Adler Psychology Quotes

But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little use) and almost ignorant of Nature: Adler, reducing almost everything to the will to power: and Jung, certainly the most humane and gentlest of them, and possibly the greatest, but nevertheless the descendant of parsons and professors, and himself a super-parson and a super-professor. all men of extraordinary character, and they devised systems that are forever stamped with that character.… Davey, did you ever think that these three men who were so splendid at understanding others had first to understand themselves? It was from their self-knowledge they spoke. They did not go trustingly to some doctor and follow his lead because they were too lazy or too scared to make the inward journey alone. They dared heroically. And it should never be forgotten that they made the inward journey while they were working like galley-slaves at their daily tasks, considering other people's troubles, raising families, living full lives. They were heroes, in a sense that no space-explorer can be a hero, because they went into the unknown absolutely alone. Was their heroism simply meant to raise a whole new crop of invalids? Why don't you go home and shoulder your yoke, and be a hero too?

In short, every child develops in ways that best allow them to compensate for weakness; “a thousand talents and capabilities arise from our feelings of inadequacy,” Adler noted.

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

The power-hungry individual follows a path to his own destruction.

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.

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

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

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.

They might add that monotheism is a political and psychological ideology as well as a religious one, and that the old economic lesson that one-crop economies generally fare poorly also applies to the spiritual realm.

The two psycho-analytic theories were in a different class. They were simply non testable, irrefutable. There was no conceivable human behav­iour which could contradict them. This does not mean that Freud and Adler were not seeing certain things correctly: I personally do not doubt that much of what they say is of considerable importance, and may well play its part one day in a psychological science which is testable. But it does mean that those ‘clinical observations’ which analysts naively believe confirm their theory cannot do this any more than the daily confirmations which astrologers find in their practice. And as for Freud’s epic of the Ego, the Super-ego, and the Id, no substantially stronger claim to scientific status can be made for it than for Homer’s collected stories from Olympus. These theories describe some facts, but in the manner of myths. They contain most interesting psychological suggestions, but not in a testable form.

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 !

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

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

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

While a complex may make someone more timid or withdrawn, it could equally produce the need to compensate for that in overachievement. This is the “pathological power drive,” expressed at the expense of other people and society generally. Adler identified Napoleon, a small man making a big impact on the world, as a classic case of an inferiority complex in action.

If Adler’s theory of human action relates to power, concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl’s brand of existential psychology, “logotherapy,” posits that the human species is uniquely made to seek meaning.

Freud believed human beings to be wholly driven by the stirrings of the unconscious mind, but Adler saw us as social beings who create a style of life in response to the environment and to what we feel we lack.

[Viktor E. Frankl] joked that in contrast to Freud's and Adler's "depth psychology," which emphasizes delving into an individual's past and his or her unconscious instincts and desires, he practiced "height psychology," which focuses on a person's future and his or her conscious decisions and actions...His goal was to provoke people into realizing that they could and should exercise their capacity for choice to achieve their own goals.

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.

Freud believed human beings to be wholly driven by the stirrings of the unconscious mind, but Adler saw us as social beings who create a style of life in response to the environment and to what we feel we lack. Individuals

A central idea in Adlerian psychology is that individuals are always striving toward a goal. Whereas Freud saw us as driven by what was in our past, Adler had a teleological view—that we are driven by our goals, whether they are conscious or not. The

Frankl’s brand of therapy is sometimes considered, after Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology, to be the third school of Viennese psychotherapy, and The Will to Meaning clearly points out the differences between his ideas and those of his compatriots. It

By far the larger number of psychotherapists are disciples of Freud or of Adler. This means that the great majority of patients are necessarily alienated from a spiritual standpoint—a fact which cannot be a matter of indifference to one who has the realization of spiritual values much at heart. The wave of interest in psychology which at present is sweeping over the Protestant countries of Europe is far from receding. It is coincident with the general exodus from the Church. Quoting a Protestant minister, I may say: "Nowadays people go to the psychotherapist rather than to the clergyman." I

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.

The fact that many clergymen seek support or practical help from Freud's theory of sexuality or Adler's theory of power is astonishing, inasmuch as both these theories are hostile to spiritual values, being, as I have said, psychology without the psyche. They are rational methods of treatment which actually hinder the realization of meaningful experience.

