In his later writings Adler made a shift never managed by Freud but later repeated by Maslow: he wrote less about pathology and more about health, and the Nietzschean striving for superiority and compensation mutated into a unifying directional tendency toward self-mastery and self-overcoming in the service of social interest (Gemeinschaftsgefühle), the opposite of self-boundedness (Ichgebundenheit). The healthy person neither loses himself in his ideal-self fictions or lives through others, the two faces worn by neurotic selfishness; the healthy person makes his deepest goals conscious while integrating them into activities that improve family and community. Here Adler anticipates Fromm's dictum that self-love and other-love arise together and support one another.
Adler never probed the depths and the heights of the unconscious psyche, and later theorists, forgetting why he called his approach Individual Psychology, used his emphasis on community and "adjustment" to equate normality with health and to malign privateness and uniqueness as maladapted. Worth for him came practically to be equated to social usefulness. Nevertheless, Adler was a man I believe I would have liked. Everyone who knew him admired his empathy, easy sociability, sense of humor, love of enjoyment, and kindly but firm insistence that we create who we are. He also confirmed for me that a psychological conflict is not an "illness"; it is an opportunity.
The following are mostly from the book Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler.
More important than innate disposition, objective experience, and environment is the subjective evaluation of these. Furthermore, this evaluation stands in a certain, often strange, relation to reality.
A clumsy right hand cannot be trained into a skillful right hand by taking thought, by wishing it were less clumsy, or even by avoiding clumsiness. It can become skillful only by exercise in practical achievements, and the incentive to the achievement must be more deeply felt than the discouragement at the hitherto existent clumsiness.
Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.
We cannot say that if a child is badly nourished he will become a criminal. We must see what conclusion the child has drawn.
We can comprehend every single life phenomenon, as if the past, the present, and the future together with a superordinated, guiding idea were present in it in traces.
When we know the goal of a person, we know approximately what will follow.
Man makes one thing the cause and another thing the effect, and then joins the two.
...A child was pampered and takes over the corresponding forms of expression with all their disadvantages. As the child grows up, he may become aware of the misfortune toward which he is headed. If such a child would ask what is the cause for this, everyone would say the mother. We ourselves would be tempted to agree, and also to blame the mother. But this argument collapses when the child changes his behavior, either on his own or through outside help and no longer makes these same errors.
Cain's Maxim Of Parent-Blaming Therapists: therapists still stuck in parent-blaming will be attracted to therapy schools that make the parents the "cause" of the child's misbehavior.
Every semblance of causality in the psychological life is due to the tendency of many psychologists to present their dogmas disguised in mechanistic or physical similes. At one time they use as a comparison a pump handle moving up and down, at another a magnet with polar termini, at another a sadly harassed animal struggling for the satisfaction of its elementary needs. From such a view, to be sure, little can be seen of the fundamental differences which human psychological life manifests.
Causes, powers, instincts, impulses, and the like cannot serve as explanatory principles. The final goal alone can. Experiences, traumata, sexual development mechanisms cannot yield an explanation, but the perspective in which these are regarded, the individual way of seeing them, which subordinates all life to the final goal, can do so.
A tremendous realization, and a revolutionary one for the field of psychotherapy, which too often looks for the locus of pathology and change in mechanisms or virtual-places like the unconscious.
Every therapeutic cure, and still more, any awkward attempt to show the patient the truth, tears him from the cradle of his freedom from responsibility and must therefore reckon with the most vehement resistance.
I'm coming to believe that this knowledge of one's responsibility can be repressed even more profoundly than the underlying wounds involved.
Every individual acts and suffers in accordance with his peculiar teleology, which has all the inevitability of fate, so long as he does not understand it. Its springs may be traced to his earliest childhood, and nearly always we find that they have been diverted into false channels by the pressure of the earliest situations in the child's life.
