Major Adlerian Concepts:
11. Life Style

This is the largest concept in Individual Psychology, and probably in all of psychology. It represents the totality of the person and personality, the individual’s basic approach to life, the unified and self-consistent pattern of beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, relationships, and actions which make up the complete person. Adlerians use it to refer to the central core of a person’s life, who this person is – past, present, and future – who seeks such-and-such final goal. Adler himself posed the concept early on, and then simply assumed it in his writings without extended definition. Perhaps the closest he came to an actual definition was relatively late, in The Science of Living in 1929. He begins by describing a pine tree in two conditions:

Its style on top of the mountain is different from its style growing in a valley. The style of life of a tree is the individuality of the tree expressing itself and molding itself to an environment. We recognize a style when we see it…for we then realize that every tree has a life pattern and is not merely a mechanical reaction to the environment. It is much the same way with human beings. We see the style of life under certain conditions…and it is our task to analyze its exact relation to the existing circumstances, inasmuch as mind changes with alteration of the environment….We have seen how human beings with weak organs, because they face difficulties and feel insecure, suffer from a feeling or complex of inferiority. But as human beings cannot endure this for long, the inferiority stimulates them…to movement and action. This results in a person having a goal. Individual Psychology has long called the consistent movement toward the goal a plan of life but because this name has sometimes led to mistakes among students, it is now called a style of life. (Adler, 1929, pp. 98-100)

Because the term is used in other ways today, the LEAP approach uses LifeCourse, summarized in ten Patterns (a term Adler also used for Life Style) which are created in childhood and carried into adult life. Review the ten LifeCourse Patterns covered in LEAP, and as you do, think of all of them as various ways to describe the single, integrated "life style" (what we call "life course") of the individual human being. Everything that you read about there (family history, family atmosphere, siblings, parental roles, childhood events...everything... is part of and contributes to the total person: The Adlerian Life Style. So it is no accident or exaggeration when I begin this definition with "the largest concept in . . ."