SOURCE: "Alfred Adler and His Comparative Psychology of Individuals," in Inferiority Feelings in the Individual and the Group, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951, pp. 73-93.

[In the following excerpt, which was originally published in Spanish in 1936, Brachfeld situates Adler's conception of human nature within the context of a social and philosophical debate over degeneracy.]

In Levin D. Schucking's work The Sociology of Literary Taste we possess an able, if incomplete, study of the changes of fashion in the domain of literature. But no one so far has attempted to give an account of the formation and development of taste in psychological matters. And yet psychology is a popular science nowadays, especially in America, and, by ricochet, throughout the world. The cult has had its repercussion on literary fashion. Hence the vogue for Kafka and Proust in the United States, with the result that these authors' works, somewhat neglected during the last twenty years, are now being displayed in all the European bookstalls. The psychology of Adler has undergone a similar revival, all the more salutary as it was still far from being appreciated at its true worth.

The conception of 'feelings of inferiority' is now inseparably connected with the name of Alfred Adler, and we shall have, therefore, to deal at some length with the body of his theories. His contribution to sociology will be the subject of a later work, which will also touch upon his 'personal equation' and the social factors which contributed to the formation of his ideas. We shall follow in this the lines laid down by the late Professor Karl Mannheim in his theory of the sociology of knowledge.

In this volume sociological factors will only be lightly touched upon, but we must nevertheless attempt to throw some light upon the scientific background against which Adler's ideas on the feelings of inferiority took shape.

At the beginning of the present century these ideas were already, so to speak, in the air. If we look through any Central European review on psychology or sex we shall find at this period 'a great fear' on every page. Everywhere the same lament is raised—'Humanity is degenerating! The idea of degeneracy was, no doubt, derived from the ideas of Darwin and Spencer on evolution, but it also gave an echo to the dissatisfaction felt at this period in an ultra-urbanised civilisation. Everywhere 'degenerates' began to crop up—Minderwertige, as the Germans called them, i.e. persons of minus biological value. This minus-value gave the medical men food for thought, and their concern was being increasingly shared by the general public.

At the same time, the university professors were turning their attention not only to pathological psychology but to the minor defects of ordinary thought called 'inhibitions'. The studies of the Hungarian writer, Paul Ranschburg, on this subject created a sensation, and where to-day we speak of the 'inferiority complex', the talk then was all of 'inhibition' and 'inhibited persons'.

This period also witnessed a revolt against the psychological atomism which was superseded by the psychology of Acts leading to the more complex psychology of Function. In his Gestaltqualitdt, Ehrenfels discovered a whole new psychology of Form. In German-speaking countries, the Ganzheitsbetrachtung of William Stern broke fresh ground and found brilliant confirmation in the Vitalism of Hans Driesch. The study of sex inevitably led to a deeper appreciation of the psychic factors involved, partly through the influence of Freud, but also independently of him. Thus Näcke, though he contributes to the Jahrbücher für sexuelle Zwischenstufen edited by the materialist Magnus

Hirschfeld, came to the conclusion that human sexuality cannot be understood without taking account of psychic factors. Adler himself started from a naturalistic standpoint in his studies of the Organic Inferiority in 1907, since this conception was already present in medical science. Independently of this, Professor Carl Pelmann's sensational work Die Psychischen Grenzzustände, Bonn, was already in its second edition in 1910. In it, he wrote of conditions which he regarded as taking place at the borderline between body and mind. Like Adler he can, therefore, be regarded as one of the forgotten forerunners of the psychosomatic therapy of to-day. He circumscribes with great eloquence the term 'mental minus-value' (geistige Minderwertigkeit). The term 'mental' need not mislead us, for in the technical vocabulary of this period the word is equivalent to 'moral' or 'psychological'; to-day we should say 'psycho-genetic'. The notion of mental degenerates was adopted by the psychology of this time, and psychogenetic factors began to be taken into consideration in addition to those of a purely hereditary, biological, or somatic character. In Sexual-Probleme, 1910, one of Pelmann's critics, the sexologist Max Marcuse, noted the preponderant influence exercised on our civilisation by the French Minderwertige, les degeneres superieurs. This was the same path along which Lombroso was travelling, and it led to the present Pathography [The Problem of Genius] of Lange-Eichbaum.

The final stage had yet to be reached. Once Freud had crossed the Rubicon with the help of his idea of psychological determinism, it only needed a thinker of courage and genius to take the decisive step forward. It was at this point that Alfred Adler appeared on the scene and rescued the idea of Minderwertigkeit by incorporating it into a new theory of striking simplicity. Thus Adler's ideas are in no way a creatio ex nihilo (such a thing does not exist in the evolution of ideas). He is the author of a new and creative synthesis gathering the many converging rivulets into one mighty stream. Adler's ideas on Minderwertigkeit and on mental degeneracy (wrongly so-called) combine logically, naturally, one might almost say organically, in the formation of a new and extremely original theory.

