Alfred Adler's individual psychology
Created | Updated Oct 21, 2002
Alfred Adler's individual psychology
A review of:
Alfred ADLER, 1928, Understanding Human Nature
and
Alfred ADLER, 1931, What Life Could Mean To You
Both published in a new edition (translator: Colin Brett)
Oxford : Oneworld Publications, 1992
ISBN 1-85168-021-7 viii + 240 U.K.£7-95 U.S.$13-95
and
ISBN 1-85168-022-5 viii + 250 U.K.£7-95 U.S.$13-95
Alfred Adler (1870-1937), the first heretic of psychoanalysis, barely scraped through childhood. The second of six children of a Viennese grain merchant, he suffered from rickets and spasms of the glottis. He almost died on several occasions from pneumonia and street accidents. In the cot alongside him when he was three, his nearest younger brother did actually die of diphtheria. Undaunted, however, by his diminutive stature (5' 2") or by his maths' teacher's pessimistic forecasts, Adler succeeded in medical school, in ophthalmology, in family life and eventually -- despite Freud's preferring to advance the established Gentile psychiatrist, Carl Jung -- in popularising a form of psychoanalysis. True to his own history, Adler would see competition between peers for resources as much more important than incestuous infantile sexuality. Now there is a pleasant yet authentic, new, and of course 'non- sexist' translation of two of his best-known works (with brief forewords by supporters James Hemming and Rita Udall).
Today, some of Adler's proposals are admittedly a little creaky. Adler tended to maintain that 'lifestyle' crystallizes by one's first birthday. He held intelligence testing to be "unreliable" (unlike Moffitt, Caspi, Harkness & Silva, 1993); and genetic inheritance of intelligence (or of anything else psychological) was a "superstition". Adler feared 'labelling' effects by which he believed he himself had almost been held back. Homosexuality involved a rift with the opposite-sex parent. Educational streaming was unhelpful. Smaller classes would improve educational standards. And full employment would reduce the crime problem until teachers trained in Adlerian theory solved it in perpetuity.
More alarming to likely readers of the present volumes will be several deviations from Adler's general utopian idealism and political correctness. Adler favours free society's notorious 'division of labour' and the provision of relevant specialist education: he is even content to educate girls differently from boys, in view of girls' forthcoming life-tasks. Monogamy-plus-children is the only marital arrangement worth considering, and wicked old European psychiatrists were wrong to recommend that their patients take lovers. Pre-marital intercourse is discouraged. And 'pampering' is ceaselessly denounced by Adler as yielding later 'whingeing' and 'whining' "neurotics, criminals, drunkards and perverts."
Nevertheless, there are three main propositions of Adler's that are, with qualification, especially consonant with modern understandings and researches.
(1) Individuality. Twin and adoption studies of the 1980's showed people are indeed 'radically individual', as Adler maintained. Only for general intelligence do biological relatives other than identical twins much resemble each other; and unrelated adoptees who grow up together show virtually no psychological similarities at all by adulthood. 50% of eminent people (U.S.Presidents, British Prime Ministers, first-rank world-class philosophers, eminences of English literature, and top British businessmen) turn out to have experienced major horrors in childhood such as serious medical conditions and parental death and bankruptcy, so compensation is as likely as capitulation providing intelligence is adequate. However, to rule out the imposed environment and to admit only a limited role for inheritance on personality is not to rule out genes. Indeed, genes -- in particular, 'gene packages' and the multiplier effects between different genes that cannot be simply passed on to children because genes segregate independently -- now come into their own as a way of explaining otherwise paradoxical human diversity (Lykken, McGue, Tellegen & Bouchard Jr, 1992).
(2) The unconscious. Adler's view of the unconscious was non-mysterious and non-dynamic. The unconscious-to-conscious relation is as "photo-to-negative": by just one lie to oneself, the unconscious can realize the master plan arrived at by consciousness. ('I have been rejected'; 'I am really superior'; or 'I have an excuse'.) Once such simple re-drafts of the story (or 'document') of one's life occur (cf. Margaret Donaldson, 1992), the 'lifestyle' derived from the 'guiding fiction' takes over whether one is awake or asleep. In dreams, the Adlerian unconscious can sometimes be caught engaged in the very same problem-solving work as goes on in daily life, yet without the constraints of reality. This view of dreams as a continuation of daytime speculations, anxieties and re-organising of accounts is more plausible than Freud's view that dreams provide disguised fulfilment of forbidden wishes.
