Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler: The Man Who Threw Out the Couch

He had rickets and could not walk until he was four. At four he nearly died of pneumonia — the doctor pronounced him lost — and decided, having survived, to become a physician. His younger brother died in the bed beside him when Adler was three. He was run over twice as a child. From that inventory of frailty came the single idea that made his name: that human beings are organised around the compensation of weakness, and that what looks like ambition is usually a wound in motion.

Vienna's Fifteenth District

Adler was born on 7 February 1870 at Mariahilfer Straße 208 in Rudolfsheim, Vienna's 15th district, the second of seven children of Leopold Adler, a grain merchant of Hungarian-Jewish descent, and Pauline Beer. His rivalry with his older brother Sigmund lasted a lifetime and fed directly into his later theories about siblings. He graduated in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1895, beginning in ophthalmology before moving to neurology and psychiatry. In 1897 he married Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein, a Russian intellectual and socialist activist; they had four children, including Alexandra and Kurt, who both became psychiatrists, and Valentine, a writer and activist. His granddaughter Margot Adler became a well-known journalist. His first practice was in a less affluent part of Vienna across from the Prater amusement park, and his patients included circus performers — people whose extraordinary physical strengths sat beside compensating weaknesses, a clinical education he never forgot.

Nine Years with Freud

In 1902 Adler wrote a defence of Freud's *Interpretation of Dreams* and was invited into the Wednesday Society that met at Freud's home; by 1906 it had seventeen members. In 1908 he presented "The aggressive instinct in life and in neurosis," arguing that sexual and aggressive drives were separate instincts that merged later — a direct contradiction of Freud's position at the time. He became president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1910. In 1911 he formally broke away with his supporters, the first major dissenter from orthodox psychoanalysis, three years before Jung. The disagreements were fundamental: Adler insisted on the social realm where Freud looked to internal instincts, rejected the primacy of sexual drives in favour of power and compensation, denied that early sexual development determined character, and held socialist convictions Freud did not share. Freud later called Adler's ideas "honorable errors," absorbed the aggressive drive into *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* in 1920 without citing him, and after Adler's death remarked with characteristic acid: "I don't understand your sympathy for Adler. For a Jewish boy out of a Viennese suburb a death in Aberdeen is an unheard of career in itself."

Individual Psychology

He founded the Society for Individual Psychology in 1912. The name is a claim: *individual* in the sense of indivisible, a person treated as a whole rather than decomposed into warring agencies. Its vocabulary entered the language. The inferiority complex was his coinage. Organ inferiority held that a weak organ is compensated by others and that weakness may become strength. Fictional finalism made behaviour teleological, pulled by imagined future states rather than pushed by the past. Style of life described the personality pattern laid down in childhood and shaped by birth order. Three life tasks — work, friendship and love — all demand cooperation, and, as he put it, "they all throw cross-lights on one another." Above all there was Gemeinschaftsgefühl, social interest: the proposition that contributing to others is what produces belonging and worth. On memory he was categorical: "There are no 'chance' memories. Out of the incalculable number of impressions that an individual receives, she chooses to remember only those which she considers... to have a bearing on her problems."

The Clinics

Adler served as an army doctor on the Russian front and then in a children's hospital between 1914 and 1918. In 1919 he opened Vienna's first child guidance clinic, and through the 1920s, with the support of the Social Democratic Party, he established twenty-eight of them — making Vienna the first city in the world to provide free educational therapy to schoolchildren. This was psychiatry carried out of the consulting room and into the community, and it came with a symbolic gesture that summarises his whole method: he discarded the analytic couch and used two chairs instead, so that clinician and patient sat as equals. He lectured constantly across Europe from 1921, began US lecture tours in 1926, and became a visiting professor at Columbia University in 1927. In 1930 he met the English occultist Aleister Crowley in Berlin. In 1934 antisemitic policy drove him out of Austria to a professorship at the Long Island College of Medicine.

The Objections

Adler's views on homosexuality, from 1917 onward, classified it as a "failure of life" and a deficiency of social interest, theorising a connection to an inferiority complex toward one's own gender — a position distinct from Freud's narcissism account and Jung's contrasexual archetypes, and no better. He softened by the mid-1930s: asked by a colleague about a young man living with an older man, Adler asked, "Is he happy?" Told that he was, he answered, "Well, why don't we leave him alone." His birth order theory never acquired rigorous scientific support. And the historian of psychology Henri Ellenberger observed that much of Adlerian theory was absorbed into the mainstream without acknowledgement, blaming his "imperfect" writing, his knack for creating a "new obviousness," and his lack of an organised following.

Why Alfred Is Called a Genius

Ellenberger's phrase — the capacity to create a "new obviousness" — is the most precise description anyone has given of Adler's particular gift, and it doubles as the case against him. His talent was for formulations so intuitive that they stop looking like discoveries once you have heard them. Inferiority complex, compensation, sibling rivalry, style of life, the goal-directed rather than past-driven self: these are now common property, embedded in ordinary speech, and almost nobody attaches his name to them. That is the mark of an idea that won completely. The institutional record supports the claim of originality too. He was the first major figure to break with Freud and build an independent school, the first to insist that the social element governs individual readjustment, and the first to take psychotherapy into public clinics as prevention rather than treatment.

The honest counter-case is that his ideas were more suggestive than demonstrated. Birth order effects have never been established with rigour; social interest is closer to an ethical commitment than a testable hypothesis; and his writing was, by general agreement including Ellenberger's, unsystematic. He ranked 67th in a 2002 *Review of General Psychology* survey of the most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century — respectable, not commanding. His influence runs largely through others: Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis all built on him. A fair reading is that Adler was a genius of clinical intuition and moral reframing rather than of theory-building, and that his reputation suffers precisely because his best insights were absorbed so completely that they now seem too obvious to have needed inventing.

Legacy

He collapsed in the street during a lecture tour in Aberdeen on 28 May 1937 and died of a heart attack caused by degeneration of the heart muscle. He had published more than three hundred books and articles; the twelve-volume *Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler* appeared posthumously. He is counted, with Freud and Jung, as one of the three founding figures of depth psychology, and Adlerian training institutes operate in more than fifteen countries.