SOURCE: "Individual Psychologist," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 2960, November 21, 1958, pp. 665-66.

[In the following review, the critic provides an overview of Adler's life, career, and writings.]

Since Freud's death in 1939 psycho-analysis has certainly not remained stationary. Although the basic method has changed little, several of the major Freudian ideas have undergone considerable revision. In particular, serious attempts have been made to shake off the doctrine of instinct and to replace it by new conceptions of inter-personal relationship. There has also been a shift of interest from the unconscious mechanisms supposed to underlie neurosis to the defences evolved by the personality in counteracting them. In Freudian parlance, the focus of attention is no longer the id but the ego.

The changing outlook in psychoanalysis has led to a revival of interest in the work of one of its long-rejected pioneers—Alfred Adler. This is clearly appreciated by Dr. H. L. and Dr. R. R. Ansbacher, the editors of a carefully chosen and thoughtfully presented selection of Adler's works. As they rightly point out, the modern emphasis upon social rather than biological issues, upon character rather than instinct and upon self-expression rather than sex, has brought many neo-Freudians close to the Adlerian position. Although this suggestion will be indignantly repudiated by many who have been conditioned to regard Adlerian theory as a major heresy, one may agree that aprima facie case exists for the revaluation of Adler and his place in psychology. Even should Adler not prove to have been right in his dissension from Freud, at least he may not now appear so far wrong as to have deserved excommunication.

Alfred Adler, the self-styled "legitimate father of the inferiority complex," was born in Vienna in 1870. Of Hungarian-Jewish parentage, he became a Christian early in life but never appears to have been much troubled by matters of religious belief. His family was well-to-do and his home life by all accounts easy-going and cultured. Yet Adler's childhood was by no means wholly happy. He was delicate in health and consumed by an altogether excessive envy of his older brother's prowess. This sense of inferiority vis-a-vis his brother appears to have remained with Adler all his life and had doubtless a good deal to do with the birth of his legitimate brain-child. Indeed, Adler himself spoke of the accord existing between the facts of his childhood and the views which he had expressed in his psychological writings. But he seems never to have suspected the origin of these views in the accident of his own psychological history.

Adler qualified in medicine at the University of Vienna and practised for many years as a general physician. Unlike Freud, he was at no time engaged in pure scientific research and hence had little opportunity to acquire firm standards of scientific evidence. Nonetheless, he won considerable respect as a general practitioner and, indeed, remained in practice through all the years in which he was close to Freud. Yet even before he met Freud Adler appears to have had a keen eye for the psychological aspect of physical illness. In this respect he was undoubtedly ahead of his time.

The circumstances of Adler's adherence to Freud are still far from clear. According to his biographer Phyllis Bottome (Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom. Faber and Faber, 1939), their association grew out of a newspaper article by Adler strongly defending Freud's much maligned work on the Interpretation of Dreams. On the other hand, the late Ernest Jones claims in his biography of Freud to have been quite unable to trace the existence of any such article. Nor was he able to confirm the report that Adler had once been Freud's family doctor. Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that Freud invited Adler to join his circle—almost certainly in 1902—and that Adler thereafter played a most important part in the early growth of the psycho-analytical movement.

Freud's acceptance of Adler as a close colleague is all the more remarkable when it is borne in mind that Adler never underwent an analysis with Freud and never really committed himself to the Freudian position. Indeed, he advanced a theory of neurosis very different from that of Freud as early as 1908, while still a trusted member of Freud's entourage. It cannot, therefore, be said that Adler's defection involved the abandonment of a position which he had formerly accepted. Adler never repudiated Freud. Strictly speaking, he had never been a Freudian at all.

The formal break with Freud took place in 1911. Part of the discussion at the Vienna Psycho-analytical Society which preceded it is reproduced by the Ansbachers and will be of lively interest to the psychological historian. As has been said, Adler's conception of neurosis at this time was very different from Freud's and had been so for some years. This difference had long been tacitly acknowledged within the Society. The critical issue was whether adherence to the Adlerian view was compatible with psychoanalysis as understood by Freud. This issue was closely and evenly fought, at least as many members of the society speaking for Adler as against him. Yet, in the end, Freud prevailed and Adler resigned, along with nine of his sympathizers—about a quarter of the total membership. These formed themselves into a "Society for Free Psycho-Analysis," acknowledging Adler's leadership. Adler later renamed his school "Individual Psychology," by which name it has since been generally known.

