The opposite pole of psychoanalysis: who is Alfred Adler?

Alfred Adler was born on February 7, 1870, in the village of Rudolfsheim, near Vienna, as the second child of a middle-class Jewish family. He has four brothers and two sisters. His mother, Pauline, is a housewife, and his father, Leopold, is a petty-bourgeois Jewish grain merchant from Hungary.

Alfred Adler (7 February 1870 – 28 May 1937) was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings of belonging, family constellation and birth order set him apart from Freud and other members of the Vienna Circle. 

He struggles with various diseases at the very beginning of his life, and because of this, he feels behind and inadequate both from his siblings and peers at school. He cannot walk until the age of four due to rickets; At the age of five, he comes face to face with death due to severe pneumonia. Although his doctor states that Adler is no longer likely to live, he still manages to hold on to life. These disorders, which he experienced in the first five years of his childhood, will affect his personality, mental state, and decisions throughout his life; It will shape his outlook on life.

Many of Adler's early memories are filled with unfortunate comparisons of how healthy his older brother Sigmund was and how sickly he was. Adler's older brother, whom he tried to leave in his childhood, always remains a valuable competitor, even an enemy, and becomes a very successful businessman in the following years. It is possible that Adler, who said he would become a doctor when he was only four years old, came to such an early decision, primarily due to the effect he had on his brother, who died in his bed next to him, secondly, his desire to heal his mother's ongoing illness, and thirdly, his own ailments.

He spent his childhood in Vienna called Penzig. He always says, never denying that his ability to know people is mainly due to his childhood on the street. He constantly tries to impose himself on his mother but feels rejected by his mother. The person with whom he has developed a trusting relationship throughout his life, with whom he feels close, is his father. He and his father are very close, and he never forgets the phrase "Alfred, don't believe in anything" that he said over and over as they walked through the woods of Vienna.

He proposed that contributing to others (Social Interest or Gemeinschaftsgefuhl) was how the individual feels a sense of worth and belonging in the family and society. His earlier work focused on inferiority, the inferiority complex, an isolating element which plays a key role in personality development. Alfred Adler considered a human being as an individual whole, and therefore he called his psychology "Individual Psychology" (Orgler 1976).

In the first years of his education life, he has difficulties adapting to school and showing success. He remembers that a teacher recommended to his father that his son was unsuccessful and had doubts that he could finish school, so he took him out of school and apprenticed him to a cobbler. His father opposes the teacher and states that Adler will decide the profession he will choose.

When his high school math teacher told him that he didn't need to do homework anymore and that he wouldn't be asking questions to avoid getting angry anymore, Adler started to listen to the lessons more carefully and started to work as a reaction to this situation. With his determination and success in later lessons, Adler becomes the best in his class in mathematics. In his book "Lifes Related Problems", he states that after this event, he was always accompanied by the thought that "every person can do anything, provided that he does not set a limit for himself".

After graduating from Vienna Medical School in 1895, he achieved his goal of becoming a physician. Since his father was born in Hungary, Adler is also considered a Hungarian citizen and must therefore do his military service in Hungary. As soon as he graduated from medical school, he completed his military service and returned to Vienna for his specialization training.

In 1898, at the age of 28, he wrote his first book on the health conditions of tailors. In this book, he puts forward the principles that will become the foundations of his future thinking; These include the necessity of looking at a person as a whole, instead of evaluating him as the sum of his impulses and motives, his relationship with his environment apart from his physical characteristics, and being aware of his innate abilities.

He became an Austrian citizen in 1911. First of all, he decides to specialize in eye diseases, but his curiosity about the whole human causes him to turn to general medicine. In the first years of his work as a general practitioner, he showed great interest in the whole person and looked at the state of the disease as a reflection of the whole personality, paying attention to the fact that the physical, psychological, and social aspects of diseases constitute a whole. While his interest in the human being as a whole leads to the study of psychiatry, his interest in general medicine never wanes. However, this situation caught the attention of Sigmund Freud.

They first met Freud in 1899, when Adler asked Freud for a consultation on a female patient. The second meeting took place in 1902 when Freud invited Adler and three other Viennese physicians to his home to discuss psychology and neuropathology. Being one of the rare physicians to appreciate Freud's Dream Interpretations, he receives a handwritten invitation from Freud to attend weekly meetings at his home where new perspectives in psychopathology are discussed. At that time Adler had already begun collecting material on patients with physical disabilities and was working on their organic and psychological reactions.

This group was known as the Wednesday Psychological Society until 1908, then they formed the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Although Freud was a manager at the beginning; Adler never saw Freud as his mentor. He believes that he and others can make contributions to psychoanalysis that would be recognized by Freud. Although Adler was close to Freud, they never had a warm relationship.

Adler married Raissa Epstein, a staunch feminist, and socialist, in 1897. He was also influenced by Socialism and Marxism during his university years; concepts such as equality, democracy, society, and cooperation are important concepts in the School of Individual Psychology.

Adler's struggles against diseases in his childhood, his struggle with his siblings, his effort to gain the appreciation of his mother, and his experiences in the academic field form the basis of concepts such as inferiority and superiority complex, birth order, lifestyle, and life goal, which are the cornerstones of the Individual Psychology theory that he will form in the coming years. Almost all of his childhood is spent struggling with physical disabilities due to diseases, and he is attributed as unsuccessful throughout his education life, and therefore an inferiority complex occurs in him. The way of life that he has determined for himself to get rid of the inferiority complex emerges as the goal of superiority.

Adlerian psychology or individual psychology opposes the rigidity and immutability of human nature introduced by Sigmund Freud. Adler argued that the individual is the master of his own life. The fact that the individual voluntarily leads to the goals of his life and acts consciously emphasizes that he is not a victim of fate, but has the power to shape and manage his own life. Unlike Sigmund Freud, who divided the personality into parts such as the id, ego, and superego, Alfred Adler considers the personality as a whole. Adler, who argues that personality can only be understood with a holistic and systematic perspective, also rejects heredity in personality formation. Heredity is considered to have an effect on personality, but it is a building block. It is the environmental factors (parent relations, upbringing, socio-economic status, etc.) that are processed on the inherited characteristics that shape the personality. Looking at personality holistically requires considering both hereditary and environmental characteristics together.

Adler argues that it is not correct to use the concepts of conscious and unconscious. Conscious and unconscious point in the same direction and there is no opposition between them. The individual's behavior is determined not by the conscious or unconscious, but by the goals and objectives that cause the behavior. Adler states that the way to understand humans is to accept human existence in unity and integrity.

The most important point that constitutes the unity and integrity of the individual and which should be considered in understanding the behavior of the individual is the social environment in which the individual lives. Adler defines man as a social being. Human beings make sense of their existence only by interacting with other people. The individual is in an effort to contribute to the society and culture in which he lives and to feel belonging. The innate sense of community puts the individual in social relations with other individuals. The social environment in which the individual lives gives a great clue in analyzing the personality of the individual and understanding the reason for his behavior. In order for the individual to have a healthy mood, it is important to adapt to society, contribute to society, and feel safe in the social context. While neurotic individuals in society cannot adapt to the realities of society, those who have a healthy personality are those who have managed to keep up with the returns of society.

While Alfred Adler was busy with his daughter, Valentine, who disappeared in Moscow at the beginning of 1937, he felt chest pains at a lecture he gave in the Netherlands. He does not listen to the doctor's advice that he should rest and goes to Aberdeen, Scotland. He died of a heart attack on 28 May 1937 in Scotland.