The war of 1914 was a severe setback to the diffusion of Adler's ideas, which for the time being merely followed in the wake of the Freudian theories.

In spite of the marked hostility of Professor McDougall, England was, however, one of the countries where from the start Adler's ideas met with a certain success. The novelist Phyllis Bottome was one of his best-known sponsors, and contributed an interesting biography, Alfred Adler, the Man and his Work (Putnam), which very usefully supplements that of Hertha Orgler. We may mention in passing that Adler came into contract with General Smuts, who contributed to his review Internationale Zeitschrift für Individualpsychologie. The great South African discovered a close affinity between his philosophy of Holism and Adler's psychology. In America, Morton Prince helped appreciably to spread the Adlerian teaching. Adler made his first visit to the United States in 1926, where his daily lectures at Columbia University were heard by over three thousand persons. He then went to Long Island Medical College, of which he was professor till his untimely death in 1937 at Aberdeen, where he was delivering a course of summer lectures. During his sojourn in America he edited the International Journal of Individual Psychology (1934-37) in Chicago, where a large group of his disciples is still in existence.

In France, on the other hand, where the term alone sentiment d'inferiorite (translated from Minderwertigkeitsgefühi) ought to have aroused echoes of Montaigne, Vauvenargues, Stendhal, and the contemporary Pierre Janet, the reception of Adler's ideas was less than mediocre. The result is that his theories are in the main unknown in France. The two lectures he gave in Paris in 1926 and again in 1937, barely ten days before his death, attracted only the specialists. The only work of his that has been translated into French is Uber den nervisen Charakter, and then under the completely erroneous title of Le Temperament nerveux, which in a sense contradicts the fundamental thesis of the book. The psycho-analysts were the first to speak of him; among the psychologists, Pierre Janet, among the writers, Paul Morand, spoke of an 'inferiority complex imported from America', but without knowing the name of Adler. Professor Wallon would quote him sometimes in his lectures on Vocational Guidance. Dr. Gilbert-Robin spread his ideas in a more popular field. I myself with the collaboration of Mlle. Rose Pfeiffer conducted, from 1929 to 1930, a circle of Adlerian studies in Paris which organised lectures among the various groups of students at the Sorbonne; I also published a number of articles and tried to interest publishers in my master's work. Berthold Friedl continued the good work in student circles, and the name of Adler and his ideas appeared more and more frequently in reviews and newspapers. Andre Maurois seems to have met Adler in America and read his books, as may be seen from some of his novels; when an enquiry was conducted as to 'what books to translate', he recommended all the works of the Viennese master. Intelligent specialists like Dr. Ombredanne have taken careful note of Adlerian results, not to mention the man who has done most to introduce modem ideas on psychology in France, Dr. René Allendy, the indefatigable and inspiring director of the Groupe d'Etudes Philosophiques et Scientifiques pour l'Examen des Tendances Nouvelles. For a long time this was the only place where foreign specialists could establish contact with the educated public in Paris. In 1933 Manes Sperber began to present the Adlerian ideas in Paris, but in an expanded form of his own, against a background of a distinctly political character. A few years later a pupil and friend whom Adler valued very highly, perhaps beyond his deserts, Dr. Alexandre Neuer, organised a feminine association of Adlerian 'initiates'. Another personal friend, Herr Schlesinger, proved a zealous and skilful propagandist in the paper Vendredi, while Mr. Paul Plottke, a young German professor in exile, who later served in H.M. Forces in Africa and Italy as psychologist and is now established in England, brought out roneographed bulletins on Adlerian psychology in German and in French.

Thus Adler's ideas have not penetrated into France to anything like the same extent as have Freud's. There has never been a real Adlerian movement comparable to the Freudian movement. The latter was enormously helped by the interest aroused by psycho-analytical ideas in certain artistic and literary circles, especially those of Surrealism, and one can safely say that without the moral and financial support of a princess of the blood royal Freud's ideas would certainly have met with far more resistance. The Adlerian psychology, handicapped by an ill-chosen name and by the unwillingness on the part of its followers to use it as an artistic and literary stimulus, was therefore infinitely less of a social and literary success in France than in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Spain or America.

In Hungary I was one of the founders of the Magyar Individual-psychologiai Tirasig, with Professor Stephen de Miday as president. This society survived the disasters of the political reaction caused by Hitler's influence, and thanks to the ability of Professor de Màday it continued its good work even throughout the last war.

