jung, of Adler, of the behaviourists, and all the other schools. Its neutrality carries a warning for those observers to whom correctness is more important than systematization, and accuracy more desirable than cure or reform. For my taste, Dr Adler is too ardent. He says in the preface:

Individual psychology is now a definite science with a limited subject-matter and no compromise can be admitted. This intransigence arises … from the inexorable logic of a treatment of phenomena as mutually related. We shall never agree to change the fundamentals of human psychology which it has established and to adopt others in their stead. And we shall also never be under the necessity of undertaking a special enquiry into sexual factors long after the other aspects of psychic life have been investigated. Individual psychology covers the whole range of psychology in one survey, and as a result it is able to mirror the indivisible unity of the personality.

Maybe so. Unhappily the history of science, and of psychology no less, is a history of compromises. "Fundamentals" change very often in it, and "never" is a word not written in its painful lexicon.