Adler

• Striving for Success or Superiority - The sole dynamic force behind people's actions is the striving for success or superiority
• The Final Goal - The final goal of either success or superiority toward which all people strive unifies personality and makes all behavior meaningful
• The Striving Force as Compensation - Because people are born with small, inferior bodies, they feel inferior and attempt to overcome these feelings through their natural tendency to move toward completion.
• Two courses of striving force

  1. Personal gain (superiority)
  2. Community benefit (success)
• Striving for Personal Superiority

  • Psychologically unhealthy individuals strive for personal superiority with little concern for other people. Although they may appear to be interested in other people, their basic motivation is personal benefit.
• Striving for Success

  • In contrast, psychologically healthy people strive for the success of all humanity, but they do so without losing their personal identity.
• Subjective Perceptions - People's subjective view of the world-not reality shapes their behavior.
• Fictionalism - Fictions are people's expectations of the future. Adler held that fictions guide behavior, because people act as if these fictions are true. Adler emphasized teleology over causality, or explanations of behavior in terms of future goals rather than past causes.
• Organ Inferiorities - Adler believed that all humans are "blessed" with organ inferiorities, which stimulate subjective feelings of inferiority and move people toward perfection or completion.
• Unity and Self-Consistency of Personality

  • Adler believed that all behaviors are directed toward a single purpose. When seen in the light of that sole purpose, seemingly contradictory behaviors can be seen as operating in a selfconsistent manner.
• Organ Dialect - People often use a physical disorder to express style of life, a condition Adler called organ dialect.
• Conscious and Unconscious

  • are unified and operate to achieve a single goal. The part of our goal that we do not clearly understood is unconscious; the part of our goal that we fail to fully comprehend is conscious.
• Social Interest - Human behavior has value to the extent that it is motivated by social interest, that is, a feeling of oneness with all of humanity.
• Origins of Social Interest

  • Adler believed that the parent-child relationship can be so strong that it negates the effects of heredity.
• Importance of Social Interest

  • According to Adler, social interest is "the sole criterion of human values," and the worthiness of all one's actions must be seen by this standard. Without social interest, societies could not exist; individuals in antiquity could not have survived without cooperating with others to protect themselves from danger.
  • Even today, an infant's helplessness predisposes it toward a nurturing person.
• Style of Life

  • The manner of a person's striving is called style of life, a pattern that is relatively well set by 4 or 5 years of age. However, Adler believed that healthy individuals are marked by flexible behavior and that they have some limited ability to change their style of life.
• Creative Power

  • Style of life is partially a product of heredity and environment-the building blocks of personality-but ultimately style of life is shaped by people's creative power, that is, by their ability to freely choose a course of action.
• Abnormal Development

  • Creative power is not limited to healthy people; unhealthy individuals also create their own personalities. Thus, each of us is free to choose either a useful or a useless style of life.
• Important factor in abnormal development is lack of social interest
• People with a useless style of life tend to

  (1) set their goals too high

  (2) have a dogmatic style of life

  (3) live in their own private world
• Factors related to abnormal development

  (1) exaggerated physical deficiencies and feelings of inferiority

  (2) a pampered style of life - parasitic relationship with the mother

  (3) neglected style of life - distrust other people
• Safeguarding Tendencies

  • Both normal and neurotic people create symptoms as a means of protecting their fragile self-esteem. These safeguarding tendencies maintain a neurotic style of life and protect a person from public disgrace.
• Three principal safeguarding tendencies are

  1. excuses
  2. aggression
  3. withdrawal
• Masculine Protest

  • Both men and women sometimes overemphasize the desirability of being manly, a condition Adler called the masculine protest. The frequently found inferior status of women is not based on physiology but on historical developments and social learning.
• Applications of Individual Psychology

  1. Family constellation
  2. Early recollections
  3. Dreams
  4. Psychotherapy
• Family Constellation - Adler believed that people's perception of how they fit into their family is related to their style of life.
• Firstborns - strong feelings of power and superiority, to be overprotective, and to have more than their share of anxiety.
• Second-born children - have a strong social interest, provided they do not get trapped trying to overcome their older sibling
• Youngest children - likely to be pampered and to lack independence, whereas only children have some of the characteristics of both the oldest and the youngest child.
• Early Recollections

  • A more reliable method of determining style of life is to ask people for their earliest recollections.
  • These recollections need not be accurate accounts of early events; they have psychological importance because they reflect a person's current view of the world.
• Dreams

  • Adler believed that dreams can provide clues to solving future problems. However, dreams are disguised to deceive the dreamer and usually must be interpreted by another person.
• Goal of Alderian Therapy

  1. Create a relationship between therapist and patient that fosters social interest
  2. To ensure that the patient's social interest will eventually generalize to other relationships, the therapist adopts both a maternal and a paternal role.
• Adler - Individual Psychology