Personality Theories in Psychology: Alfred Adler

There are many theorists who have tried to investigate the study of theories of personality. However, in this Psychology-Online article, we will highlight a psychologist who introduced the novel concept of individual psychology to the intellectual community, we will talk about Alfred Adler, biography and theories of personality.

We'll start by talking about someone he never knew: Theodore Roosevelt. Son of Martha and Theodore and born in Manhattan on October 27, 1858; it is said that he was a particularly beautiful baby who needed practically no help to come to this world. His parents were strong, intelligent, handsome and forward-thinking. He must have had an idyllic childhood.

Index

1. The Theodore Roosevelt Story
2. Alfred Adler biography
3. Theory of individual psychology
4. Theory of personality and lifestyle
5. Theology
6. The social interest according to Adler
7. Inferiority complex
8. Psychological types
9. Childhood
10. Birth order
11. Diagnosis
12. Adler's therapy
13. Discussion on Adler's theory
14. Readings

But "Teddie", as he was called, was not as healthy as he appeared to be at first glance. He suffered from severe asthma and tended to catch colds easily; he had frequent fevers and coughs and suffered from nausea and diarrhea. He was small and skinny. His voice was very high-pitched and so he remained until his adulthood. He became a sickly young man and often had to sleep sitting in a chair due to asthma. Several times he nearly died due to lack of oxygen.

But in order not to paint the picture too black, Teddie was an active child (some would consider it hyperactive) and had a fantastic personality. He was full of curiosity regarding nature and he led a group of cousins ​​on adventures in search of mice, squirrels, snakes, frogs, and anything else that could be dissected or punctured. His repeated confinement of him due to his asthma led him to take advantage of his time on books, which he would devour throughout his life. He could be a sick child, but of course he wanted to live!

After traveling in Europe with his family, his health began to deteriorate. He had grown in height, but not in his musculature. Finally, with the help of the family doctor and seconded by his father, he was urged to weightlifting. He was 12 years old. In the same way that he did with everything he was taught, Teddie carried out the task with enthusiasm. His health improved, he became healthier and for the first time in his life he was able to go a month without an asthma attack.

When he was 13 years old, he noticed another flaw in him. He couldn't hit anything with the rifle his father had given him. When his friends read to him what was written on a blackboard (he had not realized that there was something written there), he realized that he was extremely shortsighted.

That same year, he was sent alone to the field after a severe asthma attack. On his trip he was mugged by two other boys his age. He realized that Not only could he not defend himself, but he hadn't even been able to lay a hand on them. He later announced to his father his intention to learn to box. By the time he was at Harvard, he was not only healthy Teddy Roosevelt, but a frequent champion of a wide variety of athletic competitions.

The rest, as many say, is history. "Teedie" Roosevelt became a great New York Assemblyman; a cowboy from North Dakota; New York Police Commissioner; Assistant Secretary of the Navy; Lieutenant Colonel of the "Rough Riders"; Governor of New York and author of "best sellers"; all this at the age of 40. After the death of American President William McKinley in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt assumed the position of the youngest President of the United States.

How is it possible that someone so sick could become such a vigorous, healthy and successful person?. Why do some children, whether sickly or not, thrive and others get scared? Is it a particular impulse of Roosevelt or is it something that underlies all of us? These types of questions were the questions that intrigued a young Viennese doctor named Alfred Adler and that would lead him to develop his theory called Individual psychology.

Alfred Adler was born in the suburbs of Vienna on February 7, 1870. He was the second boy of three children, the fruit of a marriage between a Jewish grain merchant and his wife. As a child, Alfred suffered from rickets, which kept him from walking until he was four years old. At five, he nearly died of pneumonia. It was at this age that he decided that when he was older he would be a doctor.

Alfred was an ordinary child as a student and preferred playing in the yard to embarking on studies. He was very popular, active, and outgoing. They all knew him for trying to outdo his older brother Sigmund.

He got your medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1895. During his years of instruction, he joined a group of socialist students, within which he would meet the would be his wife, Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein, an intellectual and social activist who came from Russia to study in Vienna. They married in 1897 and eventually had four children, two of whom became psychiatrists.

