Adler Alfred Quotes

Follow your heart but take your brain with you.

It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.

The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.

The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.

A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.

It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.

seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.

To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest. The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge for conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.

He used to say to his melancholia patients: "You can be cured in fourteen days if you follow this prescription.Try to think every day how you can please someone.

This quote begins here. A simple rule in dealing with those who are hard to get along with is to remember that this person is striving to assert his superiority; and you must deal with him from that point of view. This quote ends here.

Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.

It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.

We learn in friendship to look with the eyes of another person, to listen with her ears, and to feel with her heart.

To be human means to feel inferior.

We must interpret a bad temper as a sign of inferiority.

we limit ourselves to normal cases of mutual influence, we find that those people are most capable of being influenced who are most amenable to reason and logic, those whose social feeling has been least distorted. On the contrary, those who thirst for superiority and desire domination are very difficult to influence. Observation teaches us this fact every day.

Nobody adopts antisocial behavior unless they fear that they will fail if they remain on the social side of life.

Distorted history boasts of bellicose glory... and seduces the souls of boys to seek mystical bliss in bloodshed and in battles.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. At one point, Frankl writes that a person “may remain brave, dignified and unselfish, or in the bitter Fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The great task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.

A simple rule in dealing with those who are hard to get along with is to remember that this person is striving to assert his superiority; and you must deal with him from that point of view.

There is no such thing as talent. There is pressure.

We are self-determined by the meaning we give to our experiences; and there is probably something of a mistake always involved when we take particular experiences as the basis for our future life. Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations. There

No man can think, feel, will, nor even dream, without everything being defined, conditioned, limited, directed by a goal which floats before him.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.

A private meaning is in fact no meaning at all. Meaning is only possible in communication: a word which meant something to one person only would really be meaningless. It is the same with our aims and actions; their only meaning is their meaning for others. Every human being strives for significance; but people always make mistakes if they do not see that their whole significance must consist in their contribution to the lives of others. An

It is always easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

a woman who contributes to the life of mankind by the occupation of motherhood is taking as high a place in the division of human labor as anyone else could take. If she is interested in the lives of her children and is paving the way for them to become fellow men, if she is spreading their interests and training them to cooperate, her work is so valuable that it can never be rightly rewarded. In our own culture the work of a mother is undervalued and often regarded as a not very attractive or estimable occupation. It is paid only indirectly and a woman who makes it her main occupation is generally placed in a position of economic dependence. The success of the family, however, rests equally upon the work of the mother and the work of the father. Whether the mother keeps house or works independently, her work as a mother does not play a lower role than the work of her husband.

إن التقدم العلمي ما هو إلا نتيجة لسعي البشر الدائم لتحسين أحوالهم عن طريق معرفة المزيد عن الكون المحيط بهم وتطوير قدراتهم على التعامل معه.

All failures – neurotics, psychotics, criminals, drunkards, problem children, suicides, perverts, and prostitutes – are failures because they are lacking in social interest.

A fight with a child is always a losing fight: he can never be beaten or won to cooperation by fighting. In these struggles the weakest always carries the day. Something is demanded of him which he refuses to give; something which can never be gained by such means. An incalculable amount of tension and useless effort would be spared in this world if we realized that cooperation and love can never be won by force.

Courage is not an ability one either possesses or lacks. Courage is the willingness to engage in a risk-taking behavior regardless of whether the consequences are unknown or possibly adverse. We are capable of courageous behavior provided we are willing to engage in it.

These three ties, therefore, set three problems: how to find an. occupation which will enable us to survive under the limitations set by the nature of the earth; how to find a position among our fellows, so that we may cooperate and share the benefits of cooperation; how to accommodate ourselves to the fact that we live in two sexes and that the continuance and furtherance of mankind depends upon our love-life. Individual

It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow man who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring

Do not forget the most important fact that not heredity and not environment are determining factors. - Both are giving only the frame and the influences which are answered by the individual in regard to his styled creative power.

إن كل فرد يملك القدرة على أن يصبح مهتماً اهتماماً حقيقاً بالآخرين ,ولكن هذه القدرة يجب رعايتها منذ الصغر بالتدريب والتمرين وإلا فإن نموها سوف يتوقف .

Life in general has no meaning. Whatever meaning life has must be assigned to it by the individual.

