Alfred Adler (Page 2)

We turn now to look at Adler himself.

Alfred’s father, Leopold, the son of a Jewish grain merchant, was born in Burgenland, a buffer state between Austria and Hungary, in 1835. Some time in 1850s or 1860s he moved to Penzing, a rural town outside Vienna, Austria, where he met and married Pauline Beer. They and their children were citizens of Hungary. Alfred gained Austrian citizenship in 1911. The family moved several times in Alfred’s childhood and youth, including twice to Leopoldstadt, one of Vienna’s several "Jewish quarters."

First came Sigmund, in 1868, then Alfred, born on February 7, 1870 in Rudolphsheim, a village outside Vienna,. Adler always believed that his older brother over-shadowed him. Then came two girls. One brother died in infancy.

Two of Adler’s early recollections (ERs) suggest how childhood illnesses focused The Problem he came to believe he would have to solve in life, as well as its Solution:

One of my earliest recollections is of sitting on a bench, bandaged up on account of rickets,with my healthy elder brother [Sigmund, two years Adler’s senior] sitting opposite me. He could run, jump, and move about quite effortlessly, while for me movement of any sort was a strain and an effort. Everyone went to great pains to help me, and my mother and father did all that was in their power to do. At the time of this recollection I must have been about two years old. (Mosak & Kopp, 1972, p. 9)

When I was five I became ill with pneumonia and was given up by the physician. A second physician advised a treatment just the same, and in a few days I became well again. . . . From that time on I recall always thinking of myself in the future as a physician. This means that I had set a goal from which I could expect to end my childhood distress, my fear of death. . . . So I came to choose the occupation of physician in order to overcome death and the fear of death. (Ansbachers, 1964, p. 199)

Here we find reflections of Adler’s later concepts of Early Recollections, Fictional Final Goal, Compensation, Ideal Image, Inferiority, and Courage in Striving. But one of Adler’s childhood memories was not what it seemed to be. Sperber tells it this way:

As a six-year-old boy, [Adler] was gripped with a horrible fear on the way to and from school because he could not avoid going past a cemetery. This fear became more unbearable when he saw that other children who took the same route remained fearless and uninhibited. One day he decided to come earlier than usual and forced himself to climb back and forth over the cemetery wall, and so rid himself of his fear. Years later he met an old schoolmate who had lived in the neighborhood and taken the same path. Adler reminded him of the cemetery and spoke of his own fear of it. However, the schoolmate, a perfectly reliable witness, informed him that the cemetery had never existed and that the memory...was based on an occurrence which Adler had fabricated, not experienced. Adler returned to the spot and was forced to concede that his heroic deed had indeed been a fantasy. [Adler] continued to relate this story to his students in order to append the instructive epilogue. For from this self-deception he had drawn a multitude of conclusions. (Sperber, 1974, pp.14-15)

Indeed, Adlerians know that many of the ERs clients relate are not entirely factual. However, people believe what they believe, and act as if their beliefs are true. So even fabricated ERs serve a purpose as ways a person views self, others, and the world. In cases where clients cannot recall an early recollection, the therapist may suggest that they make one up. Adler believed that, invariably, such fictive recollections will still accurately reflect some early lesson about life.

Adler says his mother pampered him until a brother was born. When she transferred her attention to the new-born, Adler said, "I felt dethroned, and turned to my father, whose favorite I was."

His father’s advice, "Never take anything for granted, but find out everything for yourself" became Adler’s life-long motto. Hoffman notes that one Passover, young Alfred decided to stay up all night to see if, as he’d been told, an angel would come to "inspect" the home to make sure it contained only unleavened bread. He substituted some leavened bread for the matzos in the cupboard, and later said "I was not altogether surprised when the angel did not turn up." (p. 9)

Adler: School Years

In 1879, Adler attended the Sperlgymnasium (where Freud had been a student in 1865) and, when the family moved to Hernals in 1881, he attended the Hernalser Gymnasium until he was 18. Hoffman (p. 15) describes schooling of the time as being boring, rigorous, with rote learning and without personal challenge. For eight years, the students were drilled in Latin, Greek, German language, German literature, history, and geography, mathematics, physics, and religion. The dominant teaching method seems to have been pointing out student mistakes, and entirely lacking in positive encouragement. Also, Adler entered his school career a year younger than his classmates, and always felt a little behind and, therefore, always needing to catch up. Doubtless there is something here which is related to his later idea of "inferiority" and the need to move from a "minus" to a "plus" position in life.

Adler’s parents raised their children as nominal Jews, and were technically observant during Adler’s childhood. The goal of middle-class Jewish families of that time (freed from anti-Semitic laws and restrictions of the previous century) was to assimilate into the dominant culture in order to get ahead both economically and socially. As a young married man, Adler joined a Protestant church to ensure his children some sort of religious education. He encouraged his children to read the Bible "for its psychological wisdom and…insights into human nature." (Hoffman, p. 9)

Like other middle-class Jews of the period, Adler’s parents wanted at least one son to enter a profession. Thus his schooling took the academic rather than trade-school track. Young Alfred began his schooling aimed at medicine, which became more important when his older brother had to drop out of school to help with the family business. When Adler did poorly in mathematics, his father threatened to apprentice him to a cobbler, which apparently had an effect, since Adler led his class in math from then on.

In the Fall of 1888, Adler entered the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Vienna, to become a practicing physician. He completed his first of three qualifying exams in 1892, and then fulfilled the first half of a year-long military obligation. After two more qualifying exams, he received his medical degree in 1895, completing his internship as a volunteer at the Viennese Policlinic. He then did the second half of his military obligation, and returned for two years of postgraduate training in psychiatry.

In 1899 he opened a private practice as an internist, then turned to the specialties of neurology and psychiatry. He and his new wife, Raissa, set up an apartment in the same building as his office, in a lower-middle-class neighborhood with a large Jewish population. Indications are that Adler worked hard, often with little sleep, to build his medical practice.

A word about medical education in Austria at the time: Hoffman (pp. 19-23) describes the situation as grim. Emphasis was on diagnosis, rather than treatment or patient care. The Austrian approach was called "therapeutic nihilism" by the rest of the European medical community. The poor feared going to the hospital because chances were great they would die there; incoming patients had to pay in advance! Patients were treated as teaching experiments rather than for their illness. All who died were autopsied to advance diagnostic skills, not medical treatment.

Adler developed an interest in socialism sometime in the mid-1890s, not for its politics but its "optimistic viewpoint that peoples’ lives could be immeasurably enhanced through specific societal action" (Hoffman, p. 22). He read Marx and Engels, wrote editorials for local newspapers on how social conditions contribute to illness, engaged in heated discussions at a local café, and also attended socialist meetings. It was at such a meeting that he may have met his future wife.