Alfred Adler's Career, Life, and Theory of Personality

When people think of psychology, names of famous figures like Freud and Jung often spring to mind. One of their contemporaries, Alfred Adler, a pioneering Austrian physician and psychiatrist, also made groundbreaking contributions to psychology, including personality, motivation, and self-improvement. He formed the school of thought known as individual psychology.

While Freud emphasized unconscious drives and childhood traumas, Adler suggested that people are driven by an innate need to experience growth, belonging, and personal meaning.

Adler's work and theories helped lay the foundation for modern psychotherapy and positive psychology. Keep reading to learn more about Adler's life, career, and contributions to psychology.

What Alfred Adler is Best Known For

Adler is known for many thoughts and theories within the field of psychology, but is best known for:

• Founding individual psychology
• His concept of the inferiority complex
• Being a founding member and president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (the latter in 1910)
  

Alder was initially a colleague of Sigmund Freud and helped establish psychoanalysis. He looked at the individual as a whole, which is why he referred to his approach as individual psychology.

He eventually split from Freud's psychoanalytic circle but went on to have a tremendous impact on the development of psychotherapy. Adler also had a significant influence on many other great thinkers, including Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis.

Alfred Adler's Life and Career

To fully understand who Alfred Adler was and how his experiences contributed to his theory of personality development, it helps to look at his life and career in greater depth.

Early Life

Alfred Adler was born in Vienna, Austria, on February 7, 1870. His early life was marked by a series of illnesses that influenced his later decision to pursue a career in medicine. He suffered rickets as a young child, which prevented him from walking until after the age of 2. Then he got pneumonia at the age of four.

Due to his health problems as a child, Adler decided he would become a physician. While he would go on to become one of the most influential figures in psychology, he didn't initially start out in that field. After graduating from the University of Vienna in 1895 with a medical degree, he began his career as an ophthalmologist and later switched to general practice.

Mid-Life

It wasn't until mid-life that Alder turned his interests toward the field of psychiatry. In 1902, Sigmund Freud invited him to join a psychoanalytic discussion group. This group met each Wednesday in Freud's home and would eventually grow to become the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

After serving as President of the group for a time, Adler left in part because of his disagreements with some of Freud's theories.

He was quick to point out that while he had been a colleague of Freud's, he was in no way a disciple of the famous Austrian psychoanalyst. In 1912, Alfred Adler founded the Society of Individual Psychology.

Later Life

Although Adler had converted to Christianity, his Jewish heritage led to the Nazis closing down his clinics during the 1930s. As a result, Adler emigrated to the United States to take a professor position at the Long Island College of Medicine. In 1937, Adler went on a lecture tour and suffered a fatal heart attack in Aberdeen, Scotland, on May 28, 1937.

His family lost track of his cremated remains shortly after his death and the ashes were presumed lost before being discovered in 2007 at a crematorium in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 2011, 74 years after his death, Adler's ashes were returned to Vienna, Austria.

Understanding Adler's Theory of Personality

Adler's theory of personality contended that individuals are whole beings. Therefore, their personality is formed based on several key concepts, including:

• Social interest: a sense of community and one's attitude toward others
• Masculine protest: in men, a tendency to compensate for feelings of inferiority by adopting excessively aggressive behavior; in women, a tendency to dominate others to overcome society's devaluation of women
• Lifestyle: a pattern of responses to situations
• Goal-directed and purposeful behavior: all behaviors are a result of our goals
• Feelings of inferiority: relying totally on others in early life causes us to feel inferior
• Striving for superiority: an attempt to overcome feelings of inferiority
• Fictional finalism: ideals with no basis in reality, thus cannot be tested or confirmed (i.e., "honesty is the best policy")
• Family constellation: one's family makeup and position within the family
• Birth order: the order in which we are born affects our familial relationships, interactions, and feelings of inferiority

Inferiority Complex

One of the main contributors to Adler's personality theory was the idea that all people develop feelings of inferiority early in life, resulting in an inferiority complex. From childhood, people work toward overcoming this inferiority by "striving for superiority."

An example of Adler's theory would be a child who feels inferior, then misbehaves in an attempt to get their parent to pay more attention to them. Later in life, feeling inferior may cause some individuals to focus on collaboration and contributions to society while others will try to exert power over others.

Other Contributions to Psychology

Alfred Adler's theories have played an essential role in many areas of psychology, including therapy and child development. Alder's ideas also influenced other important psychologists and psychoanalysts, including:

• Abraham Maslow
• Carl Rogers
• Karen Horney
• Rollo May
• Erich Fromm
• Albert Ellis

Today, his ideas and concepts are often referred to as Adlerian psychology.

Takeaways

Adler's contributions to psychology go far beyond his role in the development of psychoanalysis. His emphasis on factors like social connections and personal growth helped lay the groundwork for many modern ideas that are still influential in psychology today. He is considered one of the key founders of modern psychotherapy and experts continue to explore how concepts like the inferiority complex and birth order affect behavior.