Any man's value, therefore, is determined by his attitude toward his fellow men, and by the degrees in which he partakes of the division of labor which communal life demands.

It is not uncommon for the youngest child to outstrip every other member of the family and become its most capable member.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times.

È sempre più facile combattere per i propri principi che seguirli.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.

As a matter of fact, in our personal lives, as in the lives of all peoples, inferiorities are not to be considered as the source of all evil. Only the situation can determine whether they are assets or liabilities.

Only too many human beings have acquired the habit of recognizing an authority without testing it. The public wants to be fooled. It wants to swallow every bluff without subjecting it to rational examination. Such activity will never bring any order into the communal life of mankind but will lead only, again and again, to the revolt of those who have been imposed upon.

It was only because men learned to cooperate that we could make the great discovery of the division of labor; a discovery which is the chief security for the welfare of mankind. To preserve human life would not be possible if each individual attempted to wrest a living from the earth by himself with no cooperation and no results of cooperation in the past. Through the division of labor we can use the results of many different kinds of training and organize many different abilities so that all of them contribute to the common welfare and guarantee relief from insecurity and increased opportunity for all the members of society. It

Alfred Adler, the famous Viennese psychologist, wrote a book entitled What Life Should Mean to You. In that book he says: “It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others.

Empatía es: Ver con los ojos de otro, escuchar con los oídos de otro, sentir con el corazón de otro'. - Alfred Adler

The science of human nature… finds itself today in the position that chemistry occupied in the days of alchemy.” Alfred Adler

Nature is so rich and the possibilities of stimuli, instincts and mistakes are so numerous, that it is not possible for two persons to be exactly identical.

It is not a lower form of intelligence but a different form of thinking.

If we speak plainly, without metaphors or symbols, we cannot escape common sense. Metaphors and symbols can be abused.

هناك معان تُضفى على الحياة بعدد ما هناك من كائنات بشرية .

لو سألنا إنسانا ( ما معنى الحياة؟ ) فهو قد لا يستطيع الإجابة على هذا السؤال ، ذلك لأن أغلب الناس لايكلفون أنفسهم عناء الإجابة على أسئلة كهذه !

one of his key ideas: Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.

In man a working level of narcissism is inseparable from self-esteem, from a basic sense of self-worth. We have learned, mostly from Alfred Adler, that what man needs most is to feel secure in his self-esteem. But man is not just a blind glob of idling protoplasm, but a creature with a name who lives in a world of symbols, on an abstract idea of his own worth, an idea composed of sounds, words, and images, in the air, in the mind, on paper. And this means that man's natural yearning for organismic activity, the pleasures of incorporation and expansion, can be fed limitlessly in the domain of symbols and so into immortality. The single organism can expand into dimensions of worlds and times without moving a physical limb; it can take eternity into itself even as it gaspingly dies.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her own life.

key ideas: Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.

Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Nazi concentration camp survivor who wrote the classic Man’s Search for Meaning, drew a similar social-psychological conclusion: deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism. Sigmund Freud, for his part, analogously believed that “repression” contributed in a non-trivial manner to the development of mental illness (and the difference between repression of truth and a lie is a matter of degree, not kind). Alfred Adler knew it was lies that bred sickness. C.G. Jung knew that moral problems plagued his patients, and that such problems were caused by untruth. All these thinkers, all centrally concerned with pathology both individual and cultural, came to the same conclusion: lies warp the structure of Being. Untruth corrupts the soul and the state alike, and one form of corruption feeds the other.

or (this one is particularly evil) “to ensure that it is always my unloved child’s fault.” These are all examples of what Sigmund Freud’s compatriot, the lesser-known Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, called “life-lies.”149

Curiously enough we will find that no two children, even those born in the same family, grow up in the same situation. Even within the same family the atmosphere that surrounds each individual child is quite particular. Thus the first child has notoriously a different set of circumstances from the other children. The first child is at first alone and is thus the center of attention. Once the second child is born, he finds himself dethroned and he does not like the change of situation. In fact it is quite a tragedy in his life that he has been in power and is so no longer. This sense of tragedy goes into the formation of his prototype and will crop out in his adult characteristics.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The great task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person, as Frankl held on to the image of his wife through the darkest days in Auschwitz), and in courage in difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.

Terrible as it was, his experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was already one of his key ideas: Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.