The goal of the mental life of man becomes its governing principle, its causa finalis. Here we have the root of the unity of the personality, the individuality. It does not matter what the source of its energies may have been. Not their origin but their end, their ultimate goal, constitutes their individual character...In other words, the psychological life of a person is oriented towards the final act, like that of a character created by a good dramatist.
The fictional, abstract ideal is the point of origin for the formation and differentiation of the given psychological resources into preparatory attitudes, readinesses, and character traits. The individual then wears the character traits demanded by his fictional goal, just as the character mask (persona) of the ancient actor had to fit the finale of the tragedy.
Compare the "life script" of Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis.
The human mind shows an urge to capture into fixed forms through unreal assumptions, that is, fictions, that which is chaotic, always in flux, and incomprehensible. Serving this urge, the child quite generally uses a schema in order to act and to find his way. We proceed much the same when we divide the earth by meridians and parallels, for only thus do we obtain fixed points which we can bring into a relationship with one another.
Compare the transpersonal hypothesis, derived from Far Eastern psychologies, that the "I" or ego is in healthy people not a solidified construct but a useful working fiction. Psychogenic mental illness = identifying with that construct to the point of raising it to an absolute. Experiences, inner or outer, that don't line up with that absolute are screened out of awareness, rendered unconscious; the result is self-fragmentation.
Form and content of the neurotic guiding line originate from the impressions of the child who is humiliated.
"Neurotic" is a Freud-era term for a characterological disorder. The neuroses were gradually divided into what we now call anxiety and personality disorders, a shuffling that entirely ignores the rampant low-grade conflicts that nevertheless contaminate the entire character. I'm for either bringing back the term "neurotic"--we all know what it means despite its neurological-sounding flavor--or using another (perhaps "character disorder").
Neurosis is the natural, logical development of an individual who is comparatively inactive, filled with a personal, egocentric striving for superiority, and is therefore retarded in the development of his social interest, as we find regularly among the more passive pampered styles of life.
Psychopathology as form or expression of passivity: this may have been Adler's greatest discovery.
It is the feeling of insecurity which forces the neurotic to a stronger attachment to fictions, guiding lines, ideals, and principles.
I've referred to this as the Pharisee mentality. "The letter of the law must be obeyed!" How safe. How easy. How utterly disabling.
The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.
Caution: (normal, fiction) "as if" I could lose my money, "as if" I could be below. Anxiety: (neurotic, hypothesis) "as if" I were going to lose my money, "as if" I were going to be below. Melancholia: (psychotic, dogma) "as if" I had lost my money, "as if" I were below. In other words, the stronger the feeling of insecurity, the more accentuated the fiction becomes through increasing abstraction from reality, and the more it approaches dogma.
After all, there is no principle to live by which would be valid to the very end; even the most correct solutions of problems interfere with the course of life when they are pushed too far into the foreground, as for example, if one makes cleanliness and truth the goal of all striving.
We should not be astonished if in the cases where we see an inferiority complex we find a superiority complex more or less hidden.
One must be very important to merit heaps of self-criticism and very virtuous to be willing to pile them up for all to see.
If we see someone who is arrogant, for example, we can guess that he feels, "Other people are apt to overlook me. I must show that I am somebody." If we see someone who gesticulates strongly when he speaks, we can guess that he feels, "My words would not carry any weight if I did not emphasize them." Behind everyone who behaves as if he were superior to others, we can suspect a feeling of inferiority which calls for very special efforts of concealment. It is as if a man feared that he was too small and walked on his toes to make himself seem taller.
It interests me that Americans tend to have trouble seeing this. I think it's because we are an arrogant, selfish, pampered people. Our esteem is tied up in what we can buy and sell, who we can impress, who we can bomb into agreeing with us. Ask people in other countries for an assessment and many will tell you that we behave, collectively, exactly like spoiled rich kids. (Pollution: the thoughtless act of a brat unwrapping a candy bar.) The peasant farmer hasn't the time or the leisure to be "dysfunctional." We are so often neurotic and symptomatic, not because life is so hard on poor little us, who own most of the planet and its diminishing resources, but because we can afford to be.