Two years later he married Eleanore Schwindt, who, like his first wife, was a nurse. Unlike Tilly, who was Jewish, Elly was Catholic. Although this may have been mere coincidence, it was characteristic of Viktor Frankl to accept individuals regardless of their religious beliefs or secular convictions. His deep commitment to the uniqueness and dignity of each individual was illustrated by his admiration for Freud and Adler even though he disagreed with their philosophical and psychological theories. He also valued his personal relationships with philosophers as radically different as Martin Heidegger, a reformed Nazi sympathizer, Karl Jaspers, an advocate of collective guilt, and Gabriel Marcel, a Catholic philosopher and writer.

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.

The leaders of the revolt were Robert Maynard Hutchins, who had become president of the University of Chicago; Mortimer Adler, whose work on the psychological background of the law of evidence was somewhat similar to work being done at Yale by Hutchins; Scott Buchanan, a philosopher and mathematician; and most important of all for Phaedrus, the present chairman of the committee, who was then a Columbia University Spinozist

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.

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.

From Freud’s biological image of man via the psychological images of Adler and Jung there arose the more spiritual images of man proposed by Frankl and Assagioli. In the thinking of Rudolf Steiner we find an image of man which embodies all three of these aspects at once, so that it does not envisage a separate form of psychotherapy but, instead, a total therapy of body, psyche and spirit.

إن جميع الفاشلين في الحياة لا يقيمون وزنا إلى شيء اسمه : التعاون مع الغير

... [I]nstead of taking this poor sinner to the cross to put self to death and to 1 John 1:9 for forgiveness and cleansing, Springle talks about how this poor codependent has been suffering from a lack of self-worth. In face, he declares that the codependent's sin is the idolatry of trying to "get his security and value from someone or something other than the Lord." Thus the answer is to get your self-worth from Jesus. This sounds more like the gospel of Adler, Maslow, and Rogers (with Jesus conveniently added to meet the hierarchy of needs) than the gospel Paul preached.

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.

While Freud wrote of the drive toward pleasure or sex, and Adler of a drive toward power, Frankl believed that the human will to meaning was at least as strong a force in making us into who we are. While

We want you to take a minute to identify your very first memory. After you have rummaged through your old-memories store, write down the specifics of the memory. What exactly happened? When? Who was—and was not—there? What about your memory is crystal-clear, and what is missing or foggy? After you’ve settled upon a version of the experience, shift your focus to the thoughts, especially the feelings surrounding them. Be patient. It’s likely that details will surface at their own pace. Once you’re comfortable that you’ve recaptured your first memory, continue on with your reading and rejoin us. Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler felt that

How we react, and adapt, to our inferiorities strongly impacts our psychological health and the overall quality of our life. Adler suggested there are two primary ways people deal with feelings of inferiority. Either we see the circumstances which produce them as challenges to be confronted and so make use of coping behaviors, or we view them as problems to be avoided and resort to safeguarding behaviors.

In Adlerian psychology, trauma is definitively denied. [...] Freud’s idea is that a person’s psychic wounds (traumas) cause his or her present unhappiness. [...] But Adler, in denial of the trauma argument, states the following: “No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.

Lobotomy and shock treatment are methods which by their very nature are more suited to handle vicious circulating memories and malignant worries than the deeper-seated permanent memories, though it is not impossible that they may have some effect here too. As we have said, in long-established cases of mental disorder, the permanent memory is as badly deranged as the circulating memory. We do not seem to possess any purely pharmaceutical or surgical weapon for intervening differentially in the permanent memory. This is where psychoanalysis and other similar psychotherapeutic measures come in. Whether psychoanalysis is taken in the orthodox Freudian sense or in the modified senses of Jung and of Adler, or whether our psychotherapy is not strictly psychoanalytic at all, our treatment is clearly based on the concept that the stored information of the mind lies on many levels of accessibility and is much richer and more varied than that which is accessible by direct unaided introspection; that it is vitally conditioned by affective experiences which we cannot always uncover by such introspection, either because they never were made explicit in our adult language, or because they have been buried by a definite mechanism, affective though generally involuntary; and that the content of these stored experiences, as well as their affective tone, conditions much of our later activity in ways which may well be pathological. The technique of the psychoanalyst consists in a series of means to discover and interpret these hidden memories, to make the patient accept them for what they are and by their acceptance modify, if not their content, at least the affective tone they carry, and thus make them less harmful. All this is perfectly consistent with the point of view of this book. It perhaps explains, too, why there are circumstances where a joint use of shock treatment and psychotherapy is indicated, combining a physical or pharmacological therapy for the phenomena of reverberation in the nervous system, and a psychological therapy for the long-time memories which, without interference, might reestablish from within the vicious circle broken up by the shock treatment.

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.

