Adler's Individual Psychology

Key Terms:

Psyche Locus of Movement Lifestyle
Law of Movement Complete Goal Fiction vs. Counterfiction
Basic Inferiority Compensation Overcompensation
Inferiority Complex Striving for Superiority Social Interest
Mistaken Goals Faulty Assumptions Birth Order
Family Constellation Encouragement Life Style Assessment
Confrontation Future Autobiography Humor
Game of Probabilities Acting “as if” Task setting
Dreams Multiple Psychotherapy Inerpretation
“Spitting in the Soup” Placing in Perspective Creating Images
The Question


Thought Questions

1. Adler's view of human nature focuses on internal determinants of behavior such as values, beliefs, attitudes, goals, interests, striving for perfection and meaning. It also stresses the social determinants of personality. How does the Adlerian model differ from the Freudian model, and what are the implications for therapeutic practice?

2. How does a "teleological" explanation of striving differ from a view of behavior being determined by drives, instincts, and past behavior? What are some of the implications of viewing people as "teleological" rather than other ways?

3. Do you think that all behavior is purposeful? If so, what do you think are some of the main purposes for behavior?

4. Do you think that most people have a sense of inferiority? What are some of the ways that people may express that inferiority?

5. What's the most important, "how life really is" or "what individuals think life really is?"

6. To what degree should counselors encourage "social interest" in their clients? Does good therapy outcome depend on the ability of clients to experience increased social interest?

7. Do you think there are fairly stable birth order differences that can be used to help understand our clients?

8. What assumptions does Adler have about causality? What forms of causality can you see in his theory?

9. What assumptions does Adler have about epistemology? What forms of epistemology does he assume?

10. What assumptions does Adler make in terms of individualism/relativism? Does he make any?

11. Is meaningful agency possible in Adler’s theory? Why or why not?

Adler’s classic statement: “We cannot think, feel, will or act without the perception of some goal.”

