Adler:

Individual Psychology

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 Overview of Individual Psychology
Adler: known with his individual psychology
Optimistic view of people and emphasized social interest
 a feeling of oneness w/ all humankind
Differed from Freud in four ways
Freud Adler
People motivated by sex and People motivated by social
agression influences  Striving for superiority or
success
People have little or no choice in People responsible for who they are
shaping their personality
Behavior shaped by past Behavior shaped by people’s view
experiences of future
Emphasis on unconscious Consciousness important
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 Biography of Alfred Adler
• Born in a Viennese suburb on February 7, 1870
• Second son from seven children of middle class Jewish
parents
• As a young boy, Adler was weak and sickly and at age 5,
he nearly died of pneumonia
o He overheard the doctor tell his father that “The boy is lost” and the
death of his younger brother motivated him to become a physician
• He developed a trusting relationship with his father but he
did not feel very close to his mother. Adler was extremely
jealous of his older brother, Sigmund, eventhough he was
much more famous than his brother like many
secondborn children, continued the rivalry w/ his older
brother into middle age

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 Biography of Alfred Adler
• Adler’s early years were characterized by struggling to
overcome illnesses and feelings of inferiority. He felt inferior
to his brother and peers; which made him determined to
compensate for his physical limitations, and gradually he
overcame many of his limitations  had an impact on the
formation of his theory.
o Adler is an example of a person who shaped his own life as opposed to
having it determined by fate. His teacher advised his father to prepare
Adler to be a shoemaker but not much else.
• Received his medical degree in 1895
• Member of the Wednesday Psychological Society  a
meeting in Freud’s home w/ 3 other Viennese physician to
discuss psychology and neuropathology
o Adler never considered Freud as his mentor & the two men never shared
a warm personal relationship

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 Biography of Alfred Adler
• Published Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical
Compensation in 1907
o Assumed that physical deficiencies-not sex-formed the foundation for
human motivation
• Charter member of Vienna Psychoanalitic Society
• Rivalry with Freud led to his departure from the group
o w/ 9 other former members of the Freudian circle, he formed the
Society for Free Psychoanalytic Study  a name that irritated Freud
• Soon he changed the name of his organization to the
Society for Individual Psychology  a name that clearly
indicated he had abandoned psychoanalysis
• Interrupted his theoretical work to serve as a medical officer
in the Austrian army during WW I  more demonstrated his
social interest, especially in children
• Died in Scotland in 1937
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 Introduction to Adlerian Theory
Principles of Individual Psychology
1. Striving for success or superiority is force behind
behavior
2. Subjective perceptions shape behavior
3. Personality is unified and self-consistent
4. Value of all human activity must be seen from social
interest perspective
5. Personality structure becomes one’s style of life
6. Style of life molded by creative power