All neurotic symptoms have as their object the task of safeguarding the patient's self-esteem and thereby also the lifeline into which he has grown. To prove his ability to cope with life the patient needs arrangements and neurotic symptoms as an expedient. He needs them as an oversized safeguarding component against the dangers which, in his feeling of inferiority, he expects and incessantly seeks to avoid in working out his plans for the future.
We must never neglect the patient's own use of his symptoms.
It is one of the most effective attitudes of the neurotic to measure thumbs down, so to speak, a real person by an ideal, since in doing so he can depreciate him as much as he wishes.
A short girl prefers tall men; or a girl falls in love only when the parents have forbidden it, while treating the attainable partner with open disdain and hostility. In the conversation and thoughts of such girls the limiting word "only" always crops up. They want only an educated man, only a rich man, only a real he-man, only platonic love, only a childless marriage...Here one sees the depreciation tendency so strongly at work that, in the end, hardly a man is left who would satisfy their requirements. Usually they have a ready-made, often unconscious, ideal to which traits of the father, a brother, a fairly-tale hero, a literary or historical character are admixed. The more we become familiar with these ideals, the greater becomes our conviction that they have been posited as a fictional measure by which to depreciate reality.
Beware of those on the search for a "soul-mate"! I guarantee that at some point you will not measure up to this exalted ideal, and God help you when you don't.
One of the most interesting complexes is the redeemer complex. It characterizes people who conspicuously but unknowingly take the attitude that they must save or redeem someone. There are thousands and degrees and variations, but it is always clearly the attitude of a person who finds his superiority in solving the complications of others.
One of my patients who had been run over twice during his childhood, associated his damaged self-esteem with this recollection. Whenever he crossed the street in the company of someone else, he anxiously led the other person by the arm as if he did not credit him with the ability to get there without help. Many people are worried when their relatives travel by rail, or go swimming or boating; they give incessant instructions to the nurse maid; and continue their depreciation tendency by exaggerated criticisms and reproofs. In every school and office one finds nervous teachers and superiors given to such nagging disparagements.
Which usually go by strange names like concern, expertise, "for your benefit," love...I recently came across this criticism of an online pontificator who railed against mysticism and meditative practices which he believed had caused his epilepsy, and the remark's blunt truthfulness made me laugh: "You are one of those kids who didn't wear a seatbelt on the tilt-a-whirl and got thrown off and are now trying to warn everyone of how dangerous it is."
In the investigation of a neurotic style of life we must always suspect an opponent, and note who suffers most because of the patient's condition. Usually this is a member of the family. There is always this element of concealed accusation in neurosis, the patient feeling as though he were deprived of his right--that is, of the center of attention--and wanting to fix the responsibility and blame upon someone.
Defiant individuals will always persecute others, yet will always consider themselves persecuted.
Victim-thinking and what Nietzsche called ressentiment go together and feed each other. Every chronic martyr displays all the signs of being a professional hater.
From what does the depreciation tendency originate? It originates from the fear of an injury to one's own sensitivity.
A neurotic actress in talking about love affairs said: "I am not at all afraid of such affairs. I am actually completely amoral. There is only one thing: I have found that all men smell bad, and that violates my esthetic sense." We will understand that with such an attitude one can well afford to be amoral without incurring any danger.
To injure another person through atonement is one of the most subtle devices of the neurotic, as when, for example, he indulges in self-accusations.
"If I didn't have (this affliction), I would be the first." As a rule the if-clause contains an unfulfillable condition, or the patient's own arrangement, which only he can change.
To some degree or other, every neurotic restricts his sphere of action, his contacts with the whole situation. He tries to keep at a distance the real confronting problems of life and confines himself to the circumstances in which he feels able to dominate. In this way he builds for himself a narrow stable, closes the door, and spends his life away from the wind, the sunlight, and the fresh air.
