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Alfred
Adler was born February 7, 1870
in Vienna, Austria.
He was the second child in a family of six, his family was wealthy and
he grew
up in the suburbs of Vienna.
Adler
was ill most of his childhood and reported being closer to his father
because
he felt rejected by his mother. He also said that he felt unattractive
and
small growing up so he worked very hard to be popular in school to
compensate
for the rejection he felt from his family life. Adler was not a very
good
student at first, a teacher even suggested that his father take him out
of
school and make him a shoemaker’s apprentice. His father quickly
rejected this
idea and expressed his disgust of the teacher to Alfred. Soon Alfred
decided to
show the teacher what he could do and soon he was first in his class
and
experienced very few difficulties as a student from then on. Alfred
suffered
from a near fatal spell of pneumonia at age four and said that he
wanted to be
a doctor; this is a goal he would pursue through college (Biographical
sketch
2005).
In 1888, he
began his studies at the University of Vienna Medical School. He
received his
degree in 1895. He began practicing general medicine but specialized in
ophthalmology. In 1897, Alfred married Raissa Timofeivna Epstien. The
following
year was a busy one for Adler; he set up a private practice in Vienna
and also welcomed his first daughter, Valentine. Also in 1898, Adler
published
two articles in Austria’s “Medical News
Bulletin” and wrote his first book in which he sets up what will
become a
main aspect of his school of thought: looking at man as a whole,
functioning
entity, reacting to his environment and physical endowment as opposed
to a sum
of instincts and other psychological manifestations. In 1901 his second
child
Alexandra is born (Boeree 1997).
In
1902, as well as publishing two
more articles in the “Medical News
Bulletin” he was also one of the few people who reacted favorably
to
Freud’s book on dream analysis, which led to Freud sending him a hand
written
postcard inviting him to join the circle that met weekly at Freud’s
home to
discuss new aspects of psychopathology. At this time Adler had begun
collecting
material on patients with physical handicaps, studying their organic
and
psychological reactions to them. It has also been suggested that since
Adler’s
office was near a circus and he treated many of those people, that made
him
interested in the unusual strengths and weaknesses of them and led to
his
insights into organ inferiorities and compensation. Although Freud and
Adler
would work closely over the next several years, their relationship was
never
personal (Alfred Adler 2001).
In 1904, along with the birth of his son Kurt,
he published one of his most important works, The Physician as Educator in
which he expressed his early interest in child guidance and education. The following year he published A Study
of Organ Inferiority this book
expressed the roots of Adler’s thinking about organ dialect as well as
an
overview of the human organ systems. Over the next several years, Adler
began
developing his personality theory that differed dramatically from
Freud’s.
Adler disagreed with Freud’s emphasis on sexual factors. Adler’s idea
of the
aggression drive for example, differed greatly from Freud’s sex drive
in
psychoanalytic theory. In 1909, his daughter Cornelia was born (Boeree
1997).
In
1910 Adler became President of
the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society through Freud’s appointment; Freud
thought it
would help to mend their increasingly bad relationship. However, it did
not
help because in 1911 the two parted ways for good in a bitter ending,
both with
bad feelings of each other that they would readily discuss with others.
This
led Adler to form his own group which he first called The Society for
free
Psychoanalytic Inquiry, the name would later be changed to The Society
for
Individual Psychology (Biographical sketch 2005).
In
1912, Alder published his book, The Neurotic Constitution.
This book
developed his concepts even more clearly, and he called his
psychological
system “Individual Psychology”. This term was sometimes misinterpreted;
it
refers to the indivisibility of the personality in its psychological
structure.
Individual psychology reflected his idea that people should viewed as a
whole
rather than by their parts (Boeree 1997).
During World War I, Adler served as a
physician in the Austrian army. Prior to returning from the war he
founded
numerous child guidance centers in Vienna.
Adler was invited to lecture at Columbia
University
in 1926. His lectures
and papers were very popular in America.
His lectures were overcrowded and he communicated as easily in English
as he
did in German. Beginning in 1932, he held the first chair of visiting
professor
of medical psychology at Long Island College of Medicine. From this
point on he
spent the academic year teaching in America
and only spent the summers in Vienna.
His family moved to the states to join him in 1935. When Adler was in Aberdeen,
Scotland
to deliver a
lecture he collapsed in the street and died of heart failure on May 28, 1937 (Alfred Adler
2001).
Alfred
Adler’s theories,
publications and lectures contributed much to psychology’s history.
Adler posed
a single drive behind all of our behavior and experience. When his
theory had
evolved into its most mature form, he defined this drive as the
striving for
perfection. Individual Psychology was Adler’s social psychological
system. He
minimized the influence of sex on personality and he focused on the
conscious
rather than the unconscious. He also believed that our plans for the
future
affected us, and that striving for goals influenced our present
behavior
(Schultz 2004).
Adler
also differed from Freud
because he believed there was no biological drive for penis envy by
women. He
believed that this was a myth invented by men to feel more superior,
and he
also believed in equality for the sexes. Adler proposed that
inferiority
feelings are a motivating force in a person’s behavior. This led to the
development of the inferiority complex which people develop when they
can not
compensate for inferior feelings; this complex leaves people incapable
of
coping with problems in life. Adler believed that the drive for
superiority
spread across the cultures of the world, however we all strive for this
goal in
different ways. This is our style of life, which is fixed by age four
or five
(Biographical sketch 2005).
Adler
was also interested in
children’s relationships between their personality and birth order. He
discovered that depending on whether children were born first, middle
or last
they had varying methods of coping and attitudes toward life. He
thought that
the child born second were better adjusted than the first born or
youngest. He
also believed that because only children were the center of attention
in the
family, they may have trouble adjusting in the outside world where this
is not
the case. This concept of birth order has since been studied
extensively
(Biographical sketch 2005).
The
theories of Adler were accepted
by those who were no longer satisfied by Freud’s theories that
centralize
around sexual forces and experiences in childhood. Although many of
Adler’s
theories were criticized it was also apparent that he had a great
influence on
post-Freudian psychoanalysis.
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