Adler’s basic principles:
1. Psyche is a locus of movement set in the individual context and interpersonal relationships. It is a locus of movement in the sense that the psyche is the part of us that has will, that both sets goals as well as responds to the environment.
A. The psyche is the unique feature of humanity, genetically part of our species that gives us the capacity to go on the offense or on the defense in our environment, or formulate goals to respond to the environment.
2. The psyche engages with the world and chooses a style of life at about age three. This life style is a rough goal that the individual sets for living, what they want and need out of life, the behaviors they aspire to. This style of life consists of two parts. First, is their goal for being “Johnny wants to grow up to be a bad boy”. Second, is the relevant strategy to obtain that goal. Those two put together are called a complete goal of the style of life. Given that children at this age are generally not sophisticated verbally, the entirety of this style of life is unconscious. However, ever since the complete goal is decided upon, most behavior in life goes into meeting that goal.
A. The ego, in Adler’s terms, is the aspect of personality that the individual (and even outside observers) have picked up on, that arise from the person’s chosen lifestyle. “Johnny is a rebel”. Ego is the conscious part of the personality, whereas the unconscious is the part of the lifestyle that is subtle and hard to understand. It is often unexamined. The unconscious then, is understood strictly in terms of lack of understanding.
B. By age five, the child has practiced their style of life for a while and it begins to become less fluid. Adler called this the law of movement, a habitual pattern that the person will engage in along consistent lines of behavior from then on. It is not immutable, just habitual. Someone may not like the way their life is turning out, so they may change their behavior within certain constraints. We can change our habits, but it is unclear to the degree to which the constraints are immutable. Johnny goes from a “bad boy” to a “rebellious teenager” to a “nonconformist adult”.
3. The style of life is understood in terms of the prototype that each person remembers. The prototype is the rough, in-the-process making of the style of life. Basically, the prototype is our changeable road map for formulating goals and behaving, our habitual ways of viewing the world and of behaving. Adler also referred to these prototypes as fictions. Fictions can be such notions as “My country is the best in the world” or “My mother is the most loving person on the face of the planet” or even “All men are out to abuse me”. They can range from subjective but fairly reasonable, to very unreasonable.
A. Adler also posited counter-fictions which are the forces of non-subjective reality that challenge or make us change our fictions. For example, somebody with the fiction of “My country is the best one in the world” may find out that their country is using highly immoral means to accomplish it’s goals internationally. This would serve as a counter-fiction. If a woman who held the belief “All men are out to abuse me” and constantly ran across men who were non-abusive, these would serve as counter-fictions. The more readily someone holds on to their fictions in the face of counter-fictions the more neurotic they are and the more troublesome their behavior is. Another person’s fiction cannot serve as a counter-fiction to us. In this way, reality of the world is more important than what we’re told about it when it comes to dealing with problematic fictions.
1. (This is one of the ways in which Adler seems cognitive, because counselors can have their clients try new things in an effort to counter problematic fictions)
4. Where does the style of life and it’s resultant prototype come from? (In other words, where does the personality come from? What motivates behavior?)
A. Adler argued that, as children, we feel basic inferiority. We know where we’re at in life, and we certainly don’t want to stay there. So, we want to do something about it.
B. Adler took cues from biology, where he noted that when one organ system fails, another compensates for it. (A man loses his eyesight, so his hearing becomes extra sharp.) Adler argued that there is a parallel that we tend to strive for (built into the psyche). He called this the process of compensation. That’s where we try to make up for our perceived psychological/emotional/intellectual/behavioral deficits by compensating for them in some way. For example, a five-year-old sees how his life is going and how well his goals are being met. He sees that they’re not going according to plan, so he compensates in some way. He wanted to be “Johnny the bad boy” yet he’s not getting into trouble enough, so he compensates by acting out in school more.
C. Compensation also goes deeper than just goal-reformulating in terms of the prototype. Adler, again, taking a cue from biological growth, posited that humans strive to grow psychologically the same way that organisms grow physically. How people choose to grow is up to them, but the fact that they strive to overcome inferiority is universal. He called this process “striving for superiority” and argued that you can tell where people feel the most inferior by the ways in which they seek to compensate.
1. This can take many forms. A man feels inferior because he is short, so he makes up for that by wearing elevator shoes. But, it can also be more subtle. A man feels inferior because he’s short, so he compensates for that by becoming the smartest person he can be, or becoming the most brash, abrasive, and outspoken person he can be. We either make up for the ways in which we are inferior by working on those areas, or we compensate for them by working on another area. It is inherently flexible.
2. Striving for superiority can also entail not just striving to be better than someone else, but to be different or better than we are now, in our own terms. “I’d like to learn more about physics, because it interests me, and I don’t know anything about the field currently.”
a. “To feel inferior is to be human”. - Ain’t nobody perfect. But he also posited that this is one of the fundamental motivating forces for people.
2. People can also feel themselves in the throes of overcompensation, which occurs when someone sets an unrealistically high goal for themselves. For example, a teenage boy who is a skinny weakling might go on a spartan routine of weight lifting and exercise to the exclusions of other responsibilities (and to the exclusion of his health). That boy would be seen as having an inferiority complex which occurs when we lack the usual flexibility in compensation, and overreact according to our perceived inferiority. It tends to be rigid and compulsive.
D. Feelings of inferiority often come in conflict with what he called “social feeling” or “social interest”. Feelings of inferiority are fundamentally selfish. When we’re feeling inferior we’re not worried about how other people are doing.
1. As a counter force to this, Adler noted that we all have the capacity to care for one another and to empathize with each other. It may indeed be my style of life to be an abrasive S.O.B., but I am also born with the capacity to see how my prototypes affect other people. Adler understood this as another fundamental motivating force for humanity, but with the force of obligation behind it. We not only tend to have social feeling, we ought to behave according to those social feelings as well.
a. To quote Adler “Social interest means feeling with the whole, under the aspect of eternity. It means striving for a form of community which must be thought of as everlasting, as it could be thought of if mankind had reached the goal of perfection” (Rychlak, 1981, p. 137).
1. We are all in the process of fulfilling or becoming together. Adler saw humanity as in the process of continually doing better and accomplishing more, and sought to further that process.
2. Because we psychologists are members of the elite, we are morally obligated to continually work to undo any force that causes hopelessness, stagnation, or regress of society. (Whether that be war, unemployment, unjust laws, or even simple starvation.)
2. It is through social feeling that we can see how mistaken goals can come about. Mistaken goals are the goals we make while under faulty assumptions.