In 1929 I lectured in Madrid and Barcelona on 'Post-Freudian Psychology: Alfred Adler'. As Ortega y Gasset was interested in Adlerian ideas, Menschenkenntnis (Understanding Human Nature) was immediately translated into Spanish and is now in its third edition. In 1931 I took up my residence in Spain, lecturing and publishing many papers on Adlerian psychology. In 1934 I translated What Life Should Mean to You, which became the psychological best-seller in Spain, running to four editions. Then The Problem of Homosexuality: the first edition of the present book was published in 1936; two 'private' editions appeared in Chile (1937) and in the Argentine (1942); and the second legal edition (1944) has been out of print for a few years. Dr. Ramón Sarró, author of the preface to that edition, remarked in his preface to the third edition of What Life Should Mean to You that of the big three—Freud, Adler and Jung—Adler's psychology seemed to him the best suited to the Spanish character. When, in 1936, Adler was planning a lecture tour in Spain, the Madrid teachers wanted to invite him to a banquet at which 10,000 guests were to be present.

Individualpsychologie in der Schule was the first of his books to be translated into Spanish; it is now in its third edition, in Buenos Aires, as the publisher emigrated to Argentina. A book called Guiando el Nino (Guiding the Child) has also appeared recently in Buenos Aires. It contains a selection of articles originally published in Adlerian reviews. The editor, Señor Bernstein, is occasionally at fault in his method of introducing Adler's ideas to Spanish-speaking countries.

In general, Adler's idea met with varied and contradictory fortunes. Sometimes it was held up as a kind of revelation, sometimes dismissed as a commonplace, a 'psychology for schoolmasters'—which is true enough, but in no derogatory sense. Some writers, such as E. Utitz in his Charakterologie, look upon Adler as a modern Christian Wolff, Freud being the corresponding Leibnitz. Others regard it as Adler's merit to have made it possible for the first time to discuss openly the results of psycho-analysis by freeing these of their somewhat stifling pansexualist aura. Some again saw in Adlerism a useful complement to the economic theories of Karl Marx, while others were to find in it the first attempt to free man from the network of scientific determinism, thus restoring his freedom of will in spite of an inexorable biological heredity. As a matter of fact, none of these views is completely false. They are due to the many-sided character of Adler's work, where psycho-therapy, pedagogy, medicine, social improvement mingle with 'hints for the conquest of happiness' and 'a quick and infallible method for the Conquest of Health'. Nearest the truth are those who see in it a way of interpreting the problems of the modern world regarded as family conflicts on a gigantic scale. Like Freud, Adler starts from the analysis of neuroses rooted in family life, in libido and destrudo, in Eros and Thanatos; but he is the first to offer a psychology that will enable one to evaluate oneself and others. 'Among all the schools and trends of modern psychology,' says Sperber, 'Adler's was the only one to give to the purely psychological problems of power and valence (Geltung) the position they deserve, i.e. one of cardinal importance.' The Americans speak of 'feeling important', and this is also one aspect of the German Geltung.

But the circumstances in which this psychology first arose were peculiarly unfavourable, and were to lead to errors and confusions from which neither Adler nor his followers remained exempt. From the start their pitch was queered by factors of purely social and historic order, and for a long time their teaching appeared in a wrong perspective.

It is a hard fate to live in the shadow of a great personality possessed of powerful ideas, and yet it is by no means certain that Adler ever harboured this as a grudge against Freud, as the latter maintains in his autobiography, My Life in Psycho-Analysis. What is certain is that in 1907 Adler discovered the precious vein from which he was laboriously to quarry all his theories during the next twenty years, and that although he did not realise it himself, his work was thwarted by the presence of Freud in Vienna. Freud was fifteen years his senior, exercised a powerful influence in intellectual circles, and enjoyed the reputation of being the creator of psycho-analysis. Adler himself felt his personal charm; he was his collaborator, but he was not his pupil. It may be that without Freud Adler would not have carried his ideas in the direction he chose, but it is no less certain that his thought was something very different from a mere 'imitation by opposition' (Tarde) of psycho-analysis. And yet that is what the world believed, and what it still believes, thus placing Adler on the same footing as men like Jung, Stekel, Rank or Bjerre. Thus, in his work as in his life, he is over-shadowed by the mighty figure of Freud.

The influence of a master from whom one wants to liberate oneself can sometimes be fatal. Had it not been for Hegel's idealism, Marx might have christened his own philosophy historical realism, instead of materialism, a term which has completely misrepresented his true thought and even more so that of his votaries.