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Striving for Success or Superiority
1. The one dynamic force behind people’s behavior is the
striving for success or superiority.
• Individual psychology  everyone begins life with physical
deficiencies that activate feelings of inferiority feelings that
motivate a person to strive for either superiority or success.
o Psychologically unhealthy individuals strive for personal
superiority
o Psychologically healthy people seek success for all humanity
• Inferiority feelings seen as normal  every individual has
some area of deficiency that will lead to feelings of inferiority
• In order to compensate for such feelings, a person will be
motivated to strive for mastery, competence, or success: a
basic striving for ‘superiority’ or success, but in an arrogant
way
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 Striving for Success or Superiority
• Striving for superiority  for people who strive
for personal superiority over others
• Striving for success  actions of people who are
motivated by highly developed social interest
• Regardless of the motivation for striving, each
individual is guided by a final goal.
• Striving:
o The final goal of behavior
o Compensation
o For personal superiority
o For success
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 Striving for Success or Superiority
Striving: The final goal
• People strive toward a final goal of either personal
superiority or the goal of success for all humankind
• Each person has the power to create a personalized
fictional goal, constructed out of the raw materials provided
by heredity and environment
o The goal is neither genetically nor environmentally determined
• It is the product of creative power  people’s ability to
freely shape their behavior and their own personality
• By the time children reach 4 or 5 years of age, their creative
power has developed  they can set their final goal
• A person’s final goal reduces the pain of inferiority feeling
and points to the direction of either superiority or success
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 Striving for Success or Superiority
Striving: The final goal
• Even infants have an innate drive toward growth,
completion, or success
• If children feel neglected or pampered, their goals remain
unconscious
o Children will compensate for feelings of inferiority in devious ways that
have no apparent relationship to their fictional goal
• If children experience love and security, they set a goal that
is largely conscious and clearly understood
• In striving for their final goal, people create and pursue
many preliminary goals
o These subgoals are often conscious, but the connection between them
and the final goal usually remains unknown & seldom realized 
however, they fit together in a self-consistent pattern
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 Striving for Success or Superiority
The striving force as compensation
• People strive for superiority or success as a means of
compensation for feelings of inferiority or weakness
• Adler (1930) believed that all humans are “blessed” at birth
with small, weak, and inferior bodies  ignite feelings of
inferiority
o By their nature, possess an innate tendency and need to overcome
inferiority and pulled by the desire for completion or wholeness.
• The striving force itself is innate, but its nature and direction
are due both to feelings of inferiority and to the goal of
superiority.
o Without the innate movement toward perfection, children would never
feel inferior; but without feelings of inferiority, they would never set a
goal of superiority or success
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Striving for Success or Superiority
The striving force as compensation
• The striving for success is innate but must be developed 
at birth exists as potentiality, not actuality
o Each person must actualize this potential in his/her own manner
o This process begin at about age 4 or 5 by setting a direction to the
striving force and by establishing a goal
• The goal provides guidelines for motivation, shaping
psychological development
• As a creation of the individual, the goal may take any form
o Success is an individualized concept and all people formulate their own
definition of it
• The forces of nature and nurture can never deprive a person
of the power to set a unique goal or to choose a unique style
of reaching for the goal (Adler, 1956)
• The goal is set as compensation for the deficit feeling, but
the deficit feeling would not exist unless a child first
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possessed a basic tendency toward completion
 Striving for Success or Superiority
Striving for personal superiority
• Has a little or no concern for others  their goals are
personal ones
• People who are strive for their personal goals largely
motivated by exaggerated feelings of personal inferiority, or
inferiority complex
o In which an individual appears to himself and to others as someone
who is unable to solve a problem in a socially useful way (Ansbacher
& Ansbacher, 1956)
• Some people strive for personal gain (murderers, thieves,
etc.) and some appear motivated by social interest, but
their actions largely self-serving

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 Striving for Success or Superiority
Striving for success
• Concerned w/ goals beyond themselves
• Those who are psychologically healthy people motivated by
social interest and the success of all humankind
o Helping others without demanding or expecting a personal payoff
o Their own success is not gained at the expense of others but is a
natural tendency to move toward complection or perfection
• Maintain a sense of self but they see daily problems from
the view of society’s development
• Their sense of personal worth is tied closely to their
contributions to human society
• Social progress is more important to them than personal
credit (Adler, 1956).
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 Subjective Perceptions
2. People’s subjective perceptions shape their behavior and
personality
o The striving not shaped by reality but by the subjective perceptions of
reality fictions: people’s expectations of the future
Fictionalism
o Fictions are ideas that have no real existence, yet they
influence people as if they really existed.
o People are motivated not by what is true but by their subjective
perception of what is true
o Final goal (which is a fiction): a self-selected imagined life
goal
o Guides our style of life
o Gives unity to our personality
o Renders our behavior purposeful
Consistent with his teleological view of motivation
o Teleology: an explanation of behavior in terms of its final purpose or
aim (goal-oriented)  opposed to causality, which considers behavior
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 Subjective Perceptions
Physical Inferiorities
• All humans is ‘blessed’ with organ inferiorities
• These physically inferior have little or no importance by
themselves, but become meaningful when they stimulate
subjective feelings of inferiority
• Serve as an impetus towards perfection
o Need fictions of strength to overcome these deficiencies
• Some people compensate feelings of inferiority by moving
toward psychological health and a useful style of life,
whereas others overcompensate and are motivated to
subdue or retreat from other people
• Physical deficiencies alone do not cause a particular style
of life; but provide present motivation for reaching future
goals
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 Unity & Self-Consistency of
Personality
3. Personality is unified and self-consistent
o Each person is unique and indivisible
o Inconsistent behavior does not exist  thoughts, feelings, and actions
are all directed toward a single goal and serve a single purpose.

