Alfred Adler

1870-1937 · Austrian · Individual Psychology

To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest.

Alfred Adler was the first of Freud's close circle to break away and found a school of his own. Where Freud made sexuality the master motive and read the psyche as a battlefield of divided parts, Adler made the striving to overcome inferiority the mainspring of the mind and insisted the personality is an indivisible whole — "individual psychology," from the Latin individuus, undivided. Every neurosis, every character, every symptom he read as a movement: from a felt minus toward an imagined plus, from weakness toward a self-set goal of security and superiority.

Topics Alfred Adler addresses

• the inferiority feeling
• the inferiority complex
• compensation
• overcompensation
• organ inferiority
• the striving for superiority
• the style of life
• fictional finalism
• the guiding fiction
• social interest (Gemeinschaftsgefühl)
• the three life-tasks
• the safeguarding tendencies
• the masculine protest
• the unity of the personality
• the family constellation
• birth order
• the pampered child
• early recollections
• the useful and useless sides of life
• encouragement
• individual psychology
• the neurotic constitution
• child guidance
• the break with Freud

Converse with Alfred Adler on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Alfred Adler's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.