Alfred Adler: biography of the founder of individual psychology.

We review the contributions and influence of Alfred Adler in the world of psychoanalysis.

Neither psychoanalysis nor psychodynamic psychology can be explained by knowing only the work of Sigmund Freud.

In fact, psychotherapy based on the fundamental ideas of psychoanalysis has three great founders: Sigmund Freud (of course), Carl Gustav Jung and Alfred Adler. Alfred Adler. This article is about the latter, who, in addition to being one of the first to question the ideas of the father of psychoanalysis, was the creator of the Individual Psychology.

Biography of Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler was born into a Viennese Jewish family in 1870, a couple of decades before psychoanalysis began to take shape through the work of Sigmund Freud and Josef Breyer. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer.

From an early age, Adler had a series of health complications that are commonly pointed to as the beginning of the Austrian's interest in medicine. As a young man, he successfully studied at the University of Vienna.

After university he met Freud

After graduating from medical school in 1895, he married and came into contact with psychoanalysis through Sigmund Freud, whom he met personally in 1899. From then on, Alfred Adler began to be introduced to the ideas about the functioning of the psyche proposed by Freudian theory.

Adler's enthusiasm for psychoanalysis and psychology in general led him to become the first president of the city's association of psychoanalysts, the Wednesday Psychological Society (later officially named the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association). Vienna Psychoanalytic Association), created in 1902.

There, the fundamental ideas with which psychoanalysts tried to explain the human mind were debated and developed, and this exposure to Freud's and his disciples' theoretical proposals contributed to Alfred Adler's increasingly complex theories.This exposure to the theoretical proposals of Freud and his disciples contributed to Alfred Adler's increasingly complex theories.

The conflict between Adler and Freud

Alfred Adler's notoriety in the world of the emerging psychoanalytic world grew very quickly, partly because of his closeness to Freud but also because of the vehemence with which he expressed his ideas. In fact, there came a point at which Adler became editor of the Journal of Psychoanalysis (Zentralbaltt für Psychoanalyse), a publication of which Freud was editor and which, of course, had much relevance in his field.

However, soon after this foray into publishing, Alfred Adler began to question fundamental pillars of Freud's theories, such as, for example, the sexual theory. This meant that in 1911 opposition to Freud's ideas prevented him from continuing to work on the journal. In addition, in the same year Alfred Adler left the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association. This was the first major break in the circle of Viennese psychoanalysts, although others would follow: shortly afterwards Carl Gustav Jung also distanced himself definitively from Freud's orthodox psychoanalysis.

But Adler did not cease to be interested in the creation of ideas about the functioning of mental processes. He simply created another psychological school similar in many respects to the one advocated by Freud.. This new school is called Individual Psychology.

Alfred Adler and Individual Psychology

One could talk at length about the discrepancies that caused Alfred Adler and Sigmund Freud to split, but the main reasons were twofold.

The first is that Adler gave much less importance to sexuality in comparison with Freud.. He did not believe that neither sex nor the way in which it is symbolized is an essential regulator of human behavior from the earliest years of life.

The second has to do with the role of the unconscious. If for Freud the unconscious is all that which, acting from the shadows, keeps us tied to a series of patterns of behavior and thought according to what we have done in the past, Alfred Adler put more emphasis on the power of each individual to structure the functioning of his mind according to what happens in the present. according to what is happening in the present.

That is, on the one hand, it stops considering past acts as a ballast that inevitably conditions us, and on the other hand, it gives more importance to our way of interacting with what we feel and think in the here and now (besides recognizing the importance of the context in which we find ourselves at any given moment).

Adler forged the foundations of this new Individual Psychology by looking at his disabled patients. Although they all had a history of similar limitations, some were consumed by their inferiority complex when compared to others, while in others the physical limitations they experienced acted as a motivating factor that led them, according to Adler, to self-improvement.

The break between Alfred Adler and Freud, then, had much to do with the degree to which the former gave importance to the conscious side of thinking, which makes us unique individuals with the capacity to construct original goals.

Alfred Adler's legacy

Alfred Adler died in 1937, but his ideas have had a great resonance.. He was the first great representative of psychodynamic psychology to question major dogmas of Freud's theories, and built a more focused approach to the creative power of the individual aware of his powers and limitations. Of course, all of his work is outside of what today is considered to be scientific psychology, but that did not prevent his influences from inspiring the world of humanities and philosophy.

The Individual Psychology founded by Alfred Adler together with other members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association Vienna Psychoanalytic Association has had a great influence both on the Humanistic Psychology that appeared in the second half of the twentieth century and on several proposals framed in the psychodynamic current. In a world in which the philosophy of self-help and self-improvement is gaining much strength, it is not unusual that the ideas of Adler, who had a more optimistic view of how we are supposed to think and feel than his teacher, are well accepted.