Other Adlerian Concepts (Page 7)

37. Significance
For Adler, each individual life was a movement "from, toward." That is, from inferiority to superiority, from minus to plus, from childhood to maturity, and the like. He described it in terms of a Guiding Fiction, a Guiding Goal, and a Guiding Line, and of a movement toward personal meaning. In terms of neurotic strivings, Adler spoke of Sucht zu gelten, that is, a "search for the gold." Karen Horney spoke of neurotic process as a "search for glory" which included vindictive triumph, a proving of the self, a sort of "See, I told you so!" result. She wrote that "Alfred Adler was the first psychoanalyst to see the search for glory as a comprehensive phenomenon, and to point out its crucial significance in neurosis." (Horney, 1950, p. 28)

Such strivings, as seen in discussing the Fictional Final Goal, need not be neurotic, but part of the normal human desire to move forward in life and to "make something of oneself." Neurotic or normal may depend, to some extent, on whether such efforts and their activities are directed toward the socially useful or the socially useless side of life. Do they build up only the individual, or do they contribute to the community?

38. Socially Useful/Socially Useless
Attitudes or behaviors can be socially useful and promote relationships and the common good, or socially useless, self-centered and weakening the community. Adler saw the choice of which "side of life" one takes as having been made in early childhood. Thus one person’s life may be oriented around self-serving interests and excuses of anti-social conduct, while another person’s may be centered on courage, striving, and community responsibility.

39. Soft Determinism
Adler saw both heredity and environment as important in influencing personality development. However, he also stressed choices, especially in childhood, as major determinants of personality. It is similar to the saying, "Life may deal the cards, but you must play the hand."

This focus on individual responsibility differentiates Adler’s approach from other schools of psychology and psychotherapy, and makes growth and wholeness possible. It lies at the heart of Adlerian therapy, as the counselor encourages the client to do what the client has always done: make choices, but now more responsibly, with more information available than in childhood, and with adult, rather than child, goals in mind. Such "reasonable" choices now affirm the social interest of both the self and others.

40. Will to Power
In his concept of "striving for power" as aimed at overcoming inferiority, Adler drew from Nietzsche’s phrases "will to power" (or "will to be above") and "will to seem" (or "appear"). (Adler, 1917, p. 24). He saw such ideas as akin to the enhancement of self-esteem through having power over others, and similar to pleasure. This became, for Adler, "superiority strivings" and the movement from "minus" to "plus" in relationships.

41. Yes-But Personality
This is Adler’s example of a hesitating approach to life and a failure to take responsibility for one’s actions. A client may accept the logic of alternatives ("Yes"), yet create reasons why he/she cannot follow them (". . . but"). Such a person "won’t get off the dime," as is said.

In everyday life we see this also when we make a statement, and then make a second one which offsets or negates the first, in an effort to not appear too "set in our ways" or to appear to cover all the possibilities in the argument. This may be as simple as adding "…but I could be wrong" to a statement, or as elaborate as two lengthy statements about a topic, each of which cancels the other. The result is an indication of indecisiveness, or as we say, "waffling." This is often the case when speaking of someone else’s faults, in which we declare our objections followed by a positive statement about them.

Adler spoke of the "No" personality as one which completely rejects social responsibility and participation, such as the criminal or the psychotic, as well as of the "Yes" personality, which he saw as the acceptance of Social Interest and participation in complete humanity