Evo nekih tipičnih ciljeva: ''nametanje svojih ideoloških uvjerenja'', ''dokazivanje da sam (ili sam bio) u pravu'', ''pokazivanje sposobnim'', ''uspinjanje na hijerarhijskoj ljestvici'', ''izbjegavanje odgovornosti'' (ili, brat blizanac toga cilja, ''preuzimanje zasluga za tuđa djela''), ''napredovanje'', ''privlačenje pozornosti'', ''pobrinuti se da me svi vole'', ''ubiranje plodova mučeništva'', ''opravdavanje vlastitoga cinizma'', ''racionaliziranje svojeg antisocijalnog držanja'', ''umanjivanje značenja sukoba koji se upravo odvija'', ''podržavanje svoje naivnosti'', ''prenaglašavanje svoje ranjivosti'', ''prikazivati se svecem'' ili (a ovaj je osobito podmukao) ''pobrinuti se da za sve uvijek bude krivo moje nevoljeno dijete''. Sve su ovo primjeri onoga što je sunarodnjak Sigmunda Freuda, manje poznati austrijski psiholog Alfred Adler nazvao ''životnim lažima''. Osoba koja živi s nekom životnom laži pokušava manipulirti stvarnošću pomoću percepcije, misli i djelovanja tako što samo usko zadanu i unaprijed određenu rezultatau dopušta postojanje. Kada tako živimo, onda svjesno ili nesvjesno temeljimo svoj život na dvije premise. Prva glasi da je naše trenutno znanje nesumnjivo dovoljno da odredimo što je dobro sve do u daleku vudućnost. Drug glasi da bi stvarnost, kada bi bil prepuštena sama sebi, bila nepodnošljiva. Prva je pretpostavka filozofski neopravdana. Naime, ono čemu trenutno težite možda nije vrijedno postizanja, baš kao što ono što sada radite može biti pogrješno. Druga je premisa još gora. Vrijedi samo ako je stvarnost u sebi nepodnošljiva i istodobno nešto čime možete uspješno manipulirati i izvrtati. Takav govor i razmišljanje zahtijeva aroganciju i uvjerenost koju je engleski pjesnik John Milton genijalno poistovjetio s arogancijom i samouvjerenošću Sotone, najvišega Božjeg anđela koji je tako spektakularno zastranio. Razumska sposobnost opasno naginje oholosti: ''ono što ja znam jest sve što treba znati''. Oholost se zaljubljuje u vlastite tvorevine i nastoji ih apsolutizirati.

Encouragement as a concept in psychology has been most influenced by Adler (1946), who proposed that discouragement was at the root of many mental health problems and the seed of destruction in many interpersonal relationships.

Western psychologists say: we will train the child to be independent, to be individual. Jung’s psychology is known as the way of individuation. He must become an individual, absolutely separate. He must fight. That’s why, in the West, there is so much rebellion in the new generation. This rebellion was not created by the new, younger generation; this rebellion was created by Freud, Jung, Adler and company. They have provided the basis.

The vital question all women should ask their prospective husbands before marriage is: ‘What is your attitude towards male domination, particularly in family life?

those who do not trust themselves never trust others.

No other vice is so well designed to stunt the free development of human beings as personal vanity, which forces individuals to approach every person and every event with the query: ‘What do I get out of this?

There is no physical disability, no matter how serious, which must inevitably, necessarily and irrevocably force individuals to adopt a particular attitude to life.

Taken too far, vanity becomes exceedingly dangerous. Over and above the fact that vanity leads individuals to all kinds of useless activity more concerned with appearance than essence, and makes them think constantly either of themselves, or of other people’s opinions of them, the greatest danger of vanity is that it disconnects individuals from reality.

In everyday life, however, it makes little difference who is right and who is wrong, since the only thing that counts is getting things done and making a contribution to the lives of others.

It is frequently overlooked that girls come into the world with a prejudice sounding in their ears calculated solely to rob them of their belief in their own value, to shatter their self-confidence and destroy their hope of ever doing anything worthwhile.

One of the fundamental tenets of Individual Psychology is that all psychological phenomena are appropriate to a specific goal.

The statement of a teacher who said: ‘This girl could do anything she set her mind to!’ had a profound effect on her. These words are unimportant in themselves, but for this girl they truly meant, ‘I can accomplish anything if I really try.

The distrust between the sexes that is so universal prevents people from being frank with one another, and all humanity suffers in consequence.

What people have accomplished at the height of their powers must be credited to them during their declining years. It is wrong to cut people off from the spiritual and material comforts of society simply because they are growing old.

The kind of damage done to an ageing woman by devaluing her in this way is suffered by every human being, in that every human life has its unproductive times.