Alfred Adler was a member of Freud’s original inner circle, but broke away because he disagreed that sex was the prime mover behind human behavior. He was more interested in how our early environments shape us, believing that we all seek greater power by trying to make up for what we perceive we lacked in childhood—his famous theory of “compensation.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of

Our whole way of living inhibits that necessary intimate contact with our fellow men, which is essential for the development of the science and art of knowing human nature. Since we do not find sufficient contact with our fellow men, we become their enemies. Our behavior towards them is often mistaken, and our judgments frequently false, simply because we do not adequately understand human nature.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. At one point, Frankl writes that a person “may remain brave, dignified and unselfish, or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.” He concedes that only a few prisoners of the Nazis were able to do the former, “but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by

A story is told of Alfred Adler, one of Freud’s early followers, who once interviewed a prospective patient at great length, taking a detailed family history, and getting as elaborate an account as possible of what the man was suffering from. At the end of this three-hour consultation Adler apparently said to the man, ‘What would you do if you were cured?’ The man answered him, and Adler said, ‘Well, go and do it then.’ That was the treatment.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way

And so, beginning with the small early frustrations and deprivations, the child is helped to govern himself. his ego develops by learning to regulate his own food intake and feces evacuation: he has to learn to adapt to a social schedule, to an external measure of time, in place of a biological schedule of internal urges. In all this he makes a bitter discovery: that he is no longer himself, just by seeking pleasure. There may be more excitement in the world but the fun keep getting interrupted. For some strange reason the mother doesn’t share his glee over a bowel movement on the sofa. The child finds that he has to “earn" the mother’s love by performing in a certain way. He comes to realize that he has to abandon the idea of “total excitement" and “uninterrupted fun," if he wants to keep a secure background of love from the mother. This is what Alfred Adler meant when he spoke of the child’s need for affection as the “lever" of his education. The child learns to accept frustrations so long as the total relationship is not endangered. This is what the psychoanalytic word “ambivalence" so nicely covers: the child may hesitate between giving up what has previously been an assured satisfaction, and proceeding to a new type of conduct which will be rewarded by a new kind of acceptance. Does he want to keep the breast instead of switching to the bottle? He finds that if he makes this switch he gets a special cooing of praise and a little extra attention. Ambivalence describes the process whereby the infant is propelled forward into increasing mastery by his developing ego, while at the same time he is lulled backward into a safe dependence by his need for approval and easy gratification; he is caught in the bind, as we all are, between new and uncertain rewards and tried and tested ones.

Terrible as it was, his experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was already one of his key ideas: Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times.

not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.

Individuals with a pathological power-drive seek to secure their position in life with extraordinary efforts, with exceptional haste and impatience, with violent impulses, and all without the slightest consideration for others. These are the children whose behaviour is characterized by their frantic strivings towards an exaggerated goal of dominance. Their attacks on the rights of others in turn put their own rights at risk; they are against the world and the world is therefore against them.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. At one point, Frankl writes that a person “may

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. At one point, Frankl writes that a person “may remain brave, dignified and unselfish, or

