What Is An Adlerian?

     What differentiates Adlerian thinking from other theoretical orientations? The introduction to The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler (Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956) lists 12 assumptions that form the basic framework for this kind of thought:

1. There is one basic dynamic force behind all human activity, a striving from a felt minus situation towards a plus situation, from a feeling of inferiority towards superiority, perfection, totality.

2. The striving receives its specific direction from an individually unique goal or self-ideal, which though influenced by biological and environmental factors is ultimately the creation of the individual. Because it is an ideal, the goal is a fiction.

3. The goal is only “dimly envisaged” by the individual, which means that it is largely unknown to him and not understood by him. This is Adler’s definition of the unconscious: the unknown part of the goal.

4. The goal becomes the final cause, the ultimate independent variable. To the extent that the goal provides the key to understanding the individual, it is a working hypothesis on the part of the psychologist.

5. All psychological processes form a self-consistent organization from the point of view of the goal, like a drama which is constructed from the beginning with the finale in view. This self-consistent personality structure is what Adler calls the “style of life.” It becomes firmly established at an early age, from which time on behavior that is contradictory is only the adaptation of different means to the same end.

6. All apparent psychological categories, such as different drives or the contrast between conscious and unconscious, are only aspects of a unified relational system and do not represent discrete entities and quantities.

7. All objective determiners, such as biological factors and past history, become relative to the goal idea; they do not function as discrete causes but provide probabilities only. The individual uses all objective factors in accordance with his style of life.

8. The individual’s opinion of himself and the world, his “apperceptive schema,” his interpretations, all as aspects of the style of life, influence every psychological process.

9. The individual can not be considered apart from his social situation. Individual Psychology regards and examines the individual as socially embedded. We refuse to recognize and examine an isolated human being.

10. All important life problems, including certain drive satisfactions, become social problems. All values become social values.

11. The socialization of the individual is not achieved at the cost of repression, but is afforded through an innate human ability, which, however, needs to be developed. It is this ability which Adler calls social feeling or social interest. Because the individual is embedded in a social situation, social interest becomes crucial for his adjustment.

12. Maladjustment is characterized by increased inferiority feelings, underdeveloped social interest, and an exaggerated uncooperative goal of personal superiority. Accordingly, problems are solved in a self-centered “private sense” rather than a task-centered “common sense” fashion. In the neurotic this leads to the experience of failure because he still accepts the social validity of his actions as his ultimate criterion. The psychotic, on the other hand, while objectively also a failure, that is, in the eyes of common sense, does not experience failure because he does not accept the ultimate criterion of social validity. (p. 1)

References

Ansbacher, Heinz L. & Ansbacher, Rowena R. (Eds.) (1956). The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. New York: Basic Books.