We can get tired of hearing about ‘first and best’ people all the time. History as well as experience demonstrates that there is far more to life than being first or best.

It is a universal human phenomenon that everyone seizes upon those thoughts that justify their attitudes and rejects every idea that might prevent them from carrying on.

Forgetful people are usually those who prefer not to revolt openly, but their forgetfulness reveals a certain lack of interest in their tasks.

In judging human beings we must not be guided solely by their conscious actions and expressions. Often little details of their thought and behaviour, of which they themselves are not aware, will give us a better insight into their real nature.

A vain woman is usually unconscious of most of the instances in which she exhibits her vanity; she will behave in such a way as to present a charmingly modest picture to the world. It is not necessary, in order to be vain, actually to know that one is vain. Indeed, for the purposes of such a woman, it would be quite counterproductive for her to know that she was vain, for she could not then continue to be so.

Human beings may be divided into two types: those who know more than average about their unconscious life and those who know less.

It really does not matter what you think of yourself, or what other people think of you. The important thing is your general attitude towards society, since this determines every wish, every interest and every activity of each individual.

We might say that something like this train of thought remained unconsciously in his mind: ‘As I grow up, I’m getting nearer the sharp end of life. I realize that it will no longer be so easy for me always to be the first. I shall therefore withdraw from the race rather than compete unsuccessfully.

We must maintain this point of view because every individual within the body of human society must subscribe to the oneness of that society. We have to realize our duty to our fellow human beings. We are in the very midst of a community and must live by the logic of communal existence.

We see just another form of vanity in such behaviour, where individuals are reluctant to put themselves to the test. It is vanity that impels them to make their detour at precisely the moment when a decision is about to be made concerning their ability. They think of the glory they would lose if they failed, and begin to doubt their own ability;

An Italian criminal psychologist once said: ‘When a human being seems too good to be true, when his philanthropy and humanity assume conspicuous proportions, we should be on our guard.

Ambition and vanity provoke such complications and subterfuges in life. They destroy all frankness, and all true pleasures, all true joy and happiness in life, all for what on closer examination turns out to be a mere fallacy.

In our civilization there is one thing that does seem to have magical powers, and that is money. Many people believe that you can do anything you like with money.

no one pays any attention to the fact that many of the individuals who spend their lives chasing after gold are spurred on merely by their vain desire for God-like power.

The criteria by which we can measure individuals are determined by their value to humankind in general.

An upbringing characterized by too much tenderness is as harmful as one without any. Pampered children, just as much as unloved ones, labour under great difficulties. Pampered children develop an inordinate and insatiable craving for affection, with the result that they bind themselves to someone and refuse to let go.

The value of affection becomes so accentuated by various misunderstood experiences that the children conclude that their own love enforces certain responsibilities on the grown-ups around them. This is easily accomplished: a child says to his parents, ‘Because I love you, you must do this or that’.

All his efforts were directed towards maintaining the conviction that he might have accomplished great things if he had not been visited by misfortune. This was the state of affairs that enabled him to feel he was as good as anyone else, but that an insurmountable obstacle lay in his way.

It is impossible to understand another individual if one cannot at the same time identify oneself with him or her.

One must always watch out for such excessive attachment and tenderness towards one particular member of the family. There is no doubt that such an upbringing has a harmful influence on the future of children. Their life becomes bound up in a struggle to keep the affection of others by fair means or foul. To accomplish this they do not hesitate to use any means at their disposal.

There is no such thing as a random or meaningless recollection. Memory is selective. We can evaluate a recollection only when we are certain about the goal and purpose that it serves.

It is not necessary to wonder why we remember certain things and forget others. We remember those events whose recollection is important for a specific psychological reason, because those recollections further an important underlying movement. Likewise we forget all those events that detract from the fulfilment of a plan.

Once someone assumes the point of view that life’s difficulties must be avoided, they are inviting anxiety in, and once in, it will reinforce that point of view.

the very least we can demand of individuals is this: that they should not deliberately flaunt any temporary appearance of superiority over others.

No one can raise themselves above society and demonstrate their power over others, without simultaneously arousing the opposition of those who want to prevent their success.

there is a natural law of the equality of all human beings. This law cannot be broken without immediately producing opposition and discord. It is one of the fundamental laws of human society.

No matter how many mistakes people make, they will either blame the rest of humankind, or feel that their situation is irrevocable. We very seldom find anyone who has come up against obstacles or taken a wrong turning, and stopped to consider where they went wrong.

That perceptive psychologist, Dostoevsky, said: ‘We can judge a person’s character much better by his laughter than by any boring psychological examination.

