Alfred Adler (Page 3)

Adler: His Marriage and Family

In the summer of 1897, he met Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein. December 23 the same year, they married in Smolensk, Russia. He was 27, she 24. Hoffman (p. 25) suggests they may have met at a socialist meeting, but also notes Adler never wrote or spoke of their meeting, and both Alexandra and Kurt told Hoffman that they never heard their father speak of it.

Raissa, the second daughter of affluent Jewish parents, was born in Russia in 1873. As a female, she was not allowed to enroll in Moscow University, so went to the University of Zurich, where she was discovered socialism, an interest that continued when she moved to Vienna in 1897. According to Hoffman, Adler "felt immediately exhilarated by her intelligence, idealism, and life-minded commitment to world betterment through socialist activity." (p. 26) Hooper & Holford relate that she "overwhelmed young Dr. Adler with her brains, idealism, and determination to change the world; [she was] an exotic ‘new woman.’" (p. 39)

Alfred and Raissa had four children: Valentine (1898), Alexandra (1901), Kurt (1905), and Nelly (1909). Alexandra and Kurt became Adlerian psychiatrists in New York City, and were active in promoting Individual Psychology. "Vali" emigrated to Russia in about 1933, only to die in a Siberian gulag. Nelly remained in Vienna to pursue an acting career.

In 1898, Adler published his Health Book for the Tailoring Trade, in which he not only pioneered a psychological approach to problems in the work place, but also introduced some of the ideas that would later appear in Individual Psychology. He urged the medical establishment to look at how illness among workers in this "cottage industry" could be traced to working conditions. He suggested that treatment should include social factors and changes in working conditions. One direct result of this small book was that several new laws were passed based on Adler’s suggestions.

In 1908, Adolf Joffe, a journalist with the exile socialist newspaper Pravda (whose editor was Leon Trotsky), came to Adler for treatment of a morphine addiction. Joffe (later a key figure in Lenin’s Bolshevik government) spoke highly of Adler to Trotsky. The two men met and for the five years the Trotskys lived in Vienna, the families were close friends. Kurt Adler recalls that the two men would play chess or take the children to the park on weekends, while wives, Nathalia and Raissa, stayed home to discuss socialism and their Russian homeland. Raissa became a dedicated Trotskyite, and even more dedicated to social change in her homeland.

Alfred and Raissa were happy the first several years, but tensions developed as it became clearer that they had different ideas about what was important. Adler sought to establish himself as a major contributor to psychological theory and psychiatric practice. Raissa became increasingly political active in socialist circles. By 1912 the differences were enough that Raissa took the children to Russia for "an extended vacation," actually a marital separation.

In 1914, with war imminent, Adler wrote asking her to return. But now, as a Russian, she was technically an enemy of her Austrian husband! With typical direct action, she gained an audience with the Czar and swore she was a loyal Russian who had been forced to marry an Austrian. (Hooper & Holford, pp.96-97). Of the change in Raissa induced by this separation, the novelist Phyllis Bottome wrote:

She was no longer the ex-Russian student with all that implied, but a balanced woman of the world, well-dressed, well-groomed, taking her place as wife and mother with dignified sophistication at first wholly strange to her. Her large and generous heart was still the same, but I think it was no longer disturbed and broken. It was as if Raissa had taken a new grip on the world, and now faced it…with a chastened and wiser courage. I don’t say [she] was any happier with Adler, but from the time she returned, [she] was ready to play her part with strength and dignity in her own home." (Bottome, p. 37)

From this point, Raissa became important in Austrian politics, and viewed her political strivings as more important than Adler’s work.