About Adler

Alfred Adler’s Biography by C.G. Boeree





He then turned to psychiatry, and in 1907 was invited to join Freud’s discussion group. After writing papers on organic inferiority, which were quite compatible with Freud’s views, he wrote, first, a paper concerning an aggression instinct, which Freud did not approve of, and then a paper on children’s feelings of inferiority, which suggested that Freud’s sexual notions be taken more metaphorically than literally.

Although Freud named Adler the president of the Viennese Analytic Society and the co-editor of the organization’s newsletter, Adler didn’t stop his criticism. A debate between Adler’s supporters and Freud’s was arranged, but it resulted in Adler, with nine other members of the organization, resigning to form the Society for Free Psychoanalysis in 1911. This organization became The Society for Individual Psychology in the following year.

During World War I, Adler served as a physician in the Austrian Army, first on the Russian front, and later in a children’s hospital. He saw first hand the damage that war does, and his thought turned increasingly to the concept of social interest. He felt that if humanity was to survive, it had to change its ways!




“Perfection” and “ideal” are troublesome words, though. On the one hand, they are very positive goals. Shouldn’t we all be striving for the ideal? And yet, in psychology, they are often given a rather negative connotation. Perfection and ideals are, practically by definition, things you can’t reach. Many people, in fact, live very sad and painful lives trying to be perfect! As you will see, other theorists, like Karen Horney and Carl Rogers, emphasize this problem. Adler talks about it, too. But he sees this negative kind of idealism as a perversion of the more positive understanding. We will return to this in a little while.

Striving for perfection was not the first phrase Adler used to refer to his single motivating force. His earliest phrase was the aggression drive, referring to the reaction we have when other drives, such as our need to eat, be sexually satisfied, get things done, or be loved, are frustrated. It might be better called the assertiveness drive, since we tend to think of aggression as physical and negative. But it was Adler’s idea of the aggression drive that first caused friction between him and Freud. Freud was afraid that it would detract from the crucial position of the sex drive in psychoanalytic theory. Despite Freud’s dislike for the idea, he himself introduced something very similar much later in his life: the death instinct.


One of Adler’s earliest phrases was masculine protest. He noted something pretty obvious in his culture (and by no means absent from our own): Boys were held in higher esteem than girls. Boys wanted, often desperately, to be thought of as strong, aggressive, in control — i.e. “masculine” — and not weak, passive, or dependent — i.e. “feminine.” The point, of course, was that men are somehow basically better than women. They do, after all, have the power, the education, and apparently the talent and motivation needed to do “great things,” and women don’t.

You can still hear this in the kinds of comments older people make about little boys and girls: If a baby boy fusses or demands to have his own way (masculine protest!), they will say he’s a natural boy; If a little girl is quiet and shy, she is praised for her femininity; If, on the other hand, the boy is quiet and shy, they worry that he might grow up to be a sissy; Or if a girl is assertive and gets her way, they call her a “tomboy” and will try to reassure you that she’ll grow out of it!

But Adler did not see men’s assertiveness and success in the world as due to some innate superiority. He saw it as a reflection of the fact that boys are encouraged to be assertive in life, and girls are discouraged. Both boys and girls, however, begin life with the capacity for “protest!” Because so many people misunderstood him to mean that men are, innately, more assertive, lead him to limit his use of the phrase.