He started his medical specialty as ophthalmologist, but promptly switched to general practice, establishing his consultation in a low-income part of Vienna, close to the Prader, a combination of amusement park and circus. Therefore, his clients included circus people, and by virtue of these experiences authors such as Furtmuller (1964) have suggested that weaknesses and strengths of these people were what led him to develop his reflections on organic inferiorities and compensation.

Later he turned to psychiatry and in 1907 he was invited to join Freud's discussion group. After writing several articles on organic inferiority, which were quite compatible with the Freudian point of view, he first wrote an article on the aggressive instinct, which was not approved by Freud. He then wrote an article on children's feelings of inferiority, in which he suggested that Freud's sexual notions should be taken more metaphorically than literally.

Although Freud himself named Adler President of the Vienna Analytical Society and co-editor of its journal, he never ceased his criticism. A debate was then organized between the followers of Adler and Freud, which resulted in the creation, along with 11 other members of the organization, of the Society for Free Psychoanalysis in 1911. This organization established the headquarters of the Society for Individual Psychology the following year.

During the First World War, Adler served as a medic in the Austrian Navy, first on the Russian front and then in a children's hospital. Thus, he had the direct opportunity to see the ravages that the war produced, so that his vision was increasingly directed towards the concept of social interest. He believed that if humanity was to survive, it would have to change its habits.

After the war, he embarked on various projects that included the training of clinics associated with state schools and teacher training. In 1926, he traveled to the United States to teach and eventually accepted a visiting position at the Long Island College of Medicine. In 1934, Adler and his family leave Vienna for good. On May 28, 1937, while teaching at the University of Aberdeen, he died of a heart attack.

The desire for perfectionism

Alfred Adler postulates a single "drive" or motivational force behind all of them our behaviors and experiences. Over time, his theory was transformed into a more mature one, this instinct was renamed, desire for perfectionism. It constitutes that desire to develop our potentials to the maximum in order to reach our ideal more and more. It is, as you can see, very similar to the more popular idea of ​​self actualization.

The point is that "perfection" and "ideal" are problematic words. On the one hand, they are very positive goals, in fact, shouldn't we all pursue an ideal? However, in psychology, these words sound like a negative connotation. Perfection and ideals are, by definition, things that we will never achieve. In fact, many people live sadly and painfully trying to be perfect. As you may know, other authors such as Karen Horney and Carl Rogers emphasize this problem. Adler talks about it too, but he conceives this negative type of idealism as a perversion of a far more positive conception. We will come back to this later.

The quest for perfection was not the first phrase Adler used to designate this motivational force. Remember that his original phrase was aggressive drive, which arises when other drives such as the need to eat, to satisfy our sexual needs, to do things or to be loved are frustrated. The name assertive drive would be more appropriate, since we consider aggression to be physical and negative. But it was precisely this idea of ​​the aggressive drive that motivated the first friction with Freud. It was evident that the latter was afraid that his sexual drive would be relegated to the background within psychoanalytic theory. Despite Freud's reluctance, he himself spoke of something very similar much later in his life: the death drive.

The desire to excel

Another word Adler used to refer to this basic motivation was compensation or desire to excel. Since we all have problems, inferiorities in one way or another, conflicts, etc.; especially in his early writings, Adler believed that we can achieve our personalities as long as we can (or cannot) compensate for or overcome these problems. This idea remains unchanged throughout his theory, but it tends to be rejected as a label, for the simple reason that it seems that what makes us people are our problems.

One of Adler's earliest phrases was the male protest. He was observing something quite obvious in his culture (and by no means absent from ours): the boys were situated in a more advantageous position than the girls. Boys wanted, sometimes desperately, to be seen as strong, aggressive, or in control (male) and not weak, passive, or dependent (female). Of course, the point is that men are somehow basically better than women. After all, they have the power, the education, and apparently the talent and motivation to do "great things" and women don't.
Even today we can hear some older people commenting on this when they refer to little boys and girls. If a boy demands or screams seeking to do what he wants (male protest!), Then he is a boy who reacts naturally (or normal). If the little girl is quiet and shy, she is fostering her femininity. If this occurs with a boy, it is cause for concern, as the boy appears effeminate or may end up in a sissy. And if we meet assertive girls who seek to do what they believe, they are "tomboys" and a way will be found to abandon that position.

