Major Adlerian Concepts:
3. Subjectivity

Adlerians assume people experience events within a highly personal framework, what Adler called the apperceptive schema. The result is personal beliefs about self, others, and the world. These beliefs become one’s personal truth. In common terms, we take everything personally; that is, as if everything that happens applies to us. Believing our perceptions to be accurate and truthful, that is, The Truth, we act as if they are true. Adler’s was the first phenomenological or existential psychology.

This is a central point in Individual Psychology. It was not popular when Adler suggested it, since the general view of man was deterministic in that behavior was caused by past events or outside sources. Even so, he said (emphasis added):

For me there can be no doubt that everyone conducts himself in life from the very beginning as if he had a definite opinion of his strength and his abilities and a clear conception of the difficulty or ease of the problem at hand. In a word, I am convinced that a person’s behavior springs from his opinion. We should not be surprised at this, because our senses do not receive actual facts, but merely a subjective image of them, a reflection of the external world. In considering the structure of a personality, the chief difficulty is that its unity, its particular style of life and goal, is not built on objective reality but on the subjective view the individual takes of the facts of life. Each person organizes himself according to his personal view of things, and some views are more sound, some less sound. (Ansbachers, 1964, p. 182-183.)

In this sense, then, the individual creates his or her own reality, and acts as if that reality is true, reminding us of our introductory remarks about how, in quantum physics, observation creates the quantum reality.

In this, Adler was an existentialist, following in the ideas of Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish theologian/philosopher who is credited as being the Father of modern existentialism. We think especially of S.K.'s statement that "subjectivity is truth," and that what you believe to be true is true for you, and so you will act as if it is true. It is this reliance on "my truth is the true truth" that often gets us into trouble with others, especially our partners when they have a different viewpoint on something than we have.

In this also, Adler followed the lead of Hans Vaihinger and his theories about "acting as if."Here we think of his statement, "If we perceive something as real, we will then act as if it were so, and behave accordingly." (See the article on "As If" in the next section.)

The individuals' creation of his/her own reality leads a step further when we consider consensual reality. This theory says that something we agree exists does exist. If you and I believe that there are ghosts, then (this theory says) there are ghosts. Or UFOs, or elves, or whatever. The question for this theory to answer is whether believing something is so can make it so.

Also related is something less conjectural: consensual labeling. This is how we agree to see the world as it is by agreeing to the names we give things. If you and I agree that this hard thing is a rock, then it is a rock because we have named it so. If we get other people to agree to use the same word (or sound, "rock") for the same thing, then we have all consented (hence, consensual) that the name of the thing is "rock." This is the basis for language, and for the kind of mind-reading we humans do...that is, you know what I have in my mind when I use words we agree on to describe my inner experience. "I feel sick" is a clear statement that you and I (and others) can agree describes something specific about my inner life.

Which brings us back to subjectivity, and our ability to create our own world by labeling things within it and believing that our labeling (the names and words we use) is true. "I feel sick" is one thing. "That I feel sick and therefore deserve to be treated as special" is something else. Here I move my inner experience through my "private logic" (see that term elsewhere) and make a demand of others within my community. Another step would be, "...and if you don't treat me as special, I will make it hard for you!" Or even more so, "If you don't agree to bend to my will, I will hurt or even kill you!" All such ideas begin with labels/names/words, and how we use them not only to describe our experiences, but also to make logical or illogical demands of others.