When defeat threatens, the neurotic symptoms and readinesses become effective, inhibiting the progress of action.
Which is why it's important, when someone has panic attacks or agoraphobia, to find out exactly what preceded the onset of symptoms. Often it will be some new risk, occupation, relationship, opportunity, or other sort of significant life-change the person doesn't feel up to tackling.
There is only one reason for an individual to side-step to the useless side: the fear of a defeat on the useful side.
If I have a goal before me to avoid achievement and I am trained from childhood on through my timidity to let someone else do the work for me, to accompany me, to protect me, to deprive this person of his freedom and make him subordinate to me, then I must, of course, being on this road, fortify it as much as possible so that I can reach my goal in security.
At times the mother or the father are elevated through phantasy to the roles of lover or spouse until this tie is firm enough to safeguard the avoidance of the marriage problem.
Scratch a man who won't commit and who spends hours every week on the phone with his mother and you'll see this dynamic at work. Why should he want a female partner? He has one already, and turning away from her will fill him with guilt.
If symptoms disappear, it is always because the individual is now in a situation in which they are no longer of any benefit to him.
Whether the neurotic dominates by bullying or by whining will depend on his training: he will choose the device which he has tested best and found most effective for his purposes. Sometimes, if he is dissatisfied with one method, he will try the other. In either case the goal is the same--to gain a feeling of superiority without working to improve the situation.
Tears and complaints--the means which I have called "water power"--can be an extremely useful weapon for disturbing cooperation and reducing others to a condition of slavery.
Do you see why controlling people avoid confrontive therapies?
The form and content of the neurotic guiding line come from the impressions of the child who feels slighted. These impressions, which necessarily grow out of an original feeling of inferiority, call to life an aggressive attitude, the purpose of which is to overcome a great insecurity. Within this aggressive attitude we may place all the attempts of the child which promise an enhancement of his self-esteem
One can only hope the special study group formed by the White House to look into why children find rifles and snipe at their classmates will consider this sort of information.
The neurotic person, like everyone else, has his conflicts. But it is his way of trying to solve them which distinguishes him clearly from all other people.
The self-bound individual always forgets that his self would be safeguarded better and automatically the more he prepares himself for the welfare of mankind, and that in this respect no limits are set for him.
If we think that we must develop personality in vacuo, without a goal of contribution, we shall merely make ourselves domineering and unpleasant.
Never has man appeared otherwise than in society.
"To see with the eyes of another, to hear with the ears of another, to feel with the heart of another." For the time being, this seems to me an admissible definition of what we call social feeling.
If anyone asks me why he should love his neighbor, I would not know how to answer him, and I could only ask in my turn why he should pose such a question...It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.
Solitary occupation in children as well as adults need not come off badly. Indeed it should even be encouraged, provided it permits a prospect of later enrichment of society. It is merely due to the technique of certain accomplishments that they can be practiced and carried out only at a distance from other persons. This in no way prevents them from actually being social in character.
"Adjustment" fans take note! A criterion I find useful when I do therapy: is my client isolating himself as a temporary process of preparation and regrouping, or is it habitual? The first is productive; the second is not, and when I see it I look not just for depression and anxiety and the usual cargo but also, thanks to Adler, for hidden egotism. For every "I'm not good enough for them" can usually be found a corresponding "and they aren't good enough for me." A particularly common form of this is the lonely single who neglects his appearance because "the right woman will love me for who I am." Assuming she even meets him, for he tends not to get out much, a healthy woman will see such grandiosity and excuse-making and lack of self-care for what they are and move on to greener pastures.
....Imperfect preparation gives rise to the thousand-fold forms that express physical and mental inferiority and insecurity...In every case there is a "yes" that emphasizes the pressure of social interest, but this is invariably followed by a "but" that possesses greater strength and prevents the necessary increase of social interest. This "but" in all cases, whether typical or particular, will have an individual nuance. The difficulty of a cure is in proportion to the strength of the "but."
