Major Adlerian Concepts:
8. Social Embeddedness

What ties everything together for Adler is the individual within the community. It would not be too much to say that, for Adler, human being" is defined by the human community, and one cannot be said to be human apart from that community. Or: Community Creates Human Beings.

"Community" is found best in Adler's central concept of Gemeinschaftsgefühl, a word as hard to define as to pronounce! It has been translated as "Social Interest," "Social Sense," Social Feeling," "Community Feeling," "Community Sense, and "Feeling of Community." It is found in his ideas of The Iron Law of Communal Life, Family Constellation, and nearly all of his concepts.

For a good summary of Adler's concept of community, and of other major Adlerian ideas, see Henry Stein's web site for a complete chapter from the book Psychoanalytic Versions of the Human Condition: Philosophies of Life and Their Impact on Practice, edited by Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg, published in 1998 by New York University Press. The article is "Classical Adlerian Theory and Practice" by Henry T. Stein and Martha E. Edwards.

Adler began in 1902 with Freud to help explore the inner psychic life of the individual. Today we call the general approach that concentrates on the individual's inner life and personality "psychodynamic psychology." Adler had already seen the necessity of including the individual within the shaping influence of the community, whether that be the family, the neighborhood, friendship, the work setting, or the world and culture. Thus he saw that concentrating on the individual alone was too narrow a focus for psychology and for psychotherapy. Adler expanded his viewpoint in various ways to include the various ways that human organize themselves in larger groups. His term for his approach, "Individual Psychology," (or, in the original Austrian: Individualpsychologie) seems to focus on the individual. However, in German it means the psychology of the indivisible, undivided person. He wanted to contrast his way with Freud's, who separated the personality into parts or pieces: Id, Ego, Super-Ego, Conscious/Unconscious/Preconscious, etc. And it is this personality which is shaped and influenced and, indeed, created by its Social Embeddedness within the human community, beginning with the family.

From birth onward, a person is part of a social setting whose influences and responsibilities cannot be avoided. Society, experienced first as the family, insists on certain beliefs, actions, attitudes, etc. A person is as much a creation of social setting as of personal choice or genetic design. Adler said this influence is so strong and basic that he called it "The Iron Law of Communal Life." Society’s demands are transmitted through games, friendship groups, fairy tales, rules, customs, folk sayings, religion, school, and more.

It was this expansion of psychology beyond the individual to include the community that made him so important and influential in psychological circles, to the extent that all who came after him (as well as most who studied with him) included the social element in their studies, and even based their therapeutic methods on Adler's concepts. That the community is key in shaping the individual is central to Individual Psychology. It became so much a part of basic thinking that it quickly came to be assumed by others, including "neo-Freudians." Consider the following, which one would assume is about a book by or about Adler:

This book provides a systematic presentation of the later thinking of the psychiatrist who, perhaps more than any other, pushed psychiatry toward a keener recognition of social factors in mental health and mental disease. (He) believed in viewing the individual in his relations to other people and to his social setting. Psychiatry became, to him, not the study of mental disorder, but the study of human living. [Italics added.]

But the quote is not about Adler, but is from an introduction to Harry Stack Sullivan’s The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. (Sullivan, 1953, p. x.) Sullivan, like to so many others over the years, came to see the importance of society and community ("social factors") in personality, psychology, and mental health issues. But my point here is that it was Adler who was the "psychiatrist who, more than any other, pushed psychiatry toward a keener recognition of social factors in mental health and mental disease" long before any others, laying the groundwork in stressing the importance of the shaping influence of the community on individual personality. Today we simply assume that society and community are part of who we are as persons.