The difficulties connected with my criterion of demarcation (D) are important, but must not be exaggerated. It is vague, since it is a methodological rule, and since the demarcation between science and nonscience is vague. But it is more than sharp enough to make a distinction between many physical theories on the one hand, and metaphysical theories, such as psychoanalysis, or Marxism (in its present form), on the other. This is, of course, one of my main theses; and nobody who has not understood it can be said to have understood my theory. The situation with Marxism is, incidentally, very different from that with psychoanalysis. Marxism was once a scientific theory: it predicted that capitalism would lead to increasing misery and, through a more or less mild revolution, to socialism; it predicted that this would happen first in the technically highest developed countries; and it predicted that the technical evolution of the 'means of production' would lead to social, political, and ideological developments, rather than the other way round. But the (so-called) socialist revolution came first in one of the technically backward countries. And instead of the means of production producing a new ideology, it was Lenin's and Stalin's ideology that Russia must push forward with its industrialization ('Socialism is dictatorship of the proletariat plus electrification') which promoted the new development of the means of production. Thus one might say that Marxism was once a science, but one which was refuted by some of the facts which happened to clash with its predictions (I have here mentioned just a few of these facts). However, Marxism is no longer a science; for it broke the methodological rule that we must accept falsification, and it immunized itself against the most blatant refutations of its predictions. Ever since then, it can be described only as nonscience—as a metaphysical dream, if you like, married to a cruel reality. Psychoanalysis is a very different case. It is an interesting psychological metaphysics (and no doubt there is some truth in it, as there is so often in metaphysical ideas), but it never was a science. There may be lots of people who are Freudian or Adlerian cases: Freud himself was clearly a Freudian case, and Adler an Adlerian case. But what prevents their theories from being scientific in the sense here described is, very simply, that they do not exclude any physically possible human behaviour. Whatever anybody may do is, in principle, explicable in Freudian or Adlerian terms. (Adler's break with Freud was more Adlerian than Freudian, but Freud never looked on it as a refutation of his theory.) The point is very clear. Neither Freud nor Adler excludes any particular person's acting in any particular way, whatever the outward circumstances. Whether a man sacrificed his life to rescue a drowning, child (a case of sublimation) or whether he murdered the child by drowning him (a case of repression) could not possibly be predicted or excluded by Freud's theory; the theory was compatible with everything that could happen—even without any special immunization treatment. Thus while Marxism became non-scientific by its adoption of an immunizing strategy, psychoanalysis was immune to start with, and remained so. In contrast, most physical theories are pretty free of immunizing tactics and highly falsifiable to start with. As a rule, they exclude an infinity of conceivable possibilities.

His experience in Auschwitz, terrible as it was, reinforced what was already one of his key ideas. Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The great task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person, as Frankl held on to the image of his wife through the darkest days in Auschwitz), and in courage in difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.

121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces 122. Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography 123. Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion 124. John Dewey – How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic; the Theory of Inquiry 125. Alfred North Whitehead – An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas 126. George Santayana – The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places 127. Vladimir Lenin – The State and Revo

In Europa, intre 1911 si 1913, s-au produs doua miscari disidente ale psihanalizei, miscari inaugurate de persoane care pana atunci jucasera un rol de baza in tanara stiinta: Alfred si C. G. Jung. Aceste miscari pareau foarte periculoase si castigasera repede un mare numar de partizani. Ele nu trebuiau, totusi, prin forta lor, sa fie resimtite ca niste socuri furnizate psihanalizei, chiar daca nu se mai nega materialul faptic, ci permiteau, ceea ce era ademenitor, eliberarea de rezultate. Jung a incercat o transpunere a faptelor analitice intr-un mod abstract, impersonal, fara sa tina cont de istoria individului, modalitate prin care el spera sa indeparteze recunoasterea sexualitatii infantile si a complexului lui Oedip, ca si necesitatea de a analiza copilaria. Adler parea sa se indeparteze si mai mult de psihanaliza, respingand total importanta sexualitatii. Critica a fost ingaduitoare cu cele doua miscari (pentru cei doi «eretici»), eu neputand sa obtin mai mult decat sa-i fac pe Adler si pe Jung sa renunte sa-si numeasca doctrinele «psihanaliza». Se poate astazi constata, la capatul a zece ani, ca cele doua tentative au trecut pe langa psihanaliza fara sa o atinga. Este suficient sa spun ca in fata celor care m-au parasit ca Jung, Adler, Stekel sau alti cativa, se gaseste un mare numar de cercetatori ca Abraham, Eitingon, Ferenczi, Rank, Jones, Brill, Sachs, pastorul Pfister, van Emden, Reik, care de aproape 15 ani mi-au ramas fideli colaboratori, de majoritatea legandu-ma o prietenie pe care nimic n-a tulburat-o. N-am numit aici decat pe cei mai vechi dintre elevii mei, cei care si-au facut deja un nume in literatura psihanalitica; amintirea altor nume nu implica mai putin respect, si tocmai printre cei tineri si printre cei care au venit la mine mai tarziu se gasesc talente care ne dau mari sperante. Dar trebuie sa spun in avantajul meu ca un om dominat de intoleranta si de aroganta perfectiunii nu s-ar fi putut inconjura de o astfel de legiune de personalitati cu o inteligenta superioara, mai ales cand nu are sa le ofere atractii de ordin practic.