Which is why therapists refer to the "yes, but" syndrome: "Yes, I'd like to do that, but..." To avoid being trapped in this game, it's sometimes helpful to respond, "Well, then I guess you're stuck. Now what?"
Very great are the consequences of our real beliefs. Big errors can produce neuroses but little errors, a nearly normal person.
I do not know more about human life than others, but I can see that it expresses itself in movement and direction toward a successful solution of outer and inner confrontations.
In real life we always find a confirmation of the melody of the total self, of the personality, with its thousandfold ramifications. If we believe that the foundation, the ultimate basis of everything has been found in character traits, drives, or reflexes, the self is likely to be overlooked.
The same tones tell a different tale in Richard Wagner and in Liszt.
Authors who emphasize a part of the whole are likely to attribute to this part all the aptitudes and observations pertaining to the self, the individual. They show "something" which is endowed with prudence, determination, volition, and creative power without knowing that they are actually describing the self, rather than drives, character traits, or reflexes.
An anticipation of existential psychology, and Rollo May's question: where is the person to whom the drives and dynamics apply?
All inherited possibilities and all influences of the body, all environmental influences, including educational application, are perceived, assimilated, digested, and answered by a living and striving being, striving for a successful achievement in his view. The subjectiveness of the individual, his special style of life, and his conception of life mold and shape all influences. The individual life collects all these influences and uses them as provocative bricks in building a totality which aims toward a successful goal in relating itself to outside problems.
We must refute the causal significance of situation, milieu, or experiences of the child. Their significance and effectiveness develop only in the intermediary psychological metabolism, so to speak. They are assimilated by the early-derived style of life of the child. Thus it can happen that in a quite ethical family an antisocial child may grow up. The same experience has never exactly the same effect on two individuals; and we learn from experience only to the extent that the style of life permits.
Unearth this unconscious style of life, counselors, and you'll understand exactly how a client's current symptoms, repressions, disorders, and stucknesses confirm it. The client who allows himself to see this has gained the most powerful leverage possible for either rewriting his life script or carrying it out in self-enhancing ways; in either case he will change course and the wind blowing him flat aback will fill his sails.
The child builds up his whole life, which we have called concretely style of life, at a time when he has neither adequate language nor adequate concepts. When he grows further in the sense of his style of life, he grows in a movement which has never been formulated into words and therefore, unassailable to criticism, is also withdraws from the criticism of experience. We cannot say that this is a repressed unconscious. Rather, we must say that something has not been understood or that something has been withheld from the understanding.
A goal of overcoming as an abstract formulation is unacceptable to the human mind. We need a much more concrete formulation. Thus each individual arrives at a concrete goal of overcoming through his creative power, which is identical with the self.
Every problem child, every neurotic, every drunkard, criminal, or sexual pervert is making the proper movements to achieve what he takes to be the position of superiority. It is impossible to attack his symptoms by themselves; they are exactly the symptoms he ought to have for such a goal.
There is always something subjective in the development of a child, and it is this individuality which pedagogues must investigate. This prevents the application of general rules in the education of groups of children and is the reason why the application of the same rule results differently with different children.
A child is lazy because this attribute appears to him as a suitable means to make life easier and at the same time to maintain his significance, for the power position of an individual exists, in a certain sense, also when he moves along the line of laziness. He can always refer to it as an innate defect, leaving his inner value intact...Another child who, in an unbridled striving for power, is engaged in a constant struggle with his environment will develop character traits which appear necessary for such a struggle: ambition, envy, distrust. It is generally believed that such phenomena are completely merged with a personality, that they are innate and unalterable. But closer examination shows that it is only that they appear necessary for the movement line of the individual and are adopted for this reason. They are not primary but secondary factors, forced by the secret goal of the individual, and must be understood teleologically.
