In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
AA–1870–2026  ·  The Consulting Room

Alfred
Adler

1870  —  1937
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler
Rudolfsheim, Vienna, 1870  ·  Aberdeen, Scotland, 1937

The sickly child from a Viennese suburb who left Freud's circle to argue that we are pulled by our goals, not pushed by our past.

Rickets kept him from running with his brothers, and he nearly died of pneumonia at five; he became a doctor to fight death. He joined Freud's Wednesday circle in 1902, led the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and walked out in 1911 over sexuality. His Individual Psychology gave the world the inferiority complex, birth order, and social interest as the measure of health. In Red Vienna he ran some thirty child-guidance clinics in the schools.

He died on a lecture tour in Aberdeen. His daughter had just disappeared into Stalin's prisons.

Consultation

Every neurotic
is partly in the right.

Adler speaks from 1,901 chunks across eight works — Study of Organ Inferiority, The Neurotic Constitution, The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology, Understanding Human Nature, The Science of Living, Problems of Neurosis, The Education of Children, and Guiding the Child, the casebook of his Vienna clinics.

His discourse holds Freud's History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, with its account of their break. Freud's room is down the hall.

Ask him whether the inferiority complex is real. Ask him whether birth order matters. Ask him what to do about a child who won't go to school. Ask him why he left Freud — and whether he was ever Freud's pupil.

Inferiority ComplexStyle of LifeSocial InterestBirth OrderChild GuidanceCompensationIndividual Psychology
The psychic life of man is determined by his goal. No human being can think, feel, will, dream, without all these activities being determined, continued, modified and directed, toward an ever-present objective.
Understanding Human Nature  ·  Book I, Chapter I  ·  1927

Drawn From the Corpus