The Drive for Self : Alfred Adler and the Founding of Individual Psychology

As the founding father of Individual Psychology, ranked alongside Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as one of the world's most inspired social thinkers, Alfred Adler fashioned a new understanding of personality that took the search for self out of the shadows of Freudian gloom and placed it firmly in the hands of the individual. Here at last is the first major biography of a man who has had a profound influence not only on modern and popular psychology but on the very way we think about ourselves.
From Adler's early life in fin de siecle Vienna, to his break with psychoanalysis and later life in America, The Drive for Self offers a compelling portrait of both the man and his times. An early intimate of Freud and his inner circle, Adler was one of the original four participants in the Wednesday Psychological Society that became the nucleus for worldwide psychoanalysis. Impressed with Adler's brilliance, Freud referred many patients to him, including his own brother-in-law and by 1910 Adler was appointed president of their psychoanalytic group and editor of their professional journal. Yet slowly and steadily, the relationship between the two brilliant men deteriorated into bitter and lifelong enmity, as Adler refused to toe the psychoanalytic line. When Adler directly challenged basic psychoanalytic dogma about unconscious motivation and childhood sexuality, an outraged Freud removed him from his presidential and editorial posts. Hoffman throws new light on Freud by examining in depth the intense and often venomous relationship that existed between the two men - revealing both Freud's misuse of power and Adler's courage in defying both Freud and his powerful circle to begin his own school of thought.
Individual Psychology ultimately reflects the life of its founder. Optimistic at its core, it focuses on the uniqueness of each person, describing us as primarily social, not biological beings. Far from being driven by forces we cannot see or control, we actively direct and create our own growth, our own future. Such is the way Adler lived: From his middle-class Jewish boyhood as a small sickly child in Vienna and an early encounter with death, to his pledge to become a healer and eventual achievement of international recognition, Adler overcame feelings of inferiority and strove for a sense of accomplishment, or what he called superiority. Here in Adler's life is the basis for so many of his theories and terms, including such popular phrases as the inferiority complex, over-compensation, and life-style, that now permeate modern psychology, education, psychotherapy, consulting, and social work, as well as our very perceptions of our own lives.
With a cast of characters that includes Trotsky and Nijinsky, and set in a time of great social upheaval and change in both Europe and America, The Drive for Self is a fascinating read. Pulling from hitherto unpublished archival materials as well as extensive interviews with Adler's two surviving children, Dr. Hoffman has given us an intense and compelling portrait of a man whose impassioned life's work has proven beneficial to the world.

Hoffman (The Right to Be Human, 1988, etc.) throws steady, if hardly sparkling, light on a career overshadowed by Freud's. A gift for coining apt and memorable names for his governing psychological concepts--``inferiority complex,'' ``sibling rivalry''--has meant that Alfred Adler's ideas currently enjoy greater renown than the man himself. But during his lifetime, Adler's accessible approach to child psychology, education, and social adjustment found a receptive audience, especially in the US, where his optimism (``Anyone can become anything,'' he proclaimed) struck more chords than did Freud's darker vision. Much to his own frustration, Adler was popularly associated with Freudian thought, from which he in fact broke well before WW I. Like Freud, Adler was a largely assimilated Viennese Jew who died abroad in exile from a hostile political climate. His movement, ``Individual Psychology,'' emphasized individual experience (rather than the unconscious drives posited by orthodox Freudianism) and denied the fundamental importance of the libido. Furthermore, whereas for Freud our tragic dilemma was that civilization could thrive only by denying and repressing our most basic urges, Adler believed humans to be instinctively social. In his view, what inhibited social energies or diverted them into inadequacy or aggression were ``mistakes'' in early childhood that led to neurotic overcompensation for a burning sense of inferiority, mistakes that could be set right through patient attention by parents, therapists, and educators. Adler's convictions were grounded too in social democratic principles that saw individual pathologies in the context of the social and economic whole. Hoffman chronicles Adler's life and ideas dutifully, recapitulating the familiar cultural landscape of fin de siŠcle Vienna and interwar America in a serviceable but rather pedestrian style marred by occasional awkwardness. A worthwhile effort, covering important ground competently. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Although Alfred Adler's name is not as widely known as the man he was influenced by, Sigmund Freud, his work and ideas have shaped Western society's view of the mind. Birth order, the inferiority complex, lifestyle, and the pampered or spoiled child figure prominently in Adler's main postulates. Adler became closely associated with Freud, but irreconcilable differences eventually led to the parting of ways. Adler thought Freud's theories were too negative and hopeless, and believed that people have the inborn capacity for social feeling, for sharing among and with others. Hoffman (Visions of Innocence, 1992) offers a thorough biography of this important figure in psychology. Brian McCombie

The earliest of Freud's adherents to break away and form his own system of psychological theory, Adler is responsible for such common concepts as the inferiority complex, the importance of birth order, and the "spoiled" child. Despite the fact that his central notion-that we humans develop from an innate desire to interact with others-is far more central to contemporary psychology than is Freud's idea of libidinal drives, no major biography of Adler has been written, perhaps because he did not establish a cohesive school of followers. Unfortunately, this book does not completely fill this gap. Perhaps because Adler was a talker, not a writer, Hoffman's study does not convey much sense of the man, nor does it systematically describe his theories. Josef Rattner's Alfred Adler (LJ 5/1/83) and Manes Soerber's Masks of Loneliness: Alfred Adler in Perspective (Macmillan, 1974) both offer more complete expositions of Adler's "individual psychology" accompanied by some biographical information. Not an essential purchase.
Mary Ann Hughes, Neill P.L., Pullman, Wash.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.