a. A boy raised by an abusive alcoholic father is under the faulty assumption that all men are that way. So, his goal (which works into his style of life) is to become so mean and tough that no man can ever abuse him again. He finds later in life, thanks to social feeling and the capacity to empathize with and understand others, that many men are compassionate and gentle, and don’t need to be beaten up. He then revises his mistaken goal, and reformulates a style of life.
1. So, life experience with others can act as a counter-fiction.
b. A man embezzles money constantly from his employer, overcompensating for his poverty. Because of his social feeling, he becomes aware of the error of his ways, and turns himself in.
E. Adler had a great deal of moralistic overtones to his theory, which is ironic considering that he is an evolutionist.
1. Adler was a non-relativist. He did not believe in sitting in judgement so much as calling things as they were. He described people’s behavior in terms of how it effected others, positively or negatively. If someone lived a life with no concern for others but an expectation that others meet their selfish demands, a psychologist would be wrong to not comment directly on this behavior and call it how it is.
a. Adler called people who live for personal satisfactions without concern for others “failures of living”because they in no way contribute to the well-being of the whole group.
1. People who live in completely individualistic ways are called cowards, looking out for their own interest without acknowledging the responsibility they have for others. This is due to errors in their thinking (harmful fictions they hold on to, whether wilfully or not), which prevents them from having courage, which in this case means the courage to relate to others and risk putting yourself out for the benefit of another or for society.
F. Adler also described defense mechanisms, although he interpreted them very differently than Freud did.
1. Repression to Adler does not imply or entail horrible thoughts that must be pushed out of consciousness, but rather a lack of clarity about how one is going about meeting their goals. This lack of clarity can manifest through dreams. A man working the best he can for his female employer does not realize that his excellent and efficient work is his striving to feel superior to her, so he dreams that his boss is the file clerk and that he constantly berates her. Upon awakening he realizes that he feels under appreciated at work, and that he wishes for an acknowledgment of all he’s done from his boss. Dreams are not unconscious material, but poorly understood material that we work through (in part) by dreaming. Keep in mind that to Adler, the unconscious mind is not that which is out of awareness, but rather that which we cannot currently put words to. We may have a sense of it, but we can’t articulate it. Another way Adler used the unconscious was in the term “wordless impressions”.
2. Identification is not a defense per se, but rather than coming about due to castration fears, Adler described them as coming about due to empathy and sympathy we have for others. A boy learns to be like his father by sympathizing with him, just as that same boy might take on characteristics of his mother by being sympathetic with her.
3. The big two are compensation/overcompensation which we have already talked about.
4. One way to determine the nature of the individual’s inferiority complex is by looking at their safeguarding mechanisms, or the ways in which they try to protect themselves from failure, rejection, or further feelings of inferiority. One safeguarding mechanism would be procrastinating a paper, while another might be over studying for an exam. A safeguarding mechanism in relationships would be trying to be the center of attention all the time to feel worthwhile in the relationship, or keeping others at bay so one’s inadequacies in relating cannot be seen.
5. Distance is another defense people use when their feelings of inferiority are too great. They exacerbate their feelings of inferiority by ensuring that their goals will never be met. Someone complains that they have no friends, but they constantly complain in front of others, distancing them.
6. Protest is another defense that occurs when an individual feels unprepared for a particular goal overreacts to their feelings by talking about the goal too much or trying in some way to carry it off anyway, despite their inability to meet the goal. Masculine protest is where this is seen most vividly, where men treat women as playthings or as inherently inferior. This disturbed Adler (who was very egalitarian when it came to gender roles), and he saw that those engaging in Masculine Protest were those who were those unable to live up to the task of being men. Women also engage in masculine protest when they behave like men, rather than like women with equal rights (a woman becoming domineering, cold, tough, and disparaging of women would be an example).
G. Family order and birth constellation is what Adler is probably most famous for. He argued that no two children are raised in the same family. That either their positions are different within the family or their interpretations of the family differ. How many siblings you have, what their sexes are, and what their positions are in the family he felt had a big impact on your style of life. Every family constellation (the relative position of the siblings in the family) differs, but Adler pointed out a few basic trends.
1. The eldest child is like a mini-parent. Most likely to have a conservative or conformist outlook, most likely to believe in the validity of authority. The pressure is on the eldest child
2. The second-born child can be in competition with the eldest sibling and can be completely eclipsed by them. They may either redouble their efforts to get attention and thereby attempt to surpass the eldest child, or they may rebel.
3. The youngest child and the only child are the most likely to be pampered. Adler worried that many of them would grow up to be selfish adults who expected to have everything handed to them in life.
2. So what do you do when clients are failures at living, have mistaken goals, or their style of life is faulty? There are a few techniques suggested.
A. First of all, the therapist must keep three things in mind. 1. How the client sees life. 2. Understand why the client sees life that way. 3. Helping the client discover what their prototypes are that lead them to interpret life the way they do.
1. Confront their mis-perceptions of reality caused by their mistaken style of life. Point to them a way to have a genuine life rather than living a lie (when the therapist confronted Roger about the question of care). Also, to confront the selfish superiority/inferiority mechanisms in place and foster social feeling. To do this, the therapist helps the client introspect and learn about their habits (insight), while also examining and helping them change their faulty assumptions about others, including the therapist (transference).
2. Adlerian therapy tends to be gently confrontational, with components of re-education built in. For example, in the case of Roger, the feedback process was explicit, and Roger knew what his therapist was thinking and feeling. The therapist fosters positive feeling towards her, then helps the client experience those feelings towards others outside of therapy.
3. Adlerian therapy assumes that transference is a two way street, with mostly positive effects. Clients and therapists feel warmly towards each other, that warmth helps foster social feeling. Adler argued that many analysts interpret things in sexual terms, and hence pull for a great deal of sexual material in the transference process. Adler stated clearly that such sexualized transference was to be avoided at all cost because it perpetuates feelings of inferiority (the client can never have the therapist sexually), and it may perpetuate understanding all relationships in sexual terms.
4. Further techniques (as defined in the end of the Adlerian case in the Corsini book)
Encouragement, Life Style Assessment, Confrontation, Future Autobiography, Humor, Game of Probabilities, Acting “as if”, Task setting, Dreams, Multiple Psychotherapy, Interpretation, “Spitting in the Soup”, Placing in Perspective, Creating Images, The Question