Psychologists / psychoanalysis
Alfred Adler
Austria 1870-02-07 ~ 1937-05-28
Austrian psychiatrist (1870-1937), founder of Individual Psychology. An early Wednesday Society member who broke from Freud in 1911 to build a system around inferiority, social interest, teleology and lifestyle.
What You Can Learn
Adler reads less like theory than a practical manual. His teleology refuses to explain action only by past trauma, asking "what am I trying to gain right now?" Re-reading "I cannot speak up because the boss is scary" as "I am choosing silence to avoid criticism" returns agency. His "separation of tasks" — your reaction is yours, mine is mine — shields harassment victims and managers from others' emotional load. Gemeinschaftsgefühl pivots follower-count contests to one question: whose life am I bettering today?
Words That Resonate
A human being knows far more than he understands.
Der Mensch weiß viel mehr, als er versteht.
Social interest means not only equality but also the awareness of being part of a whole.
Gemeinschaftsgefühl bedeutet nicht nur Gleichberechtigung, sondern auch das Bewusstsein, ein Teil eines Ganzen zu sein.
The meaning of life lies in devotion, in interest in others and in cooperation.
Die Bedeutung des Lebens liegt in der Hingabe, im Interesse für andere und der Zusammenarbeit.
Each individual represents both a unity of personality and the individual shaping of that unity.
Jedes Individuum stellt sowohl eine Einheit der Persönlichkeit als auch die individuelle Gestaltung dieser Einheit dar.
Life & Legacy
Alfred Adler was born on 7 February 1870 near Vienna, the second son of a Hungarian-Jewish grain merchant. Pneumonia at four left him gravely ill, and overhearing a doctor tell his father "your boy is lost" pushed him toward medicine. The theory of inferiority and compensation grew out of his own bodily history. He graduated from Vienna in 1895 and ran a practice near the Prater amusement park, where circus performers turned weakness into trained strength — the clinical seed of "organ inferiority".
In 1902 Adler joined Freud's Wednesday discussion group as one of its first five members. By 1910 he chaired the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. But his 1908 paper treated aggression as primary, independent of sex, straining Freud's libido monism. In 1911 Freud denounced him as reactionary; Adler left to found the Society for Individual Psychology, and they never met again.
The First World War, during which he treated shell-shocked soldiers, sharpened his view that a person can only be understood as part of a community. Gemeinschaftsgefühl — social interest — became the keystone of his system. In post-war Red Vienna he founded the first child guidance clinic in 1919, scaled it to twenty-eight, and from 1924 taught at the Vienna Pedagogical Institute. Understanding Human Nature (1927) and What Life Could Mean to You (1931) reached a wide popular readership.
Four pillars define Adlerian thought: teleology (we are pulled by future goals, not pushed by past causes), inferiority and compensation (early inferiority is compensated or overcompensated into a superiority complex), lifestyle (a private logic by age five shaping work, friendship and love), and social interest (health is moving from self-centred striving to contribution). After Austrofascism took power in 1934 he moved to the US, dying on 28 May 1937 in Aberdeen. Popper attacked the theory for lack of falsifiability, yet through Kishimi and Koga's The Courage to Be Disliked (2013) Adler now anchors much of coaching.
Expert Perspective
Adler completes the depth-psychology triad with Freud and Jung, but his centre of gravity is different — society and purpose where Freud put sex and Jung put myth. Individual Psychology has less academic prestige but a wider applied reach across education, parenting and self-help. Japan rediscovered it via Kishimi.
