Major Adlerian Concepts:
1. Unity of Personality

Adlerians believe individual personality is best understood not as separate parts, traits, or instincts but as an integrated and self-consistent whole. Everything that could normally be considered "part" of a person was considered under this over-arching concept of unity. The complete, integrated pattern was seen to serve a person’s ultimate goals. Adler’s was the first "holistic" psychology. As he said, "The findings of Individual Psychology point to the fact that all behavior of a human being fits into a unit and is an expression of the individual’s style of life." (AA, Ansbachers, 1964, p. 358)

For Adler, personality unity or self-consistency was closely tied to the fictional final goal or guiding self-ideal by which one organizes one’s life in specific ways to achieve an ultimate, idealized solution to a basic life problem. As he stated,

The consideration of the unity of the personality led us to the conviction that early in life, in the first four or five years, a goal is set for the need and drive of psychical development, a goal toward which all its current flow. Such a goal not only determines the direction which promises security, power, and perfection, but also awakens the corresponding feelings and emotions through that which it promises. Thus the individual mitigates his sense of weakness in the anticipation of his redemption. (Ansbachers, 1964, p. 100)

So we have a picture of a person with a goal and a way to get there, developed in childhood and "bequeathed" to the adult as the major life undertaking, and in which all aspects of the individual join together self-consistently to achieve. For more on that goal, see the article "Fictional Finalism" on what Adler called the "fictional final goal.")

The main point here is that Adler did not separate the "parts" of a person in his psychology. For him there was no separate Id, Ego, or Super-Ego, no Conscious/Unconscious/Preconscious, nor even a separate personal past or present or future or separate actions unconnected to thoughts and/or feelings. In fact, he said that personality can not be so separated. It was this that led him to select the name for his approach as "individual" psychology. Not that it was about the individual or separate person. No, the word was from the Latin individuum which means "that which is complete and whole and cannot be separated." He wanted his psychology to reflect this.

So the person we see in Adler's approach is not one who is one person when he is married, another when he is a parent, a third when he is on the job, a fourth when he is with friends, and so on. It is always the same person, always pursuing the same goals and using pretty much the same methods throughout the movement which is his life. This person is a single, unified, complete person.

It is also this idea that helps the focus of psychotherapy. Unlike Freud, and even Jung to some extent, Adler did not see the parts of a person at war with each other in a deep, murky underlayer of personality (the Unconscious). Instead, he saw actions, thoughts, and feelings as all expressing the unity of the person. If "unhappiness" was at the fore, it would appear in physiological/organic ways as well as in relationships, work problems, and more. The Adlerian sees the person as an integrated unity who, while seemingly unraveled for the moment, is still a whole person.