But Adler did not believe that male assertiveness and his success in the world were due to some innate superiority. He rather believed that boys are educated to achieve assertiveness in life and girls are removed from this approach. However, both boys and girls come into the world with the same capacity to protest. Since many people misunderstand Adler on this point, they constrain the use of the phrase.

The desire for superiority

The last phrase he used before raising his desire for perfectionism was desire for superiority. The use of this phrase reveals one of the philosophical roots of his ideas: Friederich Nietzsche developed a philosophy that considered the will to power the basic motive of human life. Although the desire for superiority refers to the desire to be better, it also includes the idea that we want to be better than others, rather than better in ourselves. Later, Adler tried to use the term more in reference to more insane or neurotic pursuits.

The whole play on words that Adler uses refers us to a theory of personality far more distant from that represented by Freud. Freud's theory was what today we would call a reductionist theory: he tried throughout his life to retract all his concepts to physiological levels. Even though he finally admitted his failure, life is nevertheless explained on the basis of physiological needs. Furthermore, Freud tended to anchor the subject in smaller theoretical concepts such as the Id, the Ego, and the Superego.

Adler was influenced by the writings of Jan Smuts, the South African philosopher and statesman. He defended that to understand people, we must do it more as unified sets instead of doing it considering them as a collection of bits and pieces, and that we must do it in the context of their environment, both physical as social. This posture is called holism and Adler had a lot to do with it.

First, to reflect the idea that we should see others as a whole rather than in parts, the author decided to designate this psychological approach as individual psychology. The word "individual" literally means "the undivided."

Second, instead of talking about the personality of a subject in the sense of internal traits, structures, dynamics, conflicts and so on, he preferred to speak in terms of life style (today Lifestyle). Lifestyle means how you live your life; how you handle your problems and interpersonal relationships. We go on to quote in his own words how he explained this: "The lifestyle of a tree is the individuality of a tree expressing itself and molding itself in an environment. We recognize a style when we see it set against a different background than we expected, for what we are aware then that each tree has a pattern of life and is not just a mere mechanical reaction to the environment".

This last point (that lifestyle is not "merely a mechanical reaction") is a second view in which Adler differs considerably from Freud. For the latter, things that happened in the past, such as childhood trauma, determine who you are in the present. Adler views motivation as a matter of inclination and movement toward the future, rather than being driven, mechanically, by the past. We are driven toward our goals, our purposes, our ideals. This is called teleology.

Drawing things from the past into the future has certain dramatic effects. Given that the future has not yet arrived, a teleological approach to motivation involves splitting the necessity of things. If we use a mechanistic model, cause leads to effect: if a, b, and c occur, then x, y, and z should, of necessity, occur as well. But we do not need to achieve our goals or fulfill our ideals and in fact, they can change in the process. Teleology recognizes that life is hard and uncertain, but there is always a place for change.

Another great influence on Adler's thinking was that of the philosopher Hans Vaihinger, who wrote a book entitled The Philosophy of "As If"(The "As Yes" Philosophy). Vaihinger believed that the ultimate truth would always be beyond us, but that for practical purposes, we needed to create partial truths. His particular interest was science, so he offers us examples of partial truths to through the existence of protons and electrons, light waves, gravity as a distortion of space and the rest. Contrary to what many of us non-scientists tend to assume, these are not things that someone has seen or proven to exist: they are useful constructs. For now, they work; they allow us to do science and hopefully lead us to other more useful and better constructs. We use them "as if" they were real. This author calls these partial truths fictions(Currently there is an entire ideological debate around quantum physics, where there is a certain uncertainty with regarding the destiny of an entity without the intervention of an observing subject that modifies this destiny with their perceptions sensory. N.T.)

Both authors postulated that we all use these fictions in everyday life. We live with the belief that the world will be here tomorrow, as if we fully know what is good and bad; as if everything we see is really like this, and so on. Adler called this trend fictional finalism. We could understand the phrase better if we take an example: many people behave as if there is a heaven or a hell in their personal future. Of course, there could be a heaven and a hell, but most of us don't think of it as proven fact. This position makes it a "fiction" in the Vaihingerian and Adlerian sense. And finalism refers to the teleology of it: fiction rests in the future, and at the same time, influences our behavior in the present.

