Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and the founder of the school of individual psychology. He was born on February 7, 1870, in Rudolfsheim, then a village on the western fringes of Vienna, and died on May 28, 1937. His working life belonged to the charged early era of psychoanalysis, when Vienna was a meeting place for new arguments about dreams, character, childhood, and the hidden motives of human behavior.

Adler first trained in medicine at the University of Vienna, graduating in 1895. He specialized as an eye doctor, then moved into neurology and psychiatry. His medical practice began in ophthalmology, but he soon shifted to general practice and opened his surgery in a less affluent part of Vienna across from the Prater, an amusement park and circus. His clients included circus people, and it has been suggested that the performers’ unusual strengths and weaknesses helped shape his ideas about “organ inferiorities” and compensation.

He is best known for founding Individual Psychology and for coining the term “inferiority complex.” Adler saw the human being as an individual whole, not as a bundle of separate parts. His earlier work focused on inferiority as an isolating force that plays a key role in personality development. Over time, he placed strong emphasis on belonging, family relationships, birth order, and the social life of the person. He proposed that contributing to others, which he called “social interest” or Gemeinschaftsgefühl, was how a person feels worth and belonging in family and society.

Adler’s own childhood gave him close knowledge of fear, rivalry, and bodily limitation. He was the second of seven children of Pauline and Leopold Adler, an Austrian-Jewish couple. His younger brother died in the bed next to him when Alfred was three. He had rickets and could not walk until he was four. At four, he developed pneumonia and heard a doctor tell his father, “Your boy is lost.” He was also run over twice. These experiences contributed to his fear of death, and at that point he decided to become a physician. He was an active, popular child and an average student, with a competitive attitude toward his older brother and feelings of inferiority in relation to his mother.

Adler was part of Sigmund Freud’s circle for nine years. After writing in defense of Freud’s theory, he was invited in 1902 to join the Wednesday Society, the informal group that became the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement. He later became president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1910. Yet Adler often held his own views, especially on aggression, power, and the importance of the social realm. In 1911 he and his supporters formally left Freud’s circle, and in 1912 he founded the Society for Individual Psychology.

What keeps Adler’s words alive is their direct concern with ordinary courage, family life, and the human need to belong. He was the first to emphasize the social element in the re-adjustment process of the individual and to carry psychiatry into the community. His line, “The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions,” fits a thinker who studied fear without treating fear as the whole person. For Adler, people were shaped by weakness and rivalry, but also by contribution, connection, and the wish to take part in shared life.