(3) Competition and co-operation. At least by 1918, when he added the concept of 'social interest' (altruism) to his first personality process of 'personal interest' (egoism), Adler was arguably on the right track.
(i) Despite having lost both Adler and Jung over 'the doctrine of sexuality', Freud himself, by 1922, came to the view that eros was not in fact enough -- even when id was considered in harness with superego. Belatedly, room had to be made for thanatos, the omnipresent death-wish that would help explain masochism, the horrors and hysterias of war, the mind's 'repetition compulsion' to dwell on painful stimulation and memories, and perhaps the aggressive elimination of pain and competitors.
(ii) When Adler broke with Freud, his conception of 'personal interest' (or superiority- striving) was along the lines of Nietzsche's 'will-to-power' and he viewed it somewhat negatively: 'neurotic' compensations for perceived inferiority were held to yield anger, boasting, melancholia, agoraphobia, whining, migraine, prejudice, perversions, frigidity and suicide. Later, however, superiority-striving itself was admitted by Adler to be 'normal' and, indeed, "the cause of all improvements in the human condition (e.g. of scientific progress)".
(iii) Just as Freud held that the id and the superego were not opposed, but complementary, so Adler's writing, properly considered, allows the more sensible forms of competition and cooperation -- or of egoism and altruism -- to flourish together. H.L.Ansbacher (1985) summarizes Adler's final position: "....developed social interest becomes a general attitude and proficiency, and conflicts as little with personal interest as other attitudes or proficiencies do. It is not a matter of altruism pitted against egoism."
Was Adler right? Well, in making personal interest and social interest not opposed to, but independent of each other, he can certainly be said to have anticipated the relations obtaining between today's 'Big' personality dimensions of 'Independence' (will, disagreeableness) and 'Tender- mindedness' (affection, and g-free openness) (Deary & Matthews, 1993; Brand, Egan & Deary, 1993). Just like extraversion and conscientiousness, these two 'egoistic' and 'altruistic' factorial dimensions seem largely uncorrelated in testees of good intelligence even if they sometimes fuse into a single general dimension, of will versus affection (rather like Osgood's Potency dimension or crude 'masculinity vs femininity'), in simpler testees answering undetailed questions. Busy setting up child guidance clinics in Austria, and then with extricating most of his family to the U.S.A. as Hitler's shadow lengthened, Adler was in no great position to back his hunches with systematic evidence. Admirers of the great behaviourist J.B.Watson 's antipathy to 'infantile sexuality', pampering and inherited abilities will generously acknowledge Adler's own development of similar unevidenced theoretical aversions. However, Adler's more lasting contribution to psychology will prove to have been in insisting on radical individuality, on developmental stories that merit careful testing, and on addressing aspects of human personality that Freud gloomily packaged as thanatos and then left in an eerie limbo. Adler granted others the possibility of what he might without immodesty have observed in himself: will, achievement-striving, a strong sense of responsibility, assertiveness, self-help and 'personal interest' alongside soul, sympathy, tender-mindedness, idealism and 'social interest'. If they can grasp the importance of genes and the general intelligence factor, Adlerians might still help face down the crudely determinist -- mainly environmentalist -- psychologies of the past.
REFERENCES:
ANSBACHER, H.L. (1985). The significance of Alfred Adler for the concept of narcissism. American Journal of Psychiatry 142, 2, 203 - 206.
BRAND, C.R., EGAN, V.G. & DEARY, I.J. (1993). 'Personality and general intelligence.' In G.L.Van Heck, P.Bonaiuto, I.J.Deary & W. Nowack (eds.), Personality Psychology in Europe 4, 203-228. Tilburg University Press.
DEARY, I.J. & MATTHEWS, G. (1993). 'Personality traits are alive and well.' The Psychologist 6, 299-311.
DONALDSON, Margaret (1992). Human Minds. London : Allen Lane.
LYKKEN, D.T., McGUE, M., TELLEGEN, A.T., & BOUCHARD, T.J.(Jr) (1992). Emergenesis: traits that do not run in families. American Psychologist 47, 1565 - 1577.
MOFFITT, T.E., CASPI, A., HARKNESS, A.R. & SILVA, P.A. (1993). The natural history of change in intellectual performance. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 34, 4, 455 - 506.