It has been thought that the Adlerian and the Freudian systems resemble each other like two brothers; it has been thought that both have sprung from the same social need—collective nervosity, disproportionate neglect of the science of man as compared to the technical and natural sciences—which is true. But it has also been claimed that both arise from, or are part of the same spiritual tendency, the same mental approach, the same historical line in the development of ideas—which is not true at all. 'The Comparative Psychology of Individuals', i.e. of the individual as an undivided unity (in-dividuum) is not a form of psycho-analysis. True, it may have regarded itself as such at one time, and this error arose because the Adlerians themselves thought that the necessity of their historic 'moment should make them offer dialectical battle to the ideas of Freud. The results achieved by Adler and his school are something of a different order from that attaching to the 'Psycho-analytical Revolution'. And this is true in spite of all appearances, in spite of the mutual imprecations of both sides, in spite of the hatred which continues after both the masters are dead.

Far too much importance has been given to the various differences between Adler and Freud. It has been said that the latter wanted merely to be the 'retrospective historian of the psychic development of the individual, while the former was 'turned towards the future'; that Psychoanalysis looked for the causes of nervous symptoms, while Individual Psychology attributed them to goals, to characteristic pieces in a teleological puzzle. Actually this argument is merely 'popular' since the idea of final cause bridges the gap in question. That Freud sees in the dream the via regia leading to the heart of the unconscious, whereas for Adler it is merely auch ein Symptom, one more symptom amongst so many others. It has also been said that Freud atomises the personality with his conception of partial and more or less autonomous impulses, whereas for Adler only the integral man, only the 'psycho-physical unit' exists; that Freud is a 'pansexualist' whereas for Adler the sexual problem is at the most a primus inter pares. I know all these arguments, because for years I have myself repeated them ad nauseam. They are not false, certainly not; but to repeat them indefinitely, to elaborate them, to add to them is—futile. The real difference is elsewhere; it lies much deeper. It is axiomatic, for it resides in a difference of fundamental inspiration, of Weltanschauung. Here again we have been met with a host of arguments: Adler, at any rate to begin with, was a moderate Socialist, thus in the opposite camp to Freud, a 'bloated bourgeois'; again, the psycho-analyst has his patient lying on a sofa in a darkened room and takes up his position behind him, as though he wanted to shove himself into his unconscious, whereas the Adlerian engages in a talk as between equals, expressing by this attitude a complete difference of conceptions. We may add that Freud was an Ausldufer, a last representative of the liberal epoch marked by disorder and anarchy, in which the liberty of all was to create a general harmony, even in sexualibus, whereas Adler is the herald of a new era of Order, since according to him 'sexuality cannot be regarded as a private matter'. His supreme postulate was the Community (Gemeinschaft), and he regarded events in the lives of individuals as having no meaning except as participating in a collective whole.

But the differences spring from a deeper source. All the points we have mentioned are only symptoms, only derivative results. In reality Freud's system is a physiology that does not dare to call itself so. The master himself admitted that he was only dealing with a 'provisional science, pending the advent of a more perfect physiology'. This important point has, with the exception of Gerb, been ignored or forgotten by all the writers on the subject, especially by the new brand of Catholic psycho-analyst, headed by Mme. Maryse Choisy. Freud's system is the final consequence of the Darwinian Theory of Evolution (the Jungian version being pure mythology and the starting-point of the curious literary psycho-analysis very much in fashion in France—witness the curious Gaston Bachelard). Adler was the first to revive the true concrete Characterology, which had been castigated by Humboldt almost as soon as it appeared, and then committed to oblivion. The Adlerian psychology is not a science, it is not even a psychology in the usual sense of the word. It is more than that, it is a 'science', only with certain reservations and in a new sense. At the most it is an ideographic and not a nomothetic science, for the luminous phrase which Pierre Abraham wrote as a heading in his book, Figures, could also be made to serve here—'Apart from the general, no science; apart from the individual, no truth.'

Adler was always very much concerned to retain the strictly scientific character of his 'Psychology of the Individual'. But at the same time he always maintained that his Individual Psychology was an art, and on his lips the word assumed the same meaning as when one speaks, for example, of the Hippocratic art. The Greek τεχνη means art; just as medicine is a technique based on science, or on several sciences, without being itself a science, so much the same could be said of the Adlerian method. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, though born under the impulse of certain results in the field of psycho-therapy, is a theory, whereas the Adlerian system is merely a corollary to practice. The Adlerian 'discoveries' can be 'theorised after the event, as it were, and that is the task which we have set ourselves at the moment. But is it not significant that Adler was never able to construct a 'theory'? That was the task which, from the first, fell to his disciples, and one of which, let us admit it, they have not acquitted themselves too well. One cannot accept Freud's ideas without ipso facto adopting a definitely materialistic and mechanistic ideology. But one can be an Adlerian and remain what one was, go on thinking what one thought before, just as one can be a doctor and still be either a Catholic or a Communist. And when men like Rühle or Sperber have to 'enlarge' the Adlerian theory till it has become a Marxist tool, they have been no more successful than a writer like Rudolf Allers, Professor at the Catholic University of Washington, who claims to have incorporated the whole Adlerian system into his own Thomistic system of thought. (The Psychology of Character, 1939, and The Successful Error, a Critical Study of Freudian Psychoanalysis, 1943.)