Adler added that at the center of each of our lifestyles, some of these fictions rest, on the one related to who we are and where we are going.

The second most important concept only for the pursuit of perfection is the idea of social interest or social sentiment (originally called as Gemeinschaftsgefuhl or "community feeling"). Maintaining the holistic idea of ​​him, it is easy to see that hardly anyone can achieve the quest for perfection without considering their social environment. As social animals that we are, we not only cannot have eagerness, but even exist. Even the most decisive people are in fact in a social context.

Adler believed that social concern was not a matter simply acquired or learned: it was a combination of both; that is, she is based on an innate disposition, but must be breastfed in order for her to survive. The fact that it is innate is clearly illustrated by the way a baby establishes a relationship of sympathy for others without having been taught to do so. We can see that when one baby cries in the neonatal ward, everyone else starts crying too. Or like us, when we enter a room where everyone is laughing, we begin to laugh too (In Spanish slang, there is the phrase that "laughter is contagious". N.T.).

As we can see how generous and friendly children can be to others, we have examples that illustrate how selfish and cruel they can be. Although instinctively we can consider that what hurts others can also do it to us, and vice versa, at the same Time we are able to know that, faced with the need to hurt that one or to do it to me, I choose to do it to him always.

Therefore, the tendency to empathize must be supported by parents and the culture in general. Even without taking into account the possibilities of conflict between my needs and those of the other, empathy understands the feeling of pain in others and of course in a harsh world this can quickly become overwhelming. It's a lot easier to ignore that unpleasant feeling, unless society is founded on empathic beliefs.

One misunderstanding Adler wanted to avoid was that social interest was a certain form of extraversion. Americans in particular tend to view social concern as a matter of being open and friendly; of patting on the back and treating others by their first name. It is true that some people express their social interest in this way, but it is no less true that others use the same behaviors to pursue a personal interest. Ultimately, what Adler meant by interest, concern, or social sentiment was not referring to particular social behaviors, but to a much broader sense of care for the other, for the family, for the community, for society, for humanity, even for itself life. Social concern is a matter of being useful to others.

On the other hand, for Adler the true definition of mental illness lies in the lack of social care. All failures (including neurosis, psychosis, criminality, alcoholism, childhood problems, suicide, perversions, and prostitution) occur due to a lack of social interest: their goal of success is aimed at personal superiority, and their triumphs have meaning only for them themselves.

Well, here we are; being "pushed" to develop a fulfilling life, to achieve absolute perfection; towards self-actualization. And yet some of us "failures" end up terribly dissatisfied, badly flawed, and far from self-actualizing. And all this because we lack social interest, or better, because we are very interested in ourselves. And what is it that makes us so self-centered?

Adler responds that it is a matter of being oversaturated by our inferiority. If we are managing ourselves well, if we feel competent, we can allow ourselves to think of others. But if life is taking away the best of us, then our attention becomes more and more focused on ourselves.

Obviously, anyone suffers from inferiority in one way or another. For example, Adler begins his theoretical work by talking about organ inferiority, which is nothing more than the fact that each of us has weak and strong parts with respect to anatomy or physiology. Some of us are born with heart murmurs, or develop heart problems early in life. Others have weak lungs or kidneys, or liver problems in childhood. Some of us suffer from stuttering or lisping. Others have diabetes or asthma or polio. There are also those with weak eyes, or with hearing difficulties or poor muscle mass. Some others have the innate tendency to be strong and big; others to be skinny. Some of us are retarded; others are deformed. Some are impressively tall and some are terribly short, and so on.

Adler noted that many people respond to these organic inferiorities with a compensation. Somehow they overcome their deficiencies: the lower organ can become stronger and even stronger than the others; or other organs can be overdeveloped to assume the function of the lower one; or the person can psychologically compensate for the organic problem by developing certain skills or even certain personality types. There are, as you all know, many examples of people who manage to become great figures when they did not even dream that they could do it. (Take as a well-known example the case of Stephen Hopkins. N.T.).