Another fact to be borne in mind in connection with criminals is that if we increase the punishments, so far from frightening the individual criminal, we merely help to increase his belief that he is a hero. We must not forget that the criminal lives in a self-centered world, a world in which one will never find true courage, self-confidence, communal sense, or understanding of common values. It is not possible for such persons to join a society. Neurotics seldom start a club, and it is an impossible feat for persons suffering from agoraphobia or for insane persons. Problem children or persons who commit suicide never make friends, a fact for which the reason is never given. There is a reason, however: they never make friends because their early life took a self-centered direction. Their prototypes were oriented towards false goals and followed lines of direction on the useless side of life.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. At one point, Frankl writes that a person “may remain brave, dignified and unselfish, or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.” He concedes that only a few prisoners of the Nazis were able to do the former, “but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.” Finally, Frankl’s most enduring insight, one that I have called on often in my own life and in countless counseling situations: Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.

Alfred Adler, desarrolló la teoría del complejo de inferioridad. Según Adler, los niños que sufren una percepción de desarraigo a resultas de haber padecido una infancia mala, plena de burlas, sufrimientos, rechazos, tienden a buscar “sobre compensaciones” que pueden ser en la forma de determinados logros exagerados. Aquí también ves que las humillaciones, las líneas vergonzosas de la propia biografía, pueden modificar la propia posición en el Mapa de la Autoestima, llevando a que se necesiten, de manera más urgente, determinadas hazañas. La “hazaña escudo” es lo mismo que la sobre-compensación de Adler, pero a futuro. Si la compensación, es una hazaña que se busca para que duela menos la anti-hazaña que ya tenemos, que ya sufrimos, la hazaña escudo, en cambio, es un paragolpes que preparamos por un miedo enfermizo que tenemos a la posible llegada de una anti-hazaña. Es un paragolpes. Es como una anestesia de baja calidad para que, si llega la anti-hazaña, duela menos. Como desarrollaremos en este capítulo, las hazañas escudo están detrás de certezas como pesimismo, hipocondría, delirios de persecución, y de comportamientos como auto-boicot, agresividad paranoide, etc.

Terrible as it was, his experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was already one of his key ideas: Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during diffcult times.

For example, Nancy Cantor and Hazel Markus, leading contemporary cognitive motivational theorists, view motivation as a product of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge obviously includes knowledge about one's emotions and their motivational consequences, but for Cantor and Markus motives are products of the self as much as contributors to it. Key to their theory is the notion of a working self, an on-the-fly construction about who we are that reflects who we've been (past selves), and who we want don't want to be (future selves). In contrast to earlier self theorists, such as Alfred Adler, who viewed the self as a static and enduring entity, Cantor and Markus view the self as a dynamic and mutable construction that changes in different situations-we have different goals when at home than when on the job, for example, and the working self in each situation reflects such differences. One's working self is thus a subset of the universe of possible self-concepts that can occur at any one time-it is the subset that is available to the thinking conscious person at a particular moment, and is determined in part by memory and expectation, and in part by the immediate situation. These features of the working self explain how one can have both stable and mutable motives, and how motives can be conflicting or dissonant. The working self is a central part of one's mental apparatus. It influences perception, attention, thinking, memory, retrieval, and storage, and guides action.

To conduct life like this is to become possessed by some ill-formed desire, and then to craft speech and action in a manner that appears likely, rationally, to bring about that end. Typical calculated ends might include “to impose my ideological beliefs,” “to prove that I am (or was) right,” “to appear competent,” “to ratchet myself up the dominance hierarchy,” “to avoid responsibility” (or its twin, “to garner credit for others’ actions”), “to be promoted,” “to attract the lion’s share of attention,” “to ensure that everyone likes me,” “to garner the benefits of martyrdom,” “to justify my cynicism,” “to rationalize my antisocial outlook,” “to minimize immediate conflict,” “to maintain my naïveté,” “to capitalize on my vulnerability,” “to always appear as the sainted one,” or (this one is particularly evil) “to ensure that it is always my unloved child’s fault.” These are all examples of what Sigmund Freud’s compatriot, the lesser-known Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, called “life-lies.”149 Someone living a life-lie is attempting to manipulate reality with perception, thought and action, so that only some narrowly desired and pre-defined outcome is allowed to exist. A life lived in this manner is based, consciously or unconsciously, on two premises. The first is that current knowledge is sufficient to define what is good, unquestioningly, far into the future. The second is that reality would be unbearable if left to its own devices. The first presumption is philosophically unjustifiable. What you are currently aiming at might not be worth attaining, just as what you are currently doing might be an error. The second is even worse. It is valid only if reality is intrinsically intolerable and, simultaneously, something that can be successfully manipulated and distorted. Such speaking and thinking requires the arrogance and certainty that the English poet John Milton’s genius identified with Satan, God’s highest angel gone most spectacularly wrong. The faculty of rationality inclines dangerously to pride: all I know is all that needs to be known. Pride falls in love with its own creations, and tries to make them absolute.