Adler's later career was active and in its way distinguished, though he made no further theoretical contribution of real importance. In Vienna he organized a pioneer child guidance service, the full story of which has more recently been told (in The Psychology of Alfred Adler and the Development of the Child, by Madeleine Ganz, 1953). He lectured widely not only to doctors but to educationists and the general public. Indeed, he cast himself as a missionary in the cause of psychological enlightenment. In his later years Adler spent long periods in the United States, though his transatlantic reception does not appear to have been particularly happy and he had little impact upon American psychiatry. Yet he influenced many by his psychological teachings and his courageous and positive attitude to life. He died suddenly in 1936, in Aberdeen, while on a lecture tour of Great Britain.

Not even Adler's death mollified Freud. "The world," he wrote to Arnold Zweig, "rewarded him richly for his service in having contradicted psycho-analysis."

Adler's best-known work was published in 1907, in the period of his close association with Freud. Yet the Studie uber die Minderwertigkeit von Organen (later translated as Study of Organ Inferiority and its Psychical Compensation) owed surprisingly little to the work of the older man. In this study Adler put forward a theory of disease based upon the supposed inborn weakness or inferiority of particular bodily organs or systems. To weakness of a particular organ, he argued, the body responds by a wide- spread effort of compensation. This process may involve organs other than the one directly affected and is to be viewed as a compensatory reaction of the whole organism. Thus the central nervous system—and through it the mind—may have an important part to play in compensating the inherent weaknesses of the body.

This hypothesis of compensation has found broad acceptance in modern medicine. Indeed, it has since reappeared in a variety of special forms, not always with the acknowledgment it deserves. But Adler was not content with a statement of his theory in purely biological terms. It had, he supposed, important application to psychology. Thus the awareness of any physical weakness may be presumed to provoke strong psychological counter-reaction. Often, indeed, compensation becomes over-compensation, as with Demosthenes, the stutterer, who became the greatest orator of Greece. Physiological defect, in short, provides an important spur to psychological achievement.

This general idea was soon extended by Adler to embrace inferiorities other than those directly due to physical deficiency. He supposed that any inadequacy, real or imagined, might become the focus of a feeling of inferiority and thereby provoke effort directed to its conquest. Thus the ubiquitous "inferiority complex" was born. Adler's next task was to classify the main sources of psychological inferiority and to analyse the principal traits of character to which they gave rise. The outcome of this endeavour was The Neurotic Chareter (1912), which still perhaps remains as Adler's best book.

As is well known, Adler placed much emphasis upon the inferiority commonly felt by a child towards its older siblings, in which he doubtless drew heavily on his own childhood experience. He also laid stress on the inferiority commonly felt by women towards the superior position of the male—the so-called "masculine protest." But he soon went beyond the concept of compensation and adduced the craving for superiority as a basic human motive. This he related to a primary instinct of aggression—a concept accepted only very much later by Freud. At the same time, Adler never doubted the reality of human cooperation. As early as 1908 he wrote a paper on the need for affection in children—a need which he believed to lie at the root of all fellow-feeling. To this need and its derivatives he later gave the name of "social interest."

Adler's theory of neurosis is at bottom very simple. The basis of neurosis is aggression—but neurosis results from aggression only under circumstances in which "social interest" is deficient. In the neurotic, the striving for superiority operates without due regard to social reality and is consequently expressed in a variety of autistic or psychopathic forms. Neither sexual nor infantile processes need be implicated to any real extent. The unconscious, moreover, exists but in name and is for the most part an unnecessary assumption. Psychotherapy is less a process of analysis than a matter of re-education. Its aim is the rebirth of social responsibility.

With some justice, Adler reproached Freud for his neglect of the power-motive and its undeniable significance in some cases of nervous illness. Although Freud rejected Adler's views there is good evidence that he took his work extremely seriously. It is doubtful whether the same may be said of Adler. One may wonder, indeed, if Adler ever really understood Freud's position. And he certainly repudiated the most important outcome of psychoanalysis, namely, the evidence which it had provided of infantile sexuality and unconscious motivation as basic causal factors in neurosis. To anyone who accepts this evidence, it is easy to agree with Freud that the Adlerian theory just will not do.

After his break with Freud, Adler published much work but little of it broke new ground. The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1924) was a collection of papers, many of which had previously appeared elsewhere. This book represents Adler's most convincing attempt to apply his ideas to the clinical problems of neurosis. But it was only partially successful.