I believe that I am not bound by any strict rule or prejudice but prefer to subscribe to the principle: Everything can also be different.
The specific individual cannot be judged with the measure of probability.
A person's opinion of himself and the environment can best be deduced from the meaning he finds in life and from the meaning he gives to his own life.
The direction and the directed utilization of instincts and drives, as well as impressions from the environment and education, are the artistic works of the child and cannot be understood in the sense of a psychology of possession but only of a psychology of use.
Those who regard the ever-differing problems of life as remaining the same, who do not perceive their uniqueness in each case, can easily be misled to believe in efficient causes, drives, and instincts as the demonic rulers of our destiny.
No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences--the so-called trauma--but we make out of them just what suits our purposes.
The Buddha would have concurred. And Lieh Tzu.
Perception can never be compared with a photographic apparatus; it always contains something of the individual's uniqueness.
It will probably never be possible to produce conditioned reflexes which would lead to a feeling of defeat.
By "feeling" Adler here refers to a state of defeat. One can feel defeated, even helpless, but surrender is a choice.
...When fantasy is rightly coupled with social interest, the really great achievements are to be expected, for fantasy, by rousing expectant feelings and emotions, has the same effect as increasing the gas pressure in a machine that is running: the performance is increased.
A character trait is comparable to a guiding line which is attached to the individual as a pattern, permitting him to express his self-consistent personality in any situation without much reflection. Character traits do not correspond to innate forces and substrata; they are acquired, although very early, in order to make it possible to retain a definite pace.
In order to arrive at a more effective result, the psyche speaks an organ dialect.
Like the slumped shoulders that reveal defeat or the anxiety attacks that seem to prevent a person from taking on new responsibilities. Adler, a doctor, at first saw "organ inferiority" as the cause of all inferiority feelings, but he later aligned "organ dialect" with hidden goals and the style of life.
There would be far fewer outbursts of temper if the possibility were not offered of assuring oneself significance in this way.
My work with male batterers amply confirms this. People who feel positive and powerful do not batter.
People often believe that left and right are contradictions, that man and woman, hot and cold, light and heavy, strong and weak are contradictions. From a scientific viewpoint, they are not contradictions, but varieties. They are degrees of a scale, arranged in accordance with their approximation to some ideal fiction. In the same way, good and bad, normal and abnormal, are not contradictions but varieties.
Psychoanalysts often criticize Jungians for "splitting," for always talking about the psyche in terms of opposites, and Abraham Maslow, who was influenced by Adler, has found that among self-actualizers, seeming contradictions tend to dissolve. Jung understood this, but many of his pupils didn't, and many continue to write about feminine and masculine, good and bad, bright and dark, conscious and unconscious as "opposites" that need reconciliation (cf. Jung's concept of the transcendent function or reconciling symbol) rather than as poles of experience which can be trusted to disclose their own unity.
When we dream we are alone.
It is the individual shade of interpretation that matters in the end.
We all wish to overcome difficulties. We all strive to reach a goal by the attainment of which we shall feel strong, superior, and complete...Whatever name we give it, we shall always find in human beings this great line of activity--this struggle to rise from an inferior to a superior position, from defeat to victory, from below to above. It begins in earliest childhood and continues to the end of our lives.
Without any self-consistency, physiognomy, and personal note we would rank with the amoebae. Inanimate nature obeys a perceptible causality, but life is a demand.
God
who is eternally complete, who directs the stars, who is the master of
fates, who elevates man from his lowliness to Himself, who speaks from
the cosmos to every single human soul, is the most brilliant manifestation
of the goal of perfection to date. In God's nature, religious mankind perceives
the way to height. In His call it hears again the innate voice of life
which must have its direction towards the goal of perfection, towards overcoming
the feeling of lowliness and transitoriness of the existence here below.
The human soul, as a part of the movement of life, is endowed with the
ability to participate in the uplift, elevation, perfection, and completion.