LifeCourse Institute of Adlerian Psychology
"LEAP On Line" . . . to explore and change your limiting Life Patterns

When I was five I became ill with pneumonia and was given up by the physician. A second physician advised a treatment, and in a few days I became well again. From that time on I recall always thinking of my future self as a physician. This means I had set a goal from which I could expect to end my childhood distress, my fear of death. And so I came to choose the occupation of physician in order to overcome death and the fear of death.

Adler said his mother pampered him until a brother was born, when she transferred her attention to the new-born. Adler felt dethroned, and turned to his father, "whose favorite I was." His father's advice became Adler's motto: "Never take anything for granted, but find out everything for yourself." He received his medical degree in 1895, did two years of postgraduate training in psychiatry, and opened a private practice in 1899. In only a few years he became well-known throughout Austria.

In 1897 Adler married Raissa Epstein, late of Russia. They had four children: Valentine 1898, Alexandra 1901, Kurt 1905, and Nelly 1909. Alexandra and Kurt were Adlerian psychiatrists (M.D. and Ph.D.) in New York City, and active in promoting their father's approach. Nelly eventually also moved to NY City. Val married and they went to live in Russia after the Revolution, and were never heard from again.

Adler met with great success and popularity in several trips to the US in the 1920s, and in part because of the threats of war under Hitler, he decided to locate here permanently. Reporters were on hand to interview him when they landed . He spoke to them about "the foolishness of thinking that women are inferior. Women's inferiority is a male lie, and repetition of [it] is responsible for women believing it."

In 1902, Freud knew of Adler as a widely-known and respected neurologist, so he invited Adler to help him create psychological treatments of the neuroses. The result of their cooperation in the early years was "psycho-analysis." With three of Freud's patients (!) they formed the Psychological Wednesday Society, which became the Vienna Psycho- Analytic Society.

Adler was never a Freudian, a student, or a disciple of Freud. He was never psychoanalyzed, which was unique among the society's members. He was, and continued to be, a highly respected Austrian psychiatrist and independent thinker who attended Freud's group to help formulate the psychological treatment of neurosis. (In later years, according to one of his students, Abraham Maslow, he would bristle when he was described as a Freudian "disciple," which is what Freud himself called Adler after they had parted ways, wanting to maintain some of the reflected glory of having worked with Adler to form psycho-analysis.

For a time, Adler was Freud's favorite and his presumed successor. In 1909, Freud appointed him president of the Vienna Society and coeditor of the society's Journal. But when Adler introduced his concept of the Aggression Instinct, Freud rejected it. (Twenty years later, after Adler abandoned instinct theory in general, Freud took the idea as his own and called Aggression one of the main pillars of psychoanalysis!)

Differences grew between these two strong personalities. In 1911 Freud demanded that all members accept his theory that sex is the over-riding determinant of personality, both normal and neurotic. Adler led the dissenters and his lectures, A Critique of Freud's Sexual Theory of Psychic Life, became the basis for heated debates in early 1912. Adler broke new ground with several important new ideas.

When Freud could no longer stand the dissension (seeing it as tearing his society apart), he called for a vote and asked those who disagreed with him to leave. Adler (Freud's favorite) and eight others left to form what would become The Society for Individual Psychology. Soon those who left with Adler missed the intellectual challenge they'd enjoyed in the heated discussions in Freud's group, so they began to meet at Adler's apartment. Their group grew quickly, so his living quarters became too small and a larger place had to be found.

The atmosphere was one of encouragement, acceptance of variant ideas, and charged creativity. Released from the stranglehold of Freud's insistence on agreement with him in all things, they saw themselves in new and largely uncharted territory, where their contributions could make a difference.

In 1912 Adler published The Neurotic Constitution, in which he summarized his main ideas to that point. He submitted it to the Vienna College of Professors, who rejected it as being "more philosophy than medicine." This prevented Adler from teaching in the medical school, and so he decided to bring Individual Psychology to the general public and, in particular, to educators. Although he was a medical doctor, he forsook the “medical model” (in which psychological disorders were seen as "mental illnesses”) and adopted an educational model for the understanding of psychological problems.

He lectured to professionals at Vienna’s schools of higher education and at lectures that open to everyone. One of his major books, Understanding Human Nature, is a reconstruction of some of this those lectures, taken from a student's notes. Adler spoke spontaneously and left it to others to set his thoughts in book form. His public lectures became so popular that as many were turned away as were admitted because of lack of seating room.

In 1914 Adler started the Society's journal, The Individual Psychologist. That same year Adler edited Healing and Education: Medical-Educational Papers of the Society for Individual Psychology which moved Adler firmly into the field of education. Increasingly, Adler saw his approach as following an educational model, rather than the traditional medical model, which held that psychological disorders are a disease over which the individual has little or no control.

With the onset of WW I, Adler joined the Austrian  army as a doctor on the Russian front, where he served for two years. Returning to Vienna in 1916, he became the head of a hospital for wounded soldiers who suffered from "war neurosis" (later called "shell shock" and today "post-traumatic stress disorder"). His paper on the treatment of the disorder became required reading for physicians in the years to come, and the basis for treatment of the disorder during WW II by both the US and the German armies. His war experiences led him to the final pillar of his psychology: Gemeinschaftsgefühl usually translated as "social interest" although sometimes as "community feeling" or "fellow feeling."

After the war, Adler and the Society renewed their activities with a new intensity. Publication of their journal was resumed, they enthusiastically sought ways to integrate the concept of social interest into the larger system, and they began to find new arenas in which to strive. Chief among them was education, specifically adult education, school reform, teacher training, and child guidance. In 1919, Adler started the first of more than 30 child guidance clinics in Austria. They involved teachers, parents, and children, and it was these meetings from which Adler pioneered group therapy. But when Hitler came to power in 1934, he closed the child guidance clinics as "fostering democracy."

Starting in 1926, Adler's work took him to America, where he developed a solid and influential following. By his second trip, his book Understanding Human Nature had been published, starting what would become the "psychological self-help movement." In its first six months it sold more than 100,000 copies in three re- printings. (By way of contrast, Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams," sold only 16,000 copies between 1910 and 1932.)

In the US, Adler established parent education centers similar to those he'd started in Austria; some 40,000 people took part in his parenting classes in the first six months. In 1932 he was accorded the first Chair of Visiting Professor at Long Island College of Medicine, and by 1935 he had settled in New York as Professor of Medical Psychology there. His approach had become popular throughout the world, with some three dozen associations of Individual Psychology in as many countries.

Adler formed many important friendships in the US, including with Albert Einstein, who was very impressed with Adlerian psychology. As said before, Val and her husband were not heard from again after they moved to post-Revolution Russia. It was Einstein who approached Stalin personally after WW II, and learned that Val and her husband had died in a gulag. The news came too late for Adler, but Einstein was able to tell Raissa.

Despite evidence of ill health that should not have escaped the notice of an MD, Adler decided to conduct a long series of lectures in 1937. He intended to speak to "standing room only" audiences of professionals and lay- people in France, Belgium, Holland, and Scotland. At the end of May he was giving a series of lectures for medical students at the Aberdeen University. They proved to be so popular (and so many people had to be turned away) that additional lectures were added. But on May 28, Adler went out for a walk and collapsed on the sidewalk. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. His daughter, Dr. Alexandra Adler, finished the lecture series that he had planned, and then and returned to the US to found the Alfred Adler Institute of New York.

(The LEAP NoteBook, the basic book for LEAP On-Line, contains an extended biography of Adler.)

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