FINIS
A review of:
Alfred ADLER, 1928, Understanding Human Nature
and
Alfred ADLER, 1931, What Life Could Mean To You
Both published in a new edition (translator: Colin Brett)
Oxford : Oneworld Publications, 1992
ISBN 1-85168-021-7 viii + 240 U.K.£7-95 U.S.$13-95
and
ISBN 1-85168-022-5 viii + 250 U.K.£7-95 U.S.$13-95
Alfred Adler (1870-1937), the first heretic of psychoanalysis, barely scraped through childhood. The second of six children of a Viennese grain merchant, he suffered from rickets and spasms of the glottis. He almost died on several occasions from pneumonia and street accidents. In the cot alongside him when he was three, his nearest younger brother did actually die of diphtheria. Undaunted, however, by his diminutive stature (5' 2") or by his maths' teacher's pessimistic forecasts, Adler succeeded in medical school, in ophthalmology, in family life and eventually -- despite Freud's preferring to advance the established Gentile psychiatrist, Carl Jung -- in popularising a form of psychoanalysis. True to his own history, Adler would see competition between peers for resources as much more important than incestuous infantile sexuality. Now there is a pleasant yet authentic, new, and of course 'non- sexist' translation of two of his best-known works (with brief forewords by supporters James Hemming and Rita Udall).
Today, some of Adler's proposals are admittedly a little creaky. Adler tended to maintain that 'lifestyle' crystallizes by one's first birthday. He held intelligence testing to be "unreliable" (unlike Moffitt, Caspi, Harkness & Silva, 1993); and genetic inheritance of intelligence (or of anything else psychological) was a "superstition". Adler feared 'labelling' effects by which he believed he himself had almost been held back. Homosexuality involved a rift with the opposite-sex parent. Educational streaming was unhelpful. Smaller classes would improve educational standards. And full employment would reduce the crime problem until teachers trained in Adlerian theory solved it in perpetuity.
More alarming to likely readers of the present volumes will be several deviations from Adler's general utopian idealism and political correctness. Adler favours free society's notorious 'division of labour' and the provision of relevant specialist education: he is even content to educate girls differently from boys, in view of girls' forthcoming life-tasks. Monogamy-plus-children is the only marital arrangement worth considering, and wicked old European psychiatrists were wrong to recommend that their patients take lovers. Pre-marital intercourse is discouraged. And 'pampering' is ceaselessly denounced by Adler as yielding later 'whingeing' and 'whining' "neurotics, criminals, drunkards and perverts."
Nevertheless, there are three main propositions of Adler's that are, with qualification, especially consonant with modern understandings and researches.
(1) Individuality. Twin and adoption studies of the 1980's showed people are indeed 'radically individual', as Adler maintained. Only for general intelligence do biological relatives other than identical twins much resemble each other; and unrelated adoptees who grow up together show virtually no psychological similarities at all by adulthood. 50% of eminent people (U.S.Presidents, British Prime Ministers, first-rank world-class philosophers, eminences of English literature, and top British businessmen) turn out to have experienced major horrors in childhood such as serious medical conditions and parental death and bankruptcy, so compensation is as likely as capitulation providing intelligence is adequate. However, to rule out the imposed environment and to admit only a limited role for inheritance on personality is not to rule out genes. Indeed, genes -- in particular, 'gene packages' and the multiplier effects between different genes that cannot be simply passed on to children because genes segregate independently -- now come into their own as a way of explaining otherwise paradoxical human diversity (Lykken, McGue, Tellegen & Bouchard Jr, 1992).
(2) The unconscious. Adler's view of the unconscious was non-mysterious and non-dynamic. The unconscious-to-conscious relation is as "photo-to-negative": by just one lie to oneself, the unconscious can realize the master plan arrived at by consciousness. ('I have been rejected'; 'I am really superior'; or 'I have an excuse'.) Once such simple re-drafts of the story (or 'document') of one's life occur (cf. Margaret Donaldson, 1992), the 'lifestyle' derived from the 'guiding fiction' takes over whether one is awake or asleep. In dreams, the Adlerian unconscious can sometimes be caught engaged in the very same problem-solving work as goes on in daily life, yet without the constraints of reality. This view of dreams as a continuation of daytime speculations, anxieties and re-organising of accounts is more plausible than Freud's view that dreams provide disguised fulfilment of forbidden wishes.
