CH3: Alfred Adler (Individual Psychology)

• Social influences & striving for superiority and success.
• People are responsible for who they are.
• Past behavior is shaped by people's view of the future.
• Psychologically healthy people are aware of what they are doing and why.
• Alfred was an outgoing and gregarious young boy. He was surrounded by family, friends, and acquaintances. Indeed, he had six siblings and many friends. Social networks and connections were always important and necessary to Alfred. And yet, as is often true of large families, there was competition between these siblings for their parents’ attention, which was especially pronounced between Alfred and his older brother, Sigmund (Hoffman, 1994).
• People strive toward a final goal of either personal superiority or the goal of success for all humankind.
• When an individual’s final goal is known, all actions make sense and each subgoal takes on new significance.
• Humans are “blessed” at birth with small, weak, and inferior bodies. These physical deficiencies ignite feelings of inferiority only because people, by their nature, possess an innate tendency toward completion or wholeness.
• Adler's tenet 1: The one dynamic force behind people’s behavior is the striving for success or superiority.
• Adler's tenet 2: People’s subjective perceptions shape their behavior and personality
• Adler's tenet 3: Personality is unified and self-consistent.
• Adler's tenet 4: The value of all human activity must be seen from the viewpoint of social interest.
• Adler's tenet 5: The self-consistent personality structure develops into a person’s style of life.
• Adler's tenet 6: Style of life is molded by people’s creative power.
• Adler’s ideas on fictionalism originated with Hans Vaihinger’s book The Philosophy of “As If”
• No one can prove that free will exists, yet this fiction guides the lives of most of us. People are motivated not by what is true but by their subjective perceptions of what is true.
• Thoughts, feelings, and actions are all directed toward a single goal and serve a single purpose.
• 3: Through organ dialect, the body’s organs “speak a language which is usually more expressive and discloses the individual’s opinion more clearly than words are able to do”
• 1. Organ dialect - His stiff and deformed joints voice his whole style of life. It is as if they cry out, “See my deformity. See my handicap. You can’t expect me to do manual work.” Without an audible sound, his hands speak of his desire for sympathy from others.
• 2. With this definition, Adler avoided a dichotomy between the unconscious and the conscious, which he saw as two cooperating parts of the same unified system. Conscious thoughts are those that are understood and regarded by the individual as helpful in striving for success, whereas unconscious thoughts are those that are not helpful.
• Social interest is Adler’s somewhat misleading translation of his original German term, Gemeinschaftsgefühl.
• A person with well-developed Gemeinschaftsgefühl strives not for personal superiority but for perfection for all people in an ideal community.
• Social interest is rooted as potentiality in everyone, but it must be developed before it can contribute to a useful style of life. It originates from the mother–child relationship during the early months of infancy.
• The mother’s job is to develop a bond that encourages the child’s mature social interest and fosters a sense of cooperation. Ideally, she should have a genuine and deep-rooted love for her child—a love that is centered on the child’s well-being, not on her own needs or wants
• The father is the second important person in a child’s social environment. He must demonstrate a caring attitude toward his wife as well as to other people. The ideal father cooperates on an equal footing with the child’s mother in caring for the child and treating the child as a human being
• father’s emotional detachment may influence the child to develop a warped sense of social interest, a feeling of neglect, and possibly a parasitic attachment to the mother. personal superiority
• Style of life is the term Adler used to refer to the flavor of a person’s life. It includes a person’s goal, self-concept, feelings for others, and attitude toward the world.
• A person’s style of life is fairly well established by age 4 or 5
• Creative power is a dynamic concept implying movement, and this movement is the most salient characteristic of life. paces them in control
• Why do some people create maladjustments? (1) exaggerated physical deficiencies, (2) a pampered style of life, and (3) a neglected style of life.
• People with exaggerated physical deficiencies sometimes develop exaggerated feelings of inferiority because they overcompensate for their inadequacy.
• A pampered style of life lies at the heart of most neuroses. Pampered people have weak social interest but a strong desire to perpetuate the pampered, parasitic relationship they originally had with one or both of their parents.
• The third external factor contributing to maladjustment is neglect. Children who feel unloved and unwanted are likely to borrow heavily from these feelings in creating a neglected style of life. Neglect is a relative concept.
• Adler believed that people create patterns of behavior to protect their exaggerated sense of self-esteem against public disgrace. These protective devices, called safeguarding tendencies, enable people to hide their inflated self-image and to maintain their current style of life.
• 1. The most common of the safeguarding tendencies are excuses, which are typically expressed in the “Yes, but” or “If only” format.
• 2. Some people use aggression to safeguard their exaggerated superiority complex, that is, to protect their fragile self-esteem. Safeguarding through aggression may take the form of depreciation, accusation, or self-accusation.
• Under aggression is, depreciation or the tendency to undervalue other people’s achievements and to overvalue one’s own.
• Accusation, the second form of an aggressive safeguarding device, is the tendency to blame others for one’s failures and to seek revenge, thereby safeguarding one’s own tenuous self-esteem.
• The third form of neurotic aggression, self-accusation, is marked by self-torture and guilt.
• Withdrawal, or safeguarding through distance. Some people unconsciously escape life’s problems by setting up a distance between themselves and those problems.