However, unfortunately, there are also people who cannot cope with their difficulties, and they live lives of chronic displeasure. I would venture to guess that our forward-thinking and optimistic society seriously dismisses this group.

But Adler soon realized that this was only part of the story. There are even more people with psychological inferiorities. Some of us have been told that we are stupid, or ugly, or weak. Some of us come to believe that we are simply not good. At school, they test us over and over again and teach us results that tell us that we are not as good as the other student. Or we are degraded by our shins or our bad posture, only to find ourselves without friends or a partner. Or they force us to belong to the basketball team, where we wait to see which team is going to be our opponent; the one that will crush us. In these examples, it is not a question of organic inferiority that is at stake (we are not really deformed, retarded or weak) but we are inclined to believe that we are. Once again, some of us make up for our inferiority by being better in particular. Or we get better in other ways, even in spite of maintaining our sense of inferiority. And there are some who will never develop minimal self-esteem at all.

If the above has not yet removed your personality, then we are faced with a much more general form of inferiority: The natural inferiority of children. All children, by nature, smaller, weaker, and less intellectually and socially competent than the adults around them. Adler suggested that if we stop to observe their toys, games and fantasies; They all have one thing in common: the desire to grow up, to be older, to be adults. This type of compensation is truly identical to the quest for perfection! However, many children grow up feeling that there will always be others who are better than them.

If we are overwhelmed by the forces of inferiority, whether they are fixed in our body, or through the feeling of being handicapped with respect to others or we simply have problems in growth, we will develop a Inferiority complex. Going back to my childhood, I can identify several causal sources of future inferiority complexes: physically, I always tended to be rather chunky, with true "fat boy" stages. Also, since I was born in the Netherlands, I didn't grow up with the skills to play basketball or baseball or football in my genes. Finally, my parents' artistic talents often left me (unintentionally) with the feeling that I would never be as good as them. So, as I got older, I became shy and sad, concentrating on what I knew I was really good at: school. It took me a long time to achieve self-worth.

If you hadn't been a "super slow", you might not have had to develop one of the most common inferiority complexes: Math phobia! Maybe it started because he could never remember how much 7 times 8 were. Every time there was something he couldn't remember. Every year I felt further removed from mathematics, until we reached the critical point: algebra. How could you expect to know what "x" was if you didn't even know what 7 times 8 was?

Quite a few people actually believe that they are not cut out for mathematics, considering that it is because some part of the brain is missing or something. I would like to convey right now that anyone can do math, as long as they have been properly taught and when they are ready to do it. Taking the above into account, let's imagine how many people have stopped being scientists, teachers, businessmen, or even just going to school, due to their inferiority complex.

In this sense, the inferiority complex is not just a small problem; it is a neurosis, meaning by this that it is a considerable problem. One becomes shy and shy, insecure, indecisive, cowardly, submissive, and so on. We begin to rely on people just to lead us and even manipulate them to ensure our lives: "I'm good / smart / strong / handsome / sexy /; Don't you think? " Eventually, we become the sinkhole for others and can see ourselves as copies of others. No one can maintain this handicapped posture for long!

Aside from compensation and the inferiority complex, other people respond to inferiority in another way: with a superiority complex. This complex seeks to hide your inferiority through pretending to be superior. If we think we are weak, one way to feel strong is by making everyone else feel even weaker. Those people we call fools, braggarts, and those cheap dictators are the best example of this complex. More subtle examples are those who seek to attract attention through drama; or those who feel more powerful when committing crimes and those who ridicule others in by virtue of your gender, race, ethnic origin, religious beliefs, sexual orientations, weight, height, etc. Even more subtle examples are those who hide their feelings of worthlessness in illusions gained from alcohol and drugs.

Although for Adler all neuroses can be considered as a matter of social interest insufficient, he did make a distinction into three types, based on the different energy levels that used.

The first of these types is the dominant guy. From their childhood, these people develop a tendency to be aggressive and domineering towards others. Their energy (the force of their impulses that determines their personal power) is so great that they take what lies ahead in order to achieve this mastery. The most energetic end up being sadists and bravado; the less energetic hurt others by hurting themselves, such as alcoholics, addicts, and suicides.

