Alfred Adler (Page 7)

After World War I

His war experiences also led him to the final "pillar" of his psychology: Gemeinschaftsgefühl, usually translated as "social interest" although sometimes as "community feeling" or "fellow feeling." As Furtmüller puts it,

The concentration of Adler’s thinking during the war, on this problem of man’s wish for human contacts and cooperation, was not motivated by broad, general aspects of the war, What stirred his attention was, again, his contact with the common man, the ordinary soldiers, the wounded and sick in the army hospitals. For them war was not a political or social problem, but a disaster which breaks upon the individual, and the individual has to go through with it like any other catastrophes of life. (Furtmüller, in Ansbachers, 1964, p. 370)

During this period, he wrote and published on various topics, and was invited to deliver a speech to the Zurich Association of Physicians. In it, he called for prevention as a focus of psychology. This new idea (psychology to that time considered for as treatment only) was picked up by several news services. Adler’s name now became known around the world, the first indication that his work would soon receive international recognition.

On November 11, Armistice was declared, which plunged Austria into several years of famine and poverty as a now-partitioned Europe struggled with a post-war depression.

Returning after the war, Adler and the Society renewed their activities with a new intensity. Journal publication was resumed, ways were sought to integrate the concept of social interest into the larger system, and they began to find new arenas in which to strive. Chief among these was education, specifically adult education, school reform, teacher training, and child guidance.

Over the next several years, Adler wrote and lectured on a variety of topics, including child-rearing, prostitution, juvenile psychology, pre-delinquent and delinquent youth. In 1919 he started the first of more than 30 child guidance clinics based on his methods. And that fall he began offering the first of what would become many psychology courses at People’s Institute.

In 1921, at the age of 16, a young Manes Sperber attended one of these courses and was impressed enough to become one of Adler’s most devoted followers. He also became a devoted Marxist/Leninist, helping to form a "Marxist Wing" within Individual Psychology. At a 1925 meeting, Sperber, with several others of the "Marxist Wing" of IP, challenged one of the speakers, Rudolph Allers, for not being socialist enough. "At this point, the twenty-year-old Sperber angrily leaped to his feet and tore Allers’ papers to shreds. Allers . . . turned to Adler for defense. To the surprise and shock of the entire society, he stood up and said, 'But perhaps the boy is right!' " (Hoffman, p. 144)

But by 1930 Adler had had enough. At the fifth International Congress for Individual Psychology in Berlin, he told Sperber "to end his communist proselytizing and that he [Adler] wanted nothing to do with such misguided activity." (Hoffman, p. 258) Years later, in 1970, in his book subtitled "Alfred Adler in Perspective," Sperber would write,

Adler was alarmed at the danger to individual psychology which seemed to threaten from the direction of its Marxist wing. He accused his Marxist followers of hopelessly compromising his doctrine and systematically provoking the ire of the rightists and Nazis. Adler determined to use all available means to destroy our position, or at least to weaken it so much that our entire influence would evaporate. Everyone had to know that we were no longer individual psychologists and thus had no right to invoke him or his teachings. (Sperber, p. 223)

Making the situation more difficult for Adler was that, during this same time, his wife, Raissa, was an advocate of communism, lecturing and writing on the subject. And indeed, it is clear that Adler himself, in lectures, writings, and classes during this period, held a certain socialist flavor. Which led him to champion the cause of educational reform, including teacher-education. The idea for "teaching teachers" had come early in Adler’s career, as he says:

In 1898 I wrote my first article developing my idea of the relation between medicine in the larger sense and the school. Later, in connection with an extension class, I conducted a clinic. It was only a small beginning and a very unsatisfactory one in the face of the great need for child guidance. Thus was born the plan to teach the teachers, for through the school I could reach hundreds of children at once. Then came the war, postponing all my plans. (AA, Ansbachers, 1956, p. 392)

Vienna University was not interested in including teacher training in its curriculum. So Vienna’s municipal government decided to establish it’s own school, the Pedagogical Institute. This in turn led to the creation of the Institute of Psychology, which emphasized developmental and educational psychology.

Adler, for several years a regular lecturer at the Peoples Institute, became a professor at the Pedagogical Institute in 1924. His classes included "The Difficult Child " and "Problem Children in the Classroom," in which he used a case-study approach to illustrate Individual Psychology principles. In his first three years, Adler taught more than 600 teachers. From this period comes his famous educational motto, "Anyone can learn anything."

As noted, in 1919 he started the first child guidance clinic in Vienna. In a few years there were over thirty such clinics, the Erziehungsberatungsstelle (family education centers), involving teachers, parents, and children. Here Adler pioneered early forms of group and family therapy. According to Alexandra Adler, the centers had the cooperation and sponsorship of the government. Each was staffed by a physician, psychologist, and social worker.

Adler’s attempts to effect change in education were resisted by those wedded to the traditional authoritarian ways. And with Hitler’s victory in 1934, all "educational reforms" dating back to 1919 were abolished as "fostering democracy." (Hitler’s rise to power was doubtless a factor in Adler’s decision to emigrate to the US in 1935.)

By the 1920s, Adler had achieved international prominence. He had devoted followers and child guidance centers in the US. In 1924 he published a summary of his ideas to that point in Praxis und Theorie der Individualpsycholgie (published in 1927 as The Theory and Practice of Individual Psychology).

Around the same time, an American psychiatrist, Walter Wolfe, came to Vienna to study under Adler. Wolfe would became the first American member of the Society, and Adler would appoint him as assistant editor of the international journal, and English translator of Understanding Human Nature which was to have a great effect on the American public.

In 1925, a London Magistrate visited the US and was so impressed by the Adlerian child guidance centers there that she returned to England to form similar programs. Such interest led to the formation of a London branch of the International Society for Individual Psychology.