A Short Biography
By Jane Manaster
Alfred Adler was born near Vienna on February 7, 1870. His
father was a middle-class Jewish grain merchant and his
mother was a housewife. He had an older brother and sister
and four younger siblings. This unremarkable family, in the
indirect ways Adler later posited, led Adler to formulate
important theories. Destined to become one of the century’s
leading social scientists, the founder of a provocative and
widely accepted school of psychology, he drew on his family
to illustrate the concept of social interest and the
significance of birth order. He recognized the justness of
equality for women. Above all, he recognized in the frail,
fearful boy he himself had been the key to his theory: an
individual strives toward a personal goal; his attempts to
overcome his inadequacies should be a healthy means of
fulfilling life. In the 1870s the Jews of Vienna had a
choice of where they might live: either in voluntary
ghettoes, which Adler’s father declined; or in primarily
Gentile neighborhoods. During the periodic waves of
anti-Semitism which swept the country during Adler’s
formative years, his family enjoyed peace, for the old
cliché, “Some of my best friends are Jews,” was seemingly
respected. According to Carl Furtmüller, “early experiences
made him unable to feel the difference between Jews and
Gentiles as something personally important.”
His physical health in childhood has been described fully.
Early rickets “impeded his movements and made him heavy
during his childhood.” “A mild form of spasm of his vocal
cords . .. caused a feeling of inferiority.” This latter he
apparently conquered and as a schoolboy he had a “strong
interest in classical and popular music ... a good, strong,
dependable voice and a good gift for delivery.” A brush with
death due to pneumonia at about the age of 4 made him
resolve to become a doctor. Such stories, over time, tend to
sound apocryphal, but their importance cannot be shrugged
off in that they undoubtedly contributed as the basis of his
theory.
Apparently no record exists of his interaction with teachers
at die Vienna Medical School. He was influenced by the
internist Hermann Nothnagel, who told his students, “If you
want to be a good doctor, you have to be a kind person.”
Even more, Adler took to heart Nothnagel’s dictum, “the
physician must always look at the patient as a whole, not as
an isolated organ or an isolated ailment. . . the emotional
influence of the physician on the patient must be taken into
account.”
Upon graduation, Adler established a medical practice in
Vienna in 1895, near the Prater, a large amusement park in a
lower middle-class section of the city. Among his patients
were many who worked at the Prater restaurants, as well as
waiters, acrobats and artists whose livelihood depended on
bodily skills. Their ailments exposed physical weaknesses
and helped Adler to develop his theory of overcompensation.
In the same way he had had a physical voice problem which he
overcame to sing heartily, so many of his amusement park
patients had physical inadequacies which they overcame and
utilized them to make a career.
During his student days Adler was only peripherally involved
with the political movement sweeping the country. His
involvement came through friends who took him along to
political meetings rather than through strong personal
enthusiasm. His disinterest in racial or religious
differences “immunized him against nationalism.” He
participated in the excited gatherings more as a listener
than as a speaker. During those days he was sometimes seen
at the meetings with a Russian student, Raissa Timofeyewna
Epstein.
He married Raissa Epstein in 1897 and the following year his
first child, Valentine, was born. A second daughter,
Alexandra, was born in 1901, his son Kurt in 1905, and
finally his daughter Nellie in 1909.
His practice was successful, in part because of his
disarming manner. “He administered science to his patients
as if it were as simple as scrambling eggs.” When there was
a popular term to describe a technical condition, he chose
to use it. But he was haunted when he was unable to heal a
patient’s disease. As he searched for the reasons for his
patients’ persistent pains and illnesses he was steered away
from medical practice and into the fields of psychiatry,
psychology, and eventually a philosophical position which
spanned the social sciences.
The meeting of Adler and Freud was catalytic to psychology
and psychotherapy. Adler felt attracted to Freud’s Dream
Theory and had the courage to proclaim it, as he “hated
prejudice and hackneyed opinions.” In 1902 Adler was invited
to be one of four people to form Freud’s circle, meeting
weekly in Freud’s home to discuss work and philosophies, and
especially the problems of neurosis. This evolved to become
the Psychoanalytic Society. Adler was the first among them
to show an active interest in the problems of education.
In 1910 Adler was made the president of the Vienna branch of
the International Psychoanalytic Association. In October
1910 the publication Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse
was founded, with Adler and Wilhelm Stekel as co-editors and
Freud as editor-in-chief. The good spirit did not prevail as
Adler continued to develop his own theory. The following
summer Freud wrote the publisher that either he or Adler
must leave. Adler resigned. He also withdrew from his office
as president of the Vienna organization.
It was not long after the break that Adler moved from his
office on the Praterstrasse and essentially gave up his
practice as a family physician. He began to specialize
exclusively in psychiatry. The split between Adler and Freud
became irrevocable in October 1911 when Freud declared, at
a meeting of the Psychoanalytic Society, that any
affiliation with the society formed by Adler would be
incompatible with the membership of the group. Adler left,
with nine others who were disenchanted with Freud, and
formed the Society for Free Psychoanalytic Research. In
1912 Adler gave his society the name by which it first
became known, the Society for Individual Psychology.