The second is the scholarly guy. They are sensitive subjects who have developed a shell around them that protects them, but they must rely on others to solve life's difficulties. They have a low energy level and therefore become dependent on stronger subjects. When they feel oversaturated or overwhelmed, they develop what we understand as typical neurotic symptoms: phobias, obsessions and compulsions, generalized anxiety, hysteria, amnesias, and so on, depending on the individual details of your life.

The third type is the avoidant. These are the ones with the lowest energy levels and can only survive if they avoid what it's like to live, especially other people. When pushed to the limit, they tend to become psychotic and eventually withdraw into their own inner world.

There is a fourth type as well; it is the socially useful guy. This would be that of the healthy person, the one who has both energy and social interest. It should be noted that if one lacks energy, one cannot really have a social interest since we will be unable to do anything for anyone.

Adler pointed out that these four types closely resembled those proposed by the ancient Greeks, who also observed that some people were always sad, others were angry, and so on. But in their case, they attributed such temperaments (of the same terminological root as temperature) to the relative presence of four bodily fluids called moods.

• If someone has a lot of yellow bile, it would be choleric (a dry, visceral person) and rabid most of the time. The choleric would be, basically, like the dominant one. He would more or less correspond to the hefty guy.
• If someone else has a lot of phlegm, it would be phlegmatic (cold and distant)? a bit stupid. He would be, vulgarly speaking, the guy who leans on everyone.
• If someone else has a lot of black bile (and we certainly don't know what the Greeks meant by this) this will be melancholic (cold and dry) and is a subject tending to be sad all the time. This would be like the avoidant type.
• And finally, if there is a person who has more blood than the rest of the humors, he will be a person in a good mood or sanguine (warm and loving). This warm and friendly subject would represent the socially adapted or helpful type.

Before continuing, a word first of all about the Adlerian types: Adler fiercely defended that each person is an individual subject with his own unique lifestyle. Therefore, the idea of ​​types is for him only a heuristic tool, meaning a useful fiction, not an absolute reality.

In the same way as Freud, Adler understood personality or lifestyle as something established from an early age. In fact, the prototype of their lifestyle tends to be fixed around the age of five. New experiences, rather than changing that prototype, tend to be interpreted in terms of that prototype; in other words, they "force" those experiences to fit preconceived notions in the same way that new acquisitions are "forced" into our stereotype.

Adler argued that there were three basic childhood situations that would most of the time lead to a failed lifestyle. The first is that of which we have already spoken on several occasions: organic inferiorities, as well as childhood illnesses. In Adler's words, children with these deficiencies are "overloaded" children, and if no one cares to direct their attention to others, they will keep directing it to themselves. Most will go through life with a strong sense of inferiority; some others may make up for it with a superiority complex. They can only be compensated with the important dedication of their loved ones.

The second is the one corresponding to the mime or consent. Through the action of others, many children are taught that they can take without giving anything in return. Your wishes become orders for others. This posture sounds wonderful until we observe that the spoiled child fails in two ways: first, he does not learn to do things for himself and later discovers that he is truly inferior; and second, he does not learn to deal with others either since he can only relate by giving orders. And society responds to spoiled people in only one way: with hatred.

The third is the negligence. A child neglected by his guardians or abused learns what the spoiled, although in a much more harsh and more direct: they learn about inferiority as they are constantly shown that they are worthless any; They adopt self-centeredness because they are taught not to trust anyone. If one has not known love, we will not develop the capacity to love later. We must emphasize here that the neglected child not only includes the orphan and the victims of abuse, but also to those children whose parents are never there and to others who have been raised in a rigid and authoritarian.

Adler must be taken into account as the first theorist to include not only the influence of the mother, father, and other adults in the child's life, but also of the child's brothers and sisters. His considerations of the effects of siblings and the order in which they were born is probably what Adler is best known for. However, I must warn you that Adler considered these ideas also as heuristic concepts (useful fictions) that contribute to understanding others, but should not be taken too seriously.

