Major Adlerian Concepts:
10. Fictional Finalism ("Mistaken Mission")

Adler believed that, of all a child’s problems, one will stand out as so important that one decides this I must spend my life to solve. It is fictional because a child is in no position to judge life’s real problems; and it is final because to solve it becomes the ultimate goal of life. Adler held that people arrange their lives in order to justify and enable their fictional, final goal, or what he earlier called (in The Neurotic Constitution, 1912) the guiding self-ideal.

The development of the mental life is accomplished with the help of a fictional teleology through the proposing of a certain end under the pressure of a teleological apperception. The goal of the mental life . . . becomes its governing principle, its causa finalis. Here we have the root of the unity of personality, the individuality. It does not matter what the source of its energies may have been. Not their origin but their end, their ultimate goal, constitutes their individual character. (Ansbachers, 1964, p. 94)

A part of Adlerian therapy is to reveal the goal so it can be revised, resulting in a different and more satisfying line of movement.

In LEAP we speak of the Mistaken Mission to mean the same thing. The image is of a journey toward an idealized solution to the childhood problem. On this mission, unrelated issues take second place. With Adler, specific activities are associated with this Mission: education, career, marriage, parenting, religious and political activities, etc. The purpose is to bring one nearer to the goal where the Problem is solved.