Perhaps more widespread than the genuine feeling is its conventional misuse. This consists of posing as an extremely public-spirited, exaggeratedly sympathetic individual. Thus there are people who crowd to the scene of a disaster to achieve a mention in the newspapers and get themselves noticed without actually doing anything to help the victims.

All these things – her bed-wetting, her fear of the dark, her terror of being alone, and her attempted suicide – were directed towards the same goal. To us they mean: ‘I must stay close to my mother’, or ‘Mother must pay constant attention to me!

Such unfortunates tend even to be proud of their ill-luck, as though some supernatural power had caused it. Examine this point of view more closely and you will find that vanity is rearing its ugly head again!

We must classify all irascible, angry, acrimonious individuals as enemies of society and enemies of life. We must again call attention to the fact that their striving for power is rooted in their feeling of inferiority. No human beings confident of their own power need to show these aggressive, violent reactions and gestures.

If romantic love is a relationship connected by red string, then the relationship between parents and children is bound in rigid chains. And a pair of small scissors is all you have. This is the difficulty of the parent-child relationship. YOUTH: So what can one do? PHILOSOPHER: What I can say at this stage is: You must not run away. No matter how distressful the relationship, you must not avoid or put off dealing with it. Even if in the end you’re going to cut it with scissors, first you have to face it. The worst thing to do is to just stand still with the situation as it is. It is fundamentally impossible for a person to live life completely alone, and it is only in social contexts that the person becomes an “individual.” That is why in Adlerian psychology, self-reliance as an individual and cooperation within society are put forth as overarching objectives. Then, how can one achieve these objectives? On this point, Adler speaks of surmounting the three tasks of work, friendship, and love, the tasks of the interpersonal relationships that a living person has no choice but to confront.

BIRTH ORDER, n. The sequence in which children are born into a family. Firstborns, like only children, typically receive a lot of attention and later have a slightly higher IQ. Once there is more than one child in a family, children often compete viciously, or take opposing paths so they can’t be compared. See ALFRED ADLER.

HISTORICAL TIMELINE OF THE EARLY THEORIES 1886 – Sigmund Freud began therapeutic practice and research in Vienna. 1900 – Sigmund Freud published “Interpretation of Dreams” – beginning of psychoanalytic thought 1911 – Alfred Adler left Freud’s Psychoanalytic Group to form his school of Individual Psychology 1913 – Carl Jung also departed from Freudian views and developed his own school of Analytical Psychology 1936 – Karen Horney published Feminine Psychology as she critiqued Freudian psychoanalytic theory 1951 – Carl Rogers published Client-Centered Therapy 1951 – Gestalt Therapy is published by Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, & Ralph Hefferline. 1953 – B.F. Skinner outlined Behavioral Therapy 1954 – Abraham Maslow helped found Humanistic Psychology 1955 – Albert Ellis began teaching methods of Rational Emotive Therapy – beginning of cognitive psychology 1959 – Victor Frankl published an overview of Existential Analysis 1965 – William Glasser published Reality Therapy 1967 – Aaron Beck published a Cognitive Model of depression

Adlerian therapy is one of the simplest theories to integrate with Christianity. According to Watts (2000), the common ground between Adler’s Individual Psychology and Christian beliefs is of great significance. Adler’s views of human nature, including believing that people can determine their future, are goal-oriented and striving for perfection, can be viewed holistically, and relationally (social interest), are all compatible with the Christian faith (Johansen, 2010). Watts (2000) emphasizes that the greatest commonality is the shared perspective on social relationships. Watts (2000) states, “The Bible affirms that humans have a three-fold relationship responsibility: to God, to others, and to themselves” (p. 320). Johansen (2010) added that Adler’s less deterministic viewpoint aligns with the Christian’s view that people have the freedom to choose, noting the Christian term free will and scripture found in Deuteronomy 30:19 (King James Version) where God says, “… I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.

Through social learning, Adler (1927, 1946) believed people had the power to change themselves. Adler (1924, 1959) termed his approach Individual Psychology to emphasize the whole person and indivisible makeup of personalities, which meant the person could not be divided up into parts as Freud believed. Individual Psychology is grounded on three main constructs: all human behavior is goal-directed and purposeful, people have within themselves a drive toward living harmoniously and contributing to social interest, and choices are influenced by the person’s social world and seen through the context of the whole person (holistic view) (Adler, 1927, 1946; Adler, 1924/1959). Adler (1927, 1946; 1924, 1959) also believed that a person must be understood in relation to and in connection with all their social systems emphasizing that a person was socially embedded, which is the Adlerian belief that people do not develop in isolation.