Nu conteaza cu ce calitati te nasti, ci cum alegi sa le folosesti!

The second goal is to contribute to someone or something. Even in the early stage of psychology, one of the founding minds of the field, Alfred Adler, postulated that “the only individuals who can really meet and master the problems of life . . . are those who show in their striving a tendency to enrich everyone else.”7 It’s not just that many of us want to contribute. Contributing actually helps make us healthy and feel better.

Alfred Adler desenvolveu a Psicologia Individual, que enfatiza a importância do sentimento de pertencimento e da contribuição social. Para Adler, a religião era uma expressão do interesse social, um conceito central em sua teoria. Ele via a religião como uma forma de promover a coesão social e o bem-estar comunitário, ajudando os indivíduos a se sentirem parte de algo maior e a desenvolverem um senso de responsabilidade mútua. Sigmund Freud, por outro lado, tinha uma visão mais crítica da religião. Ele a considerava uma ilusão, uma forma de neurose coletiva. Freud acreditava que a religião era uma projeção dos desejos infantis de proteção e segurança, uma necessidade de um pai protetor. Para ele, a religião servia para controlar os impulsos humanos e oferecer uma estrutura moral, mas deveria ser superada em favor da razão e da ciência.

Whatever excuse he makes, he betrays one thing, and that is that he wishes to be excused of further responsibility. In this manner he has an apparent justification and avoids all criticism of himself. He himself is never to blame. The reason he has never accomplished what he desired to do is always someone else’s fault. What such individuals overlook is the fact that they themselves have made very few efforts to obviate their mistakes.

In the course of our formal education we acquire very little knowledge of human nature, and much of what we learn is incorrect, because contemporary education is still unsuited to giving us a valid knowledge of the human mind.

我們怎麼看待自己，或者他人怎麼看我們，這些都不重要。重要的是，我們用什麼心態待人與社會，因為我們的欲望、我們在乎的事、我們做的事，全部由心態決定。

Ко потцењује жену, било да је мушкарац или жена биће кажњен неурозом.

15 yaşındaki bir kız kendisine çocukluğundan beri küçük kardeşlerine oranla haksız davranıldığı kanaatindedir. Kendi hareket kanununu oluştururken hayatta en önemli şeyin sıcaklık ve şımartılmak olduğunu esas kabul eder. Okulda kendine iyi bir durum oluşturmayı başarır fakat yeni gelen öğretmen onu sevmez, özellikle kötü muamele eder. Bu kez çocukluktan beri var olan kıskançlık ve aşağılık duygusu, sıcaklık ve şımartılma konusunda başka bir yöne kayar. Artık ev ve okul onu tatmin etmediğine göre geriye erkekler tarafından şımartılmaktan başka bir yol yoktur. Aradan geçen bir müddetin sonunda bunda da aradığını bulamaz ve bununla aradığı sıcaklığa ulaşamadığı sonucuna ulaşır. Bundan sonra geriye tek seçenek kalır; intihar…

На самом деле неважно, что вы думаете о себе и что о вас думают другие. Важно ваше отношение к обществу в самом широком смысле, поскольку оно определяет все желания, все интересы и все поступки каждого индивидуума.

На самом деле неважно, что вы думаете о себе и что о вас думают другие. Важно ваше отношение к обществу в самом широком смысле, поскольку оно определяет все желания, все интересы и все поступки каждого индивидуума.

И если в наше время весьма немногие действительно готовы к супружеской жизни, то это потому, что большинство людей никогда не обучалось тому, как можно видеть глазами другого, слышать его ушами. и чувствовать его сердцем.

И если в наше время весьма немногие действительно готовы к супружеской жизни, то это потому, что большинство людей никогда не обучалось тому, как можно видеть глазами другого, слышать его ушами и чувствовать его сердцем.