Freud was a man of science, Adler an educator. The fact that both were doctors was an accident due to their 'moment', to their 'milieu,' and not to their 'dominant faculty (Taine's faculte maitresse). They do not speak the same language. The words may often be the same, but they are used in a totally different sense. There is neither identity nor opposition. Not only are their points of view utterly different, but the two men are not, in spite of appearances, talking of the same thing. With the tenacity of a Sherlock Holmes and the searching eye of a Public Prosecutor, Freud has brought forward a gigantic indictment of humanity. Whatever is obvious, whatever is clearly there, is only facade (as he says in connection with our 'earliest memories'), a facade designed to cover something hidden. Whatever is manifest is only the symbol of what is latent. The descriptive geography of the human psyche does not satisfy him, he wants to write its geology, its geodesy. His psychology therefore becomes a Tiefenpsychologie, a 'depth psychology'. For a very long time this term was used to denote both systems, the Freudian and the Adlerian. This was a mistake. Regarded as 'depth psychology the Adlerian method would appear very superficial. Jung's is the only system that really deserves the name.

Oceanography is certainly a noble science, but woe to the sailor who relies on it alone to cross the ocean! Adler never wanted to give men more than a practical treatise on how to sail most successfully, given the means at his disposal, through the troubled waters of life. If he does plumb the depths of the unconscious—which he does not at all regard as an inferno to which all the worst in man has been relegated—he does so only the better to find the course which the ship must steer.

Adler took as his starting-point a paradox of biology, viz. the faculty of compensation for defective or inadequate organs. From this he travelled step by step towards the ambitious aim of creating with psychology a Scientific Knowledge of Man. For him, psychology was not the research carried on in laboratories designed to impress us with a bewildering array of figures; he distrusted tests as heartily as he distrusted the 'infinitesimal analysis of the ego' which Freud carried to such lengths. A knowledge of the soul and of human conduct, worked out on a human scale, inspired simply by good sense and accessible to the man in the street—such was his aim. A doctor of sick souls, his chief concern was to heal. And since to heal is not so much a science as an art, Adler, whose penetrating spirit was devoid of all philosophical or metaphysical preoccupation, dreamed of a psychology which would be at once a science and an art. He gave intuition its due, although this inevitably shocked those who rather stupidly regarded the empirical data of natural science as alone of any positive value. He has been reproached with his distrust for psychological apparatus, his scorn for the battery of tests, his general dislike of psycho-technique or psychometry. But since in experimental psychology practically everything can become a test, so Adler's 'test' was a determinate situation in life. He could open a 'human document' at any page; the least fragment of autobiography was enough for him to tell us with almost unerring vision the essential points of the subject's style of life. His enormous practical knowledge of men enabled him to skip the earlier stages of interpretation and to dispense with 'profiles' and 'psychological batteries'. Where there was only one in 1929 there are no less than five professors teaching the statistical method at the Institut de Psychologie at the Sorbonne to-day, and yet we know how frail is this method of tests, based as it is on a misconception of social facts and involving a veritable petitio principii.

Adler, who at the outset would eagerly embrace any idea or tendency faintly resembling his own, was fortunately preserved from following the methods then in vogue—psycho-analysis and psycho-technique. He was prevented from doing so by the discovery of the physiological and psychological relativity residing in the law of compensation and over-compensation. His thought was not 'evolved'; it was contained in embryo in his first work, the Studie über Minderwertigkeit der Organen, first published in 1907 and reprinted twenty years later without the author having to change a single word in it. It is in this book, moreover, that we shall find the starting-point of his theories and of all our present knowledge on the subject of the feelings of inferiority.