In his later work Adler tended increasingly to address himself to the educator and the layman rather than to the medical world. The Pattern of Life (1930), What Life Should Mean to You (1931) and Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind (1933) were books aimed at the new post-war public avid for psychological enlightenment. They presented their author as an effective popularizer of his own brand of psychological self-help. No doubt they had influence in their time. To-day they are virtually forgotten.

What, then, is the significance of Adler for present-day thought? At first glance, one would be tempted to say that little remains of his psychological edifice. True, the "inferiority complex" has been accepted as a useful name for a very prevalent source of human unhappiness. Yet there is no good reason to believe that feelings of inferiority, in the absence of deeper disturbances, are of much significance in psychological medicine. Similarly, few people can nowadays accept the sense of inferiority as the principal goad to human achievement. In some cases this may be so—but hardly in all. As so often in psychology, Adler spoiled a good case by facile over-generalization.

And what of the Adlerian "will to power"? This highly Teutonic notion, which goes back at least to Nietzsche, has never really established itself as a valid psychological conception. Needless to say, the advent of Hitler constrained psychologists to inquire closely into the origins of the impulse to dominate and of what has recently been called the authoritarian personality. But few have found it possible to accept a solution in terms of a unique and irreducible human faculty. The striving for superiority has a complex origin in which constitution, upbringing and social convention play their respective parts. Adler's view of dominance in terms of a single psychological variable is both too vague and too all-embracing to possess real explanatory value.

Nonetheless, a more careful glance at contemporary psychology does reveal some parallels between Adler's outlook and more recent lines of thought. First, there has been a marked tendency to distrust the more analytical approach to problems of personality and to stress once again the unitary, coherent and purposeful character of human conduct. This outlook, well represented in the writings of Gordon Allport and Gardner Murphy, undoubtedly owes something to Adler's insistence upon the study of the whole individual and his characteristic "life-style." To this extent at least. Adler anticipated an influential standpoint in present-day psychology.

Secondly, we have witnessed since the war a tremendous upsurge of interest in social issues, which has even penetrated to psychiatry. Freud, it will be remembered, conceived the individual as in fundamental opposition to the claims of society. For him, social forces appeared as almost entirely restrictive and as basically hostile to individual self-expression. In his well-known phrase, neurosis is the price paid for civilization.

Psycho-analysis to-day takes a less gloomy view of organized society. To some neo-Freudians, indeed, mental health is virtually synonymous with social adjustment. And so it was with Adler. His "social interest" was conceived as a basic human capacity and its lack as a sine qua non of neurosis. No treatment of neurosis that evades the re-connexion of the patient with his society stands a chance of lasting success.

This more optimistic view of organized society is undoubtedly the real reason for the present revival of interest in Adler. Both he and our modern neo-Freudians share a belief not only in the therapeutic function of the group but in the ultimate betterment of society itself. Neurosis, they seem to say, is the price paid not for civilization but for its lack.

Yet when all is said, it remains true that Adler was never analysed, never really understood Freud and contributed hardly anything to the theoretical development of psychoanalysis. He expounded a view of neurosis that was both exaggerated and over-simple; a generalization from a few cases without adequate control or possibility of proof. In presenting his argument, moreover, Adler relied almost wholly on personal authority with scant regard to the evidence upon which his system was based. Present-day psychology has little use for prophets and pamphleteers. It seeks its foundations in the decent obscurity of the laboratory, the clinic and the statistician's office.

The most that can be said for Adler is that he stood up to Freud at a time when psycho-analysis showed signs of hardening into a quasi-religious sect. Courage, indeed, he never lacked. And, significantly, this was the trait which he most admired in others and which he spent the greater part of his life in trying to instill into his patients. "Courage," he was wont to say, "is the health of the soul."

Alfred Adler will remain as a figure of real—if minor—importance in the history of modern psychology. A man of complex nature, he was not without internal contradictions. Alongside his aggressiveness was a strong feeling for democracy and socialism. His philosophy of ruthless self-interest was tempered with a deep compassion for the sick and the unhappy. In his slightly ludicrous way he strove earnestly to bring psychological insight within the compass of the ordinary man and woman. Behind the fictive mask of the Superman lay concealed the face of one whom Israel Zangwill might have called a Dreamer of the Ghetto.