• The only son it is more likely than others to be spoiled, with all the dire repercussions that we have discussed. After all, the parents of an only child have bet and won on only one number, to put it crudely, and are more likely to pay special attention (sometimes anxiety-filled care) to their pride and joy. If the parents are violent or abusive, the only child will have to face the abuse alone.
• The first child life begins as an only child, with all the attention falling on him. Too bad that just when things are getting comfortable, the second child arrives and "dethrons" the first. At first, the former might struggle to regain his position; he might, for example, start acting like a baby (after all, it seems to work with the baby behaving like he does, right?), although he will only find reluctance and warning to grow already!. Some become disobedient and rebellious; others sullen and withdrawn. Adler believed that the first children were more willing to develop problems than the next. On the bright side, most first children are precocious and tend to be relatively more lonely (individual) than other children in the family.
• The second son He is immersed in a very different situation: he has a first brother who "feels the steps", so he tends to be very competitive and is constantly trying to outperform the major, which they often do, but many feel as if the race for power is never fully realized and spend their lives dreaming of a competition that leads to nowhere. part. Other "middle" guys tend to be similar to the latter, although they each look at different "competitors."
• The last son he is more likely to be pampered in families with more than one. After all, he is the only one who will not be dethroned! Therefore, these are the second children with the greatest chance of problems after the first child. On the other hand, the minor can also feel an important inferiority, with all the others greater than him and therefore "superior". But, with all these "trail markers" ahead, the little one can outdo them too.

Anyway, who is truly the first, second or youngest of the boys is not as easy as it seems. If there is too much time distance between them, they don't necessarily have to look the same as if this range were shorter between them.

With regard to my children, there is a difference between my first and second daughter of 8 and 3 years between this and the third: this would make my first daughter to be an only child; the second as the first, and the second as the last. And if some of the children are boys and other girls, there is also a marked difference. A second female child will not take her older brother as a competitor; a boy in a family of girls may feel more like an only child; and so on. As with the entire Adler system, the order of birth must be understood in the context of the special personal circumstances of each subject.

In order to discover the "fictions" on which our lifestyles rest, Adler would dwell on a wide variety of things, such as the order of birth, for example. First, she would examine him and study his medical history for any organic roots responsible for his problem. A serious illness, for example, could have side effects that closely mimic neurotic and psychotic symptoms.

In the same first session with you, I would ask you about your childhood memories earlier. In these memories, Adler would not be looking so much for the truth of the facts, but rather indicators of that initial prototype of his present life. If your early memories include security and a high degree of care, you could be signaling to us a pampering or consent. If you recall some degree of aggressive competition with your older brother, it might suggest the intense anxieties of the second child and the dominant personality type. And if finally, the memories of him involve negligence and hiding under the laundry room, it could suggest serious inferiority and avoidance.

I would also ask for any child problem what he might have had: bad eating or toilet habits could indicate how he has controlled his parents; fears, such as the dark or being alone, may suggest pampering or consent; stuttering can be associated with anxiety at the time of learning to speak; a major assault and robbery could be signs of a superiority complex; daydreaming, isolation, laziness, and lying down all day would be ways of avoiding one's own inferiority.

In the same way as for Freud and Jung, Dreams (and daydreams) were important to Adler, although he approached them more directly. For the latter, dreams were an expression of lifestyle and instead of contradicting his daytime feelings, they were unified with the subject's conscious life. Dreams often represent the goals we have and the problems we face to achieve them. If you don't remember any dreams, Adler doesn't give up: Get into fantasizing right then and there; after all, your fantasies will also reflect your lifestyle.

Adler would also pay attention to the way you express yourself; his posture, the way he clasps his hands, the gestures he uses, how he moves, his "body language" as we say today. Adler, for example, has observed that pampered people tend to lean on something in the office. Even his own postures when sleeping can help: a person who sleeps in a fetal position and with the head covered by the sheet is clearly different from that which is spread all over the bed completely without clothe themselves.

He would also call her attention exogenous factors; those events that sparked the emergence of the symptoms that he has. Adler contributes several of them that he considers common: sexual problems like uncertainty, guilt, the first time, impotence and others; the woman's own problems such as motherhood and childbirth, the beginning of menstruation (in psychiatric terms, menarche, N.T.) and its end (menopause, N.T.); his love life such as flirtations, dates, commitments, marriage and divorces; his work and educational life, including school, college, exams, career decisions and the own work, as well as dangers that have threatened your life or the loss of loved ones.