Inferiority, a term long used in medicine and in jurisprudence, is a notion that has come to us from Darwinism. In human beings the existence of organic inferiorities can really only be noted at the moment of birth or during childhood. All the organs may suffer from a complete or partial deficiency, or inferiority; the sensory organs, the digestive system, the organs of respiration, the circulation of the blood, the glandular, urinary or genital systems, the nervous system. The fate of an 'inferior' organ will always vary according to the individual. Under the impact of external stimuli the instinct of self-preservation will drive the individual afflicted with a deficiency to level things up, to compensate for his inferiority. From an extensive study of persons and families showing organic deficiencies of all kinds, Adler concludes that the levelling process generally goes through the following stages: vital incapacity, morphological or functional anomalies; inability to resist and predisposition to certain definite illnesses; compensation through the organ itself; compensation through another organ; compensation by 'psychic superstructure'; organic or, alternatively, psychological over-compensation. The central nervous system takes part in a general way in any partial compensation, beginning with an increase of growth or of function (e.g. the one-armed man's arm which assumes athletic proportions). The inferior organ takes longer to function properly than the perfect organ. Adler was therefore able to state that to overcome an inferiority presupposes increased cerebral activity, a cerebral compensation. The next step seemed to be the assumption that every defective organ called forth the creation of a 'psychic superstructure', and that the individual in question will be 'more gifted' than if his organ had been perfectly constituted from the first. Thus it might well be, thought Adler, that an inadequate digestive system might acquire higher working capacity than a normal one. But at the same time, since the starting point of the compensation is in the digestive organs, the psychic superstructure founded on the deficiency would logically be stronger than anything else and attract all the other psychic complexes around it. In such a case anything connected with digestion or nutrition will have a special psychic 'value' or 'accent'. The nutritive instinct will therefore predominate in the subject, with greediness and avidity in its wake; but it may also produce greed, avarice, covetousness and possessiveness generally on the moral plane. Such a process (which is only one example, for compensations take place analogously in the case of inferiority of any organ) would seem to favour the formation in the individual of psychic axes closely dependent upon one or several inferior organs.

These 'psychic axes' manifest themselves in the subject's whole psychological set-up, in his dreams, in the choice of his profession, etc. The defective organ then indulges in regular exercises—rather like an athlete training for a contest, and having overcome its difficulties, it is rewarded by the pleasure that henceforth accompanies its activity. Hence the special attitude of the subject towards this functional pleasure brought with such effort, as indeed towards all pleasure and towards sexual pleasure in particular. In a word, Adler has found the concrete point where purely physical or physiological facts are transformed into psychic facts. The discovery is of capital importance and was not exploited as it should have been. For very soon Adler was to discover that it was not so much the organic inferiority as its psychic superstructure which released the compensation. Similarly the compensations vary qualitatively and quantitatively in response to an imponderable element—a vague, confused and ill-defined feeling of insufficiency. Having started from purely biological work on the heredity of certain organs, especially those of the visual organ, in which he was a specialist, Adler now turned to the study of inferiorities in natura vili, i.e. in children without, however, going into the problem of Kinderfehier. Thus, from being a child doctor he became, in pursuing the paradoxical destiny of organic inferiorities, a nerve doctor and a psychiatrist. The psychic axes, which were the result of the compensation or over-compensation for inadequate organs, had thus been discovered. But the word 'psychic' presupposes an opposition to 'somatic'. Adler, however, had gradually become convinced that body and soul were so closely connected as to constitute a single undivided unity and that even purely imaginary inferiorities, or such as existed only in virtue of some social convention (such as being left-handed, having red hair, etc.), would call forth compensations without the presence of any organic inferiority properly so called. Thus the psychic axes, which at first were landmarks for the exploration of the personality, became directing lines of behaviour—the meridians, as it were, of the subject's life.

But man does not live in a vacuum. Organism presupposes environment, the one cannot exist without the other. The human person receives a host of stimuli from the external world and this amorphous mass becomes ordered along certain 'axes' or 'directing lines' which we may call tendencies. But Adler was not content with what the manuals of psychology called 'directed attention'. He saw at once that memory itself did not escape from this law of tendencies. Memories are in a sense like metal filings lying on a piece of cardboard. If a magnet is placed above them they will dispose themselves along symmetrical magnetic lines. The magnetic pole which determines the directing lines of character is the ideal aim pursued by the subject; its opposite pole is the earliest childhood recollection. Man's whole being tends, whether he knows it or not (and more often he does not know it), towards a fictitious goal of superiority. We are set in motion, not by our innate dispositions, but by the position in which we stand in relation to this goal. Each of our actions indicates our position in this continual voyage which starts from inferiority and moves towards superiority—a position of struggle or an attitude of hesitation and indecision. There is a whole 'dialect of the organs', including a 'sexual jargon' which, to the astute observer, will indicate the kinetic law of each. For in Adler's view there was nothing static in man, everything was in motion, and no one psychic process could be taken as expressing the whole human being. What does it matter what we bring with us into the world at birth? What we do with it, that alone is important. It would therefore be useless to make out a list of our innate dispositions—(Besitzespsychologie—the psychology of possession). The Adlerian psychology aims quite consciously at the utilisation of what we have—(Gebrauchspsychologiethe psychology of use). Hence the heuristic principle which is of primary importance in the Adlerian psychology. It tells us not to lose ourselves in questions of detail, such as how the eye or the ear functions, how dreams are produced, etc. These theoretical matters can be left to the academic psychologists. What matters to the Adlerian psychologists is what the eye wants to see, what the ear wants to hear, the tendency which the dream reveals, the function of the dream—whether it encourages or discourages.

