Alfred Adler: Biography Of The Founder Of Individual Psychology
Neither psychoanalysis nor psychodynamic psychology can be explained knowing only the work of Sigmund Freud.
In fact, psychotherapy based on the fundamental ideas of psychoanalysis has three great founders: Sigmund Freud (of course), Carl Gustav Jung and Alfred Adler This article is about the latter, who, in addition to being one of the first to question the ideas of the father of psychoanalysis, was the creator of the Individual Psychology
Alfred Adler was born into a Viennese Jewish family in 1870, a couple of decades before psychoanalysis began to take shape through the works of Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer
From a very young age, Adler had a series of health complications that are commonly pointed out as the beginning of the Austrian’s interest in medicine. A career that, in his youth, he successfully studied at the University of Vienna.
After university he meets Freud
After graduating from medical school in 1895, he married and began to come into contact with psychoanalysis through Sigmund Freud, whom he met personally in 1899. From then on, Alfred Adler began to introduce himself. in the ideas about the functioning of the psyche proposed by Freudian theory.
Adler’s enthusiasm for psychoanalysis and psychology in general led him to become the first president of the city’s association of psychoanalysts, the Wednesday Psychological Society (which would later receive the official name of Vienna Psychoanalytic Association), created in 1902.
There, the fundamental ideas with which psychoanalysts tried to explain the human mind were debated and developed and this exposure to the theoretical proposals of Freud and his disciples contributed to Alfred Adler making his theories increasingly complex.
The conflict between Adler and Freud
Alfred Adler’s notoriety in the world of the emerging psychoanalytic world grew very quickly, partly due to his closeness to Freud but also because of the vehemence with which he expressed his ideas. In fact, there came a point where Adler became director of the Psychoanalysis Magazine (Zentralbaltt für Psychoanalysis), a publication of which Freud was editor and which, of course, was very relevant in its field.
However, shortly after this foray into the publishing world, Alfred Adler began to question fundamental pillars of Freud’s theories, such as sexual theory This meant that in 1911 opposition to Freud’s ideas prevented him from continuing to work on the magazine. Furthermore, that same year Alfred Adler left the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association. This was the first major break that the circle of Viennese psychoanalysts experienced, although others would follow: shortly after, Carl Gustav Jung would also definitively distance himself from Freud’s orthodox psychoanalysis.
But Adler did not stop being interested in the creation of ideas about the functioning of mental processes. Simply, created another psychological school similar in many points to the one defended by Freud This new school is called Individual Psychology
Alfred Adler and Individual Psychology
One could talk at length about the disagreements that caused Alfred Adler and Sigmund Freud to divide, but there were two main reasons.
The first is that Adler gave much less importance to sexuality compared to Freud He did not believe that neither sex nor the way in which it is symbolized was an essential regulator of human behavior from the first years of life.
The second has to do with the role of the unconscious. Yes for Freud the unconscious It is everything that, acting from the shadows, keeps us tied to a series of patterns of behavior and thinking according to what we have done in the past, Alfred Adler placed more emphasis on the power that each individual has when it comes to structuring the functioning of their mind according to what happens in the present.
That is to say, on the one hand it stops considering past acts as a burden that inevitably conditions us, and on the other it gives more importance to our way of interacting with what we feel and think in the here and now (in addition to recognizing the importance of the context in which we find ourselves at each moment).
Adler forged the foundations of this new Individual Psychology by focusing on his disabled patients Although they all had a history of similar limitations, some were consumed by their inferiority complex when comparing themselves to other people, while for others the physical limitations they experienced acted as a motivating factor that led them, according to Adler, to self-improvement.
The break between Alfred Adler and Freud, then, had a lot to do with the degree to which the former gave importance to the conscious aspect of thought, which makes us unique people with the capacity to construct original objectives.
Alfred Adler died in 1937, but his ideas have had a great echo He was the first great representative of psychodynamic psychology to question major dogmas of Freud’s theories, and built an approach more focused on the creative power of the individual aware of his powers and limitations. Of course, all of his works are outside what is considered scientific psychology today, but that did not prevent his influences from inspiring the world of the humanities and philosophy.
Individual Psychology founded by Alfred Adler together with other members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association It has had a great influence both on Humanistic Psychology that appeared in the second half of the 20th century and on various proposals framed in the psychodynamic current. In a world in which the philosophy of self-help and personal improvement is gaining a lot of strength, it is not strange that the ideas of Adler, who had a more optimistic vision about how we are supposed to think and feel than his teacher, are well accepted. .