(3) Competition and co-operation. At least by 1918, when he added the concept of 'social interest' (altruism) to his first personality process of 'personal interest' (egoism), Adler was arguably on the right track.
(i) Despite having lost both Adler and Jung over 'the doctrine of sexuality', Freud himself, by 1922, came to the view that eros was not in fact enough -- even when id was considered in harness with superego. Belatedly, room had to be made for thanatos, the omnipresent death-wish that would help explain masochism, the horrors and hysterias of war, the mind's 'repetition compulsion' to dwell on painful stimulation and memories, and perhaps the aggressive elimination of pain and competitors.
(ii) When Adler broke with Freud, his conception of 'personal interest' (or superiority- striving) was along the lines of Nietzsche's 'will-to-power' and he viewed it somewhat negatively: 'neurotic' compensations for perceived inferiority were held to yield anger, boasting, melancholia, agoraphobia, whining, migraine, prejudice, perversions, frigidity and suicide. Later, however, superiority-striving itself was admitted by Adler to be 'normal' and, indeed, "the cause of all improvements in the human condition (e.g. of scientific progress)".
(iii) Just as Freud held that the id and the superego were not opposed, but complementary, so Adler's writing, properly considered, allows the more sensible forms of competition and cooperation -- or of egoism and altruism -- to flourish together. H.L.Ansbacher (1985) summarizes Adler's final position: "....developed social interest becomes a general attitude and proficiency, and conflicts as little with personal interest as other attitudes or proficiencies do. It is not a matter of altruism pitted against egoism."
Was Adler right? Well, in making personal interest and social interest not opposed to, but independent of each other, he can certainly be said to have anticipated the relations obtaining between today's 'Big' personality dimensions of 'Independence' (will, disagreeableness) and 'Tender- mindedness' (affection, and g-free openness) (Deary & Matthews, 1993; Brand, Egan & Deary, 1993). Just like extraversion and conscientiousness, these two 'egoistic' and 'altruistic' factorial dimensions seem largely uncorrelated in testees of good intelligence even if they sometimes fuse into a single general dimension, of will versus affection (rather like Osgood's Potency dimension or crude 'masculinity vs femininity'), in simpler testees answering undetailed questions. Busy setting up child guidance clinics in Austria, and then with extricating most of his family to the U.S.A. as Hitler's shadow lengthened, Adler was in no great position to back his hunches with systematic evidence. Admirers of the great behaviourist J.B.Watson 's antipathy to 'infantile sexuality', pampering and inherited abilities will generously acknowledge Adler's own development of similar unevidenced theoretical aversions. However, Adler's more lasting contribution to psychology will prove to have been in insisting on radical individuality, on developmental stories that merit careful testing, and on addressing aspects of human personality that Freud gloomily packaged as thanatos and then left in an eerie limbo. Adler granted others the possibility of what he might without immodesty have observed in himself: will, achievement-striving, a strong sense of responsibility, assertiveness, self-help and 'personal interest' alongside soul, sympathy, tender-mindedness, idealism and 'social interest'. If they can grasp the importance of genes and the general intelligence factor, Adlerians might still help face down the crudely determinist -- mainly environmentalist -- psychologies of the past.
REFERENCES:
ANSBACHER, H.L. (1985). The significance of Alfred Adler for the concept of narcissism. American Journal of Psychiatry 142, 2, 203 - 206.
BRAND, C.R., EGAN, V.G. & DEARY, I.J. (1993). 'Personality and general intelligence.' In G.L.Van Heck, P.Bonaiuto, I.J.Deary & W. Nowack (eds.), Personality Psychology in Europe 4, 203-228. Tilburg University Press.
DEARY, I.J. & MATTHEWS, G. (1993). 'Personality traits are alive and well.' The Psychologist 6, 299-311.
DONALDSON, Margaret (1992). Human Minds. London : Allen Lane.
LYKKEN, D.T., McGUE, M., TELLEGEN, A.T., & BOUCHARD, T.J.(Jr) (1992). Emergenesis: traits that do not run in families. American Psychologist 47, 1565 - 1577.
MOFFITT, T.E., CASPI, A., HARKNESS, A.R. & SILVA, P.A. (1993). The natural history of change in intellectual performance. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 34, 4, 455 - 506.
FINIS