While there were many who integrated Adler’s theories with
their own, allowing him no word of credit Adler himself
generously acknowledged those whose work influenced him. In
1911 the German philosopher Hans Vaihinger published “The
Philosophy of As IF in Berlin. The following year Adler’s
book “The Neurotic Character” commended “It was good fortune
which made me acquainted with Vaihinger’s ingenious
‘Philosophy of As If ... a work in which I found the
thoughts familiar”.
While Freud maintained exclusiveness among his followers,
and imposed a formality upon his patients, who were bound to
lie down and have their therapist be a silent and invisible
presence behind them, Adler started immediately on another
tack. His group practiced neither the initiation rites nor
the oaths of allegiance that Freud had used. Adler’s
followers were encouraged to introduce a guest to the
meetings—a guest who might be qualified by interest,
experience or ability to become a member. Similarly, Adler,
in his professional encounters with patients, sat facing
them, the two in comfortable chairs so that the treatment
had an almost social ambience. This, Adler was convinced,
made it easier for the patient to accept facts about himself
which might be unpleasant or difficult.
In 1915 Adler was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. He
served as a physician, at first in a Vienna hospital, then
in the Polish province of Austria, and finally back in
Vienna. During . these years he further developed his
system, discovering from his insightful watching of the war
casualties, with the many neurotics among them, the
paramount importance of social interest. He realized with
absolute clarity that “one should not be content to cure
mental illnesses, but one should make every effort to
prevent them”.
The end of the war heralded his involvement with the new
political regime. He served on the local Workers’ Committee,
which carried out minor administrative functions on behalf
of the Socialist-Democratic Party, and was able to attend to
his special interest in educational activities.
One of the principal objectives of the first Austrian
Republic was school reform, and in this new climate Adler
received permission to establish his first child guidance
clinic in Vienna in 1922. He included the child’s parents
and teacher as well as an interested audience during each
session. His original intention with the clinics was to help
teachers who had difficulty coping with “backward” children,
now that the 70-year-old law requiring primary education
for all had become a reality. Yet he realized the need to
help the children themselves, and by the end of the 1920s,
thirty-two clinics in Vienna were conducted by schools and
parent-teacher associations under the direction of Alfred
Adler. There were additional clinics in Germany.
He delivered regular lectures at the Volksheim, an adult
education center. He also lectured as a faculty member of
the Pedagogical Institute, the_ Vienna teacher training
college.
The number of his followers continued to grow. Gone were the
days when they could gather for weekly discussions at his
apartment. In the evenings, the social meeting place became
the Café Siller, overlooking the Danube channel, where
Adler, after a long day of counseling, lecturing and
attending to his clinics, would have friendly talks until
the late hours.
In 1926 he acquired a house at Salmannsdorf, a suburb of
Vienna, by all accounts a substantial residence with
spacious grounds. Here he hosted the visits of many eminent
Austrian and foreign colleagues and students.
As the year drew to a close he made his first trip to
America. He lectured at the New School for Social Research
and the Community Church in New York. He visited and spoke
across the country at Harvard, at Brown in Rhode Island, in
Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Milwaukee and several schools in
California. In Chicago 2,500 applications to attend his
lecture for teachers had to be turned down.
It was then, in his mid-fifties, that he felt the need to
master the English language, and accordingly he took daily
lessons until he felt confident to deliver lectures. As Carl
Furtmüller explained, “Shunning this task because his
English was not perfect would have been in his opinion one
of those pretexts which neurotics use to excuse their
avoidance of real solutions to life’s problems.” As he was
spending increasing periods each year in the United States,
undaunted by advancing years, he learned to drive an
automobile at the age of 60.
His 60th birthday, at his request, was not made a public
celebration. He was in New York for this occasion, and none
of his family was able to be present. Starting the day as
usual, he was unaware that many of his friends had planned a
party for him. Through a frantic quest in the midst of
Prohibition, they managed to find Rhine wine, and the
festivities got under way. His birthday was also celebrated
by a special issue of the International Zeitschrift für
Individualpsychologie.
Appointed as a visiting professor at Columbia University in
1929, Adler consolidated his American migration when, in
1932, he was called to the first chair of Medical Psychology
in the United States at Long Island Medical College.
In 1934 the Austrofascists overthrew the Austrian Republic.
One of their first acts was to abolish school reform and any
programs involved with it. Adler’s clinics were closed. In
1935, Adler and his wife formally left Vienna to reside at
the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York. Soon after moving, he
launched the Zeitschrift in English as the
International Journal of Individual Psychology.
Adler continued to work with no sign of a slowing pace. In
the spring of 1937, he traveled to Europe and started on a
round of lectures and meetings. He enjoyed several weeks of
vigorous work, of meetings with friends. Late in May he went
to Scotland. On May 28, shortly before he was due to lecture
in Aberdeen, he took a walk along the streets near his
hotel. He collapsed from a heart attack and died in the
ambulance taking him to the hospital.
Copyright ©
2005 International Association of Individual
Psychology
