Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler, an Austrian medical doctor and psychotherapist, founded the school of individual psychology. He broke from Sigmund Freud and their mutual circle by focusing on feelings of belonging, family relationships, and birth order. Adler believed that contributing to others—what he called "social interest" or *Gemeinschaftsgefühl*—gave individuals a sense of worth and belonging in their family and society. He also introduced the concept of the "inferiority complex," an isolating factor he saw as central to personality development. Because he viewed each human being as an indivisible whole, he named his approach Individual Psychology.

Adler was the first to stress the social element in helping individuals readjust and to bring psychiatry into the community. A 2002 survey ranked him the 67th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.

Born on February 7, 1870, in Rudolfsheim, a village on Vienna’s western edge, Adler was the second of seven children in an Austrian-Jewish family. His father, Leopold, was a grain merchant from a Hungarian-Jewish background; his mother was Pauline (Beer). When Alfred was three, his younger brother died in the bed next to him. Throughout childhood, he competed with his older brother, believing his mother favored that sibling. Despite a good relationship with his father, he struggled with feelings of inferiority toward his mother. An active, popular child and average student, Adler was competitive with his older brother, Sigmund. He developed rickets and could not walk until age four. At four, he also had pneumonia; a doctor told his father, "Your boy is lost." These illnesses, along with being run over twice and witnessing his brother’s death, gave him a lasting fear of death and motivated him to become a physician. Interested in psychology, sociology, and philosophy, he graduated from the University of Vienna in 1895, first specializing as an eye doctor, then in neurology and psychiatry.

Adler began as an ophthalmologist but soon switched to general practice, setting up his surgery in a poorer part of Vienna across from the Prater, an amusement park and circus. His clients included circus performers, and their unusual strengths and weaknesses likely inspired his ideas about "organ inferiorities" and compensation.

Early in his career, Adler wrote an article defending Sigmund Freud’s theory after reading *The Interpretation of Dreams*. In 1902, Freud invited him to join a small discussion group, the "Wednesday Society," which met weekly at Freud’s home and grew into the psychoanalytic movement. By 1906, the group had 17 members, including figures like Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, and Ernest Jones. In 1908, Adler presented a paper on "the aggressive instinct in life and in neurosis," arguing that sexual and aggressive drives were separate instincts that later merge. Freud initially disagreed. When Freud later proposed his own dual instinct theory in 1920 without citing Adler, he was criticized for not acknowledging Adler’s earlier work. Freud added a footnote in 1923 asserting his concept differed from Adler’s. Adler became president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1910 but left in 1911 with his supporters, becoming the first major dissenter from orthodox psychoanalysis, before Carl Jung’s split in 1914. The separation suited both men, as they had grown to dislike each other. During their nine-year association, Adler kept his own ideas, and Freud referred to him as "My colleague Dr Alfred Adler" in 1909. They never saw each other after the split, and Freud continued to dislike Adler, even after Adler’s death, remarking to a colleague that for "a Jewish boy out of a Viennese suburb a death in Aberdeen is an unheard of career in itself."