Later on, a new term replaced the 'directing lines', which had themselves replaced the 'psychic axes'. Not that the facts observed by Adler had changed, nor his methods of interpretation and cure; only the theoretical conception had altered. The new term was style of life. The importance of this change in terminology must not be over-estimated. It certainly marks a new stage in the emancipation of Adler's thought from the ultra-naturalistic ideas in which he had been educated and which had gone to form his first terminology. But it should be noted that this emancipation was never complete. Nevertheless, to talk of a 'style of life' expresses a definitely personalist point of view and an approach to the idea of life as being man's continual creation.

According to Adler, the style of life is established in early childhood, generally between the third and fifth year. In his analyses of 'The Neurotic's Conception of the World or of the 'Soul of the Criminal' in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Individual Psychologie of Vienna and in the International Journal of Individual Psychology of Chicago, he claimed that the neurosis or delinquency invariably mirrored a situation in childhood when the neurotic or the criminal was taking his first steps in life. This is particularly true of criminals. 'It is sufficient', he writes, 'to ask them for their earliest memory, the oldest impressions which have lasted since their childhood. They will answer something like this. "I was helping to clean some clothes: and it was then I noticed a coin and I took it. I was six." Or else, "When I was five I saw a railway carriage catch fire. It was full of children's balloons that were being thrown out: I took as many as I could." Or again, "My mother was in the habit of leaving money lying about; every week I used to take a little."'

It would seem, then, that in affirming that the style of life is established in early childhood, Adler is basing his deduction on such early memories, or mirrors of the adult's style of life. But in this I am of the opinion that Adler is guilty of a petitiō principii, or that he has been the victim at any rate of an error in perspective. The idea that our subsequent fate is cast in childhood 'between the third and fifth year' is nothing but a legacy from Freud, in spite of the fact that Adler understood the supposed Oedipus Complex in a completely different sense from Freud's. The Freudian idea that with the establishment of the Oedipus Complex the fate of our libido and consequently of the whole of our life is cast, was the logical outcome of the author's belief in Evolution. But such an idea appears out of place in the Adlerian system and does not conform to its general spirit. Had not Adler himself shown us that the earliest memory, far from being a manifest facade hiding an older and latent memory, was most often germane to the present situation, or simply expressed that same style of life, of which, like the dream, it was only a consequence? It was he, too, who had shown us that these earliest memories were very often not authentic, that they were often 'arranged' in favour of the subject's preoccupations at the time, that they were 'false recognitions' purely in function of the present goal. I have studied this question myself in several hundred subjects, and I can state that very often a change in the style of life will automatically arouse a fresh 'earliest recollection' which will be in conformity with the new situation.

Very often, too, a number of earliest memories subsist without our being able to say which of them is the oldest. We shall therefore name sometimes one, sometimes another as such, and this not by a chance caprice but in virtue of the magnetic attraction exercised by the present situation on the confused mass of mnemonic material. But, it will be asked, if according to Adler's own results the earliest memory is 'arranged' in virtue of the existing style of life or of the present situation, how can it be claimed that these same memories point to the precocious but definitive establishment of this very style of life? Adler used to say that to cure a patient consisted in changing his style of life. But could one change it if it dated from early childhood? It was all very well for the psycho-analysts to say that even in the case of an unfavourable Oedipus constellation (e.g. fixation on the parent of the same sex, leading to homosexuality in the adult) the normal form of the complex could always be 'diluted'. The Adlerian psychology (except in the case of the dissident Künkel) did not recognise the idea of affective transference. So all Adler could do was to appeal to commonsense, to the 'community feeling' which he believed to exist a priori in the depths of every human soul. He attacked the psycho-analysts' assumption that the child is a fundamentally selfish little creature; this he regarded as an error in perspective. Since man, from the dawn of his existence on this globe, has always lived and always will live in a society, it is impossible that this fact should not have made a deep mark upon the species and implanted in it a profound sense of community which is expressed in the mother-child relationship. The baby's relationship to its mother is not at all, as some have dared to maintain, a 'parasitical' one. The mother with her breasts full of milk, and the functional changes brought about in her organism by motherhood, needs the child just as much as the child needs her.