Last but not least, Adler was open to that more pseudo-artistic and less rational and scientific part of the diagnosis. He suggested that we not ignore empathy, intuition and simply, deductive work.

There are considerable differences between Freud's therapy and Adler's. First, Adler preferred to have the client sitting across from him, face to face. Later, he would be very concerned about not appearing authoritarian to the patient. In fact, he warned therapists not to let the patient place him in an authority figure role, since he allows the patient to play a role that is very He has probably played many times before: the patient may position you as a savior who can be attacked when we inevitably reveal our humanity.

To the extent that they belittle us, they feel as though they are growing up, raising their neurotic lifestyles as well.

This would be, in essence, the explanation that Adler gave to the resistance. When the patient forgets appointments, he is late, he demands special treatment or becomes generally stubborn and uncooperative he is not, as he thought Freud, a question of repression, but rather a resistance as a sign of the patient's lack of courage to face his lifestyle neurotic.

The patient must come to understand the nature of his lifestyle and his roots in his self-centered fictions. This understanding (or "insight") cannot be forced: If we simply say to a patient "Look, this is his problem ", he will simply turn back looking for new ways to maintain his fantasies. Therefore, we must bring the patient to a certain affective state that he likes to listen to and wants to understand. Only from here can he be influenced to live what he has understood (Ansbacher and Ansbacher, 1956, p. 335). It is the patient, not the therapist, who will ultimately be responsible for healing.

Finally, the therapist must motivate the patient, which means awakening his social interest, and the energy that accompanies it. From a genuine human relationship with the patient, the therapist provides a basic form of social interest that can then be transferred to others.

Although Adler's theory seems to be less interesting that Freud's with his sexuality, or Jung's with his mythology, probably draws one's attention as being the most based on common sense of three. Students are generally more sympathetic to Adler's theory. In fact, a few personality theorists also like it. Maslow, for example, once said that the older he got, the more reason Adler seemed to have. If you have a certain notion of the theoretical branch of Carl Rogers, you will have realized how similar they are. And a large number of students of personality theories have observed that the so-called Neo-Freudians (Horney, Fromm, and Sullivan) should in fact be called Neo-Adlerians.

Problems

Criticisms of Adler tend to linger on the question of whether or not his theory is, or to what degree, scientific. The mainstream of psychology today is directed towards the experimental, which means that the concepts a theory uses must be measurable and manipulable. Therefore, this approach assumes that an experimental orientation prefers physical or behavioral variables.

As we saw, Adler uses basic concepts far removed from the physical and the behavioral: Desire for perfection?; How is that measured? What about compensation? And feelings of inferiority? And social interest? To this is added that the experimental method also establishes a basic assumption: that all things operate in terms of cause and effect. Adler would of course agree that this is so for physical phenomena, but he would flatly deny that people function on this principle. Rather, he takes the teleological path, establishing that people are "determined" by their ideals, goals, values, and "final fantasies or fictions." Teleology extracts the necessity of things: a person does not have to respond in a certain way to a specific circumstance; a person has choices to decide; a person creates his own personality or lifestyle. From an experimental perspective these questions are illusions that a scientist, even a personality theorist, does not take into account.

Even if one opens up to the teleological stance, there are critics that are based on the unscientificity of the Adlerian theory: many of the details of his theory are too anecdotal, that is, they are valid in particular cases but not necessarily as general as Adler held. For example, the first child (even broadly defined) does not necessarily feel displaced, nor does the second necessarily feel competitive.

Still, Adler would easily respond to these criticisms. First, as we just mentioned, if one accepts teleology, we don't need to know anything about human personality. And second, wasn't Adler clear enough in his investigation of fictional finalism? All concepts of it are useful constructs, not absolute truths, and science is just a matter of incessantly creating useful constructs. So if you have better ideas, let's hear them out!

• If you want to know more about Alfred Adler's theory, read directly Ansbacher and Ansbacher's book The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. These authors select many parts of their writings, organize them, and add additional comments. They introduce many of your ideas in a very accessible way.
• Adler's own books include: Understanding Human Nature, Problems of Neurosis, The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology, and Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind.
• You can also find very recent material from Adler at: The International Journal of Individual Psychology.

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

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