• Organ Dialect/ Organ Jargon

o The disturbance of one part body affects the entire person
o The deficient organ expresses the direction of the
individual’s goal
• Through organ dialect, the body’s organ “speak a language
which is usually more expressive and discloses the
individual’s opinion more clearly than words are able to do”
(Adler, 1956, p. 223).
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 Unity & Self-Consistency of Personality
Conscious and Unconscious
• Unified personality is a function of harmony between
conscious and unconscious processes aimed toward a
single goal
• Adler (1956) defined the unconscious as that part of the goal
that is neither clearly formulated nor completely understood
by the individual.
o He avoided a dichotomy between the unconscious and the conscious,
which he saw as two cooperating parts of the same unified system.
o Conscious thoughts are those that are understood and regarded by the
individual as helpful in striving for success
o Unconscious thoughts are those that are not helpful in striving for
success

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 Social Interest
4. The value of all human activity must be seen from
the viewpoint of social interest.
• Social interest: a force that binds society together
o Translated as ‘social feeling’ or ‘community feeling’ –
Gemeinschaftsgefuhl (German term)
o An attitude of relatedness w/ humanity in general as well as
an empathy for each member of the human community
o The natural inferiority of individuals necessitates their
joining together to form a society
o Three life tasks seek to successfully accomplish: social task
of building relationship; the love-marriage task of achieving
intimacy; the occupational task of work or making significant
contributions to society
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 Social Interest
Origins of social interest
• Potentiality is found in everyone  but must be developed
before it can contribute to a useful style of life
• Originated from the mother-child relationship @ infancy
o Develop a bond that encourages the child’s mature social interest and
fosters a sense of cooperation
o The father is a second important person in child’s social environment
• Fostered by social environment
o The effects of the early social environment are extremely important
o After age 5, the effects of heredity become blurred by the environmental
forces that modified or shaped nearly every aspect of a child’s
personality

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 Social Interest

Importance of Social Interest

• Measure of psychological health and maturity
o It is the standard to be used in determining the usefulness of a life
o People possess social interest  psychologically mature
o People who are self-centered, strive for personal power and superiority
over others  immature people
• “The sole criterion of human values” and the “barometer of
normality”
• Exaggerated feelings of inferiority lead to a neurotic style of
life, whereas normal feelings of incompletion result in a
healthy style of life

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 Style of Life
5. The self-consistent personality structure develops
into a person’s style of life
• “Style of life”  refer to the flavor of a person’s life; the typical way that
one lives or moves toward a self-selected life goal
o Includes personal goal, self-concept, empathy, and attitude
toward world
o Product of heredity, environment, and creative power
o Mostly set by 4 or 5 years of age  but can still correct faulty or
invalid assumptions & consciously choose a more appropriate life goal
o Psychologically unhealthy individuals: marked by inability to
choose new ways of reacting to their environment
o Psychologically healthy people:
o Behave in diverse and flexible ways w/ styles of life that are complex
and changing
o Express this through action and struggle to solve major problems of life:
neighborly love, sexual love, and occupation, through cooperation,
personal courage, & willingness to make contribution for other’s welfare
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 Creative Power
6. Style of life is molded by people’s creative power
• Creative power is Adler’s term for an inner freedom that
empowers each person to create his or her own style of life
o Places one in control of his or her life
o Responsible for one’s final goal
o Determines one’s method of striving
o Contributes to the development of one’s social interest
• Makes each person a free individual  implying movement,
the most salient characteristic of life
• Importance is not endowment but how one uses this power
o People are creative beings who not only react to their environment but
also act on it and cause it to react to them
o Each person uses heredity and environment as the bricks and mortar to
build personality, but the architectural design reflects that person’s own
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style
 Abnormal Development
General Description
• The one factor underlying all types of maladjustments is
underdeveloped social interest.
• Besides lacking social interest, neurotics tend to (1) set
their goals too high, (2) live in their own private world, and
(3) have a rigid and dogmatic style of life
• People become failures in life because they are
overconcerned with themselves and care little about others
• Maladjusted people set extravagant goals as an
overcompensation for exaggerated feelings of inferiority 
lead to dogmatic behavior, and the higher the goal, the more
rigid the striving.

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 Abnormal Development
External Factors in Maladjustment
The contributing factors to abnormality:
• Exaggerated physical deficiencies
• Whether congenital or the result of injury or disease,
are not sufficient to lead to maladjustment  must be
accompanied by accentuated feelings of inferiority
• Pampered style of life
• They see the world with private vision and believe that
they are entitled to be first in everything
• Neglected style of life
• Children who feel unloved and unwanted are likely to
borrow heavily from these feelings in creating a
neglected style of life; little confidence in themselves,
more suspicious, and likely to be dangerous to others