Let us try to sum up the Adlerian theory very briefly in its final form and with its ultimate implications. Every human being lives in accordance with a certain style of life which is peculiar to him. This style of life is marked through and through with the goal of superiority, real or fictitious, towards which tend all the great directing lines of the subject's behaviour. Everyone tends to assert his own worth (Geltung) to avoid situations of inferiority, and aspires to situations of superiority.

The stupid assertion has been made, and how often repeated, that Adler 'defied Nietzsche's Will to Power', that he proclaimed and extolled Hobbes' libido dominandi (cf. Ernest Seilliere). Some of Adler's early writings lend a certain colour to this erroneous interpretation. In them he speaks of a Streben nach Macht and lays undue stress on the importance of the 'aggressive impulses' in neurosis and in life in general. But the more he deepened and elaborated the results he drew from the analysis of thousands of subjects, the further he moved from this terminology. 'People confuse my psychology with that of my patients', he would say jokingly. For in his view the most powerful motive in every human action was not, as Nietzsche claimed, power, but superiority, whether fictitious or real. That superiority which lurks even in the soul of the masochist, for he is seeking it in the very extremity of the humiliation to which he subjects himself. To show one's worth, to feel important—that is the secret of the human soul. And here we can borrow a term from chemistry, that of valence, so as to distinguish clearly between real and objective worth (the German Wert), and this Geltung or Geltungsstreben, which is a deeply implanted and purely subjective tendency to show or display our worth. Thus the Will to Power would be only one form among a thousand others of this tendency towards valency; one of a theoretically infinite number of variants of the same theme.

But according to Adler this tendency to show our worth is not a primordial factor in human nature. It arises as compensation for a painful and sometimes burning feeling of a lack, of a minus, the Feeling of Inferiority, the Minderwertigkeitsgefühl. Man, owing to his greater differentiation as compared to the higher mammals and even to his cousin, the ape, has become, in a sense, an inferior species. He is an animal whose birth is premature. According to biologists he ought not to see the light until he has reached the weaning stage. This is what has forced him to live in society, for only union makes for strength. Society or, in Adlerian terminology, the Community (Gemeinschaft) is the primordial fact. It is prior to the individual, and in the latter there exists from the first a strong impulse towards communal solidarity. In this view, man, is fundamentally altruistic and not, as so many psychologists seem to think, fundamentally egoistic. The sense of community is as natural to him as breathing. But alas, the feeling of his own insufficiency breaks in upon his spirit of solidarity and collaboration, and at each blow suffered by his self-esteem this spirit will lose strength. Hence all the many deviations from the 'straight' path. Here we have a man or woman showing nervous symptoms, another will succumb to psychosis, another to crime; yet another will compensate his feelings of insufficiency by a definite sexual perversion, while another will seek for a return to community by the path (somewhat problematic in Adler's view) of art. Mental hygiene would therefore require that the patient should adapt himself to the community. But what is this community? What is this mysterious entity? Adler has refused to define it. Every psychic deviation is an error which brings about inevitable retribution; it is a diseased state of our feeling of community, of our common sense. In What Life Should Mean to You, in the important chapter that bears the title of the book, we read, 'The Community Feeling means above all the urge towards a form of community conceived as eternal, such as one might imagine humanity to be if it had already achieved perfection. I am not thinking of any existing community or society, nor of any religious or political group. I am simply pointing out that the most suitable human ideal is the perfect community, which would contain the whole of humanity and thus mark the final stage of Evolution.'

At this point Adler ventures into Utopian regions which are far removed from the field of serious sociological observation. We do not wish to follow him in these metaphysical speculations, though he is the first to recognise that they do not admit of proof. In his view, 'Community is to be regarded as 'absolute truth', as the 'absolute imperative'; but the notion has unfortunately remained completely vague and undefined. Religion is a community, and so is a political group, the relationship between mother and child, between the members of the same family or of the same nation. All these are 'communities', but Adler has neglected to set them out in any kind of hierarchy. He does not argue about the notion, just as a Christian does not argue about his God, and it is not difficult to see in Adler's work the mark of a religious and metaphysical mind, though expressed in purely secular form. The community takes the place of the divinity; the feeling of inferiority that of evil or sin, and altruism or solidarity that of virtue. The scheme is that of all Christian moralists and recalls in a curious way the doctrine of Mandeville, which we expounded in an earlier chapter.

Thus, in the Adlerian system, the feeling of inferiority seems to acquire the role of prime mover. It is the pivot around which all psychic movement revolves, the force that conditions all our actions, even our thoughts, our talent, our happiness or our unhappiness. And just as Mandeville admitted that, paradoxical as it may seem, the vices of individuals tended to the public advantage, so Adler drew attention mainly to the useful, the socially useful side of many feelings of insufficiency and minus-value.