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 Abnormal Development
Safeguarding Tendencies
• People create patterns of behavior to protect their exaggerated
sense of self-esteem against public disgrace; this protective
devices called safeguarding tendencies enable people to
hide their inflated self-image and to maintain their current style
of life.
• Can be compared to Freud’s concept of defense mechanisms
(DM)
• For both: the symptoms are formed as a protection against anxiety
• Freud: DM operate unconsciously to protect the ego against anxiety;
common to everyone
• Adler: safeguarding tendencies are largely conscious and shield a
person’s fragile self-esteem from public disgrace; only for them who
constructed neurotic symptoms
• Designed to protect a person’s present style of life and to
maintain a fictional, elevated feeling of self-importance (Adler,
1964)  excuses, aggression, withdrawal
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 Abnormal Development
Excuses
• Typically expressed in the “Yes, but” or “If
only” format
• In the “Yes, but” excuse, people first state
what they claim they would like to do—
something that sounds good to others—then
they follow with an excuse.
• The “If only” statement is the same excuse
phrased in a different way
• These excuses protect a weak—but
artificially inflated—sense of self-worth and
deceive people into believing that they are
more superior than they really are (Adler,
1956).
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 Abnormal Development
Safeguarding Tendencies

Aggression
• Used to protect their fragile self-esteem  take the form of
depreciation, accusation, or self-accusation.
• Depreciation  the tendency to undervalue other people’s
achievements and to overvalue one’s own.
o The intention is to belittle another so that the person, by comparison, will
be placed in a favorable light
• Accusation  the tendency to blame others for one’s
failures and to seek revenge, thereby safeguarding one’s own
tenuous self-esteem.
• Self-accusation  marked by self-torture and guilt 
including masochism, depression, and suicide, as means of
hurting people who are close to them.
o People devalue themselves in order to inflict suffering on others while
protecting their own magnified feelings of self-esteem (Adler, 1956)
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 Abnormal Development
Safeguarding Tendencies
Withdrawal
• Safeguarding through distance  unconsciously escape
life’s problems by setting up a distance between themselves
and those problems, take form of (1) moving backward, (2)
standing still, (3) hesitating, and (4) constructing obstacles
• Moving backward is the tendency to safeguard one’s fictional goal of
superiority by psychologically reverting to a more secure period of life
• Standing still  simply do not move in any direction; thus, they avoid all
responsibility by ensuring themselves against any threat of failure
• Hesitating  hesitate or vacillate when faced with difficult problems; do
procrastinations that give them the excuse “It’s too late now.”
• Constructing obstacles  the least severe of safeguarding
o Some people build a straw house to show that they can knock it down. By overcoming the
obstacle, they protect their self-esteem and their prestige.
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 Abnormal Development
Masculine Protest
• In contrast to Freud, Adler (1930, 1956) believed that the
psychic life of women is essentially the same as that of men
and that a male-dominated society is not natural but rather
an artificial product of historical development
• Cultural and social practices—not anatomy—influence many
men and women to overemphasize the importance of being
manly, a condition he called the masculine protest.
• Boys – being masculine means being courageous, strong and
dominant. Epitome of success for boys is to win, to be powerful, to be
on top.
• Girls – to be passive, and to accept an inferior position in society

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Applications of Individual Psychology
Family Constellation
• In therapy, Adler almost always asked patients about
their family constellation, that is, their birth order, the
gender of their siblings, and the age spread between
them.
• Adler viewed birth order and sibling relationships as
another crucial factor influencing a person’s social
relationships and lifestyle.
• The psychological, or perceived, birth order of the child is
more significant than the actual, or chronological, birth
order

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Applications of Individual Psychology
Family Constellation
Adler did form some general hypotheses about birth order:
• Firstborn children: likely to have intensified feelings of power and
superiority, high anxiety, and overprotective tendencies
• Secondborn children: begin life in a better situation for developing
cooperation and social interest; their personalities to some extent are
shaped by their perception of the older child’s attitude toward them.
• Youngest children: often the most pampered; run a high risk of being
problem children; likely to have strong feelings of inferiority and to
lack a sense of independence; but they possess many advantages
• Only children: often develop an exaggerated sense of superiority and
an inflated self-concept; may lack well-developed feelings of
cooperation and social interest, and expect other people to pamper
and protect them

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 Applications of Individual Psychology
Early Recollections
• To gain an understanding of patients’ personality, Adler
would ask them to reveal their early recollections (ERs).
o The memories from our first four or five years of life, whether of real
events or were fantasies  assumed to reveal the primary interest of life
• The recalled memories yield clues for understanding
patients’ style of life, he did not consider these memories to
have a causal effect.
• The early recollections are the most satisfactory single
indicators of lifestyle
o Highly anxious patients will often project their current style of life onto
their memory of childhood experiences by recalling fearful and anxiety-
producing events
o Self-confident people tend to recall memories that include pleasant
relations with other people
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 Applications of Individual Psychology
Dreams
• Adler agreed w/ Freud about the value of dreams in
understanding personality, but disagreed on the way in
which dreams should be interpreted
• He did not believe that dreams fulfill wishes or reveal hidden
conflicts  dreams involve feelings about a current problem
and what we intend to do about it
• Dreams are oriented toward the present and future, not
toward conflicts from the past
• Adler (1956) applied the golden rule of individual psychology
to dream work, namely, “Everything can be different” (p. 363)
 If one interpretation doesn’t feel right, try another.

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 Applications of Individual Psychology
Psychotherapy
• Adlerian theory postulates that psychopathology results from
lack of courage, exaggerated feelings of inferiority, and
underdeveloped social interest.
• The purpose of Adlerian psychotherapy: to enhance courage,
lessen feelings of inferiority, and encourage social interest 
asking “What would you do if I cured you immediately?”
• Adler often used the motto “Everybody can accomplish
everything.”
Except for certain limitations set by heredity, he believed that what people
do with what they have is more important than what they have (Adler,
1925/1968, 1956).
• The use of humor and warmth a warm, nurturing attitude by
the therapist encourages patients to expand their social interest to
each of the three problems of life: sexual love, friendship, and
occupation.
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 Related Research

Early Recollections and Career Choice

o Adler believed that career choices reflect a person’s
personality  The kind of career one chooses as an adult
is often reflected in one’s earliest recollections
o Kasler & Nevo (2005): Early recollections in childhood did
match career type as an adult, at least for the three
career types that were well represented (Realistic,
Artistic, and Social)
o Early recollections and style of life may relate to
occupational choice.

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 Related Research
Early Childhood and Health-Related Issues
Belangee (2013)
o Dieting, overeating, and bulimia can be viewed as common
ways of expressing inferiority feelings or a sense of
worthlessness
o Persons with eating disorders are very much focused on their
own lives and difficulties
Laird and Shelton (2013)
o There are significant differences among students with regard to
family dynamics, alcohol consumption, and drinking patterns
o The youngest children in a family were more likely to binge drink,
whereas older children demonstrated more drinking restraint 
Youngest children are more dependent upon others, and when
people who are dependent are stressed, they are more likely to
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40 by heavy drinking.
 Related Research
Early Recollections and Counseling Outcomes
Savill & Eckstein (1987)
o They found significant changes in both mental status and early
recollections for the counseling group but not for the controls
indicates that when counseling is successful, patients change their
early recollections.

Statton & Wilborn (1991)

o The counseling group showed greater changes in the theme,
character, setting, amount of detail, and level of affect of their early
memories  suggests that early recollections may change as a result
of psychotherapy or some other life-altering experience
o Tend to support Adler’s teleological approach to personality; namely,
early childhood experiences are less important than the adult’s view of
those experiences.
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 Critique of Adler
• Although research has consistently shown a relationship
between early childhood recollections and a person’s present
style of life (Clark, 2002), these results do not verify Adler’s
notion that present style of life shapes one’s early recollections
 present style of life determines early memories rather than
vice versa—is difficult to either verify or falsify
• His individual psychology may be misleading since his unique
emphasis is on social motivation rather than individual
dynamic
• Adler’s theory is
o High on generating research, organizing known data, and guiding action
o Moderate on parsimony/ simplicity
o Low on verification, falsification, and internal consistency
o Lack of precise operational definitions terms such as goal of
superiority and creative power have no scientific definition

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 Concept of Humanity
• People are basically self-determined and that they shape
their personalities from the meaning they give to their
experiences
• The use of people’s abilities is more important than the
quantity of those abilities
• People’s interpretations of experiences are more important
than the experiences themselves
o People are motivated by their present perceptions of the past and their
present expectations of the future
o “meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves
by the meanings we give to situations” (Adler, 1956, p. 208)
• People are forward moving, motivated by future goals rather
than by innate instincts or causal forces  people’s personal
freedom allows them to reshape their goals and thereby
change their lives.
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 Concept of Humanity
• Even though the final goal is set during childhood, individuals
are capable of change at any point in life
o Not all the choices are conscious and that style of life is created through
both conscious and unconscious choices.
• People are responsible for their own personalities.
o People’s creative power is capable of transforming feelings of
inadequacy into either social interest or into the self-centered goal of
personal superiority
• Self-centeredness as pathological and established social
interest as the standard of psychological maturity

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 Summaries of Adler’s Concept of
Humanity
• Based on six dimensions concept of humanity:
o Very high on free choice and optimism
o High on social factors and uniqueness
o Average on unconscious influences
o Very low on causality
• People are self-determining social creatures,
forward moving and motivated by present fictions
to strive toward perfection for themselves and
society.

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 Refleksi 1
• Apa yang menurut kamu menjadi inferiorities/
kelemahan/keterbatasan dalam dirimu?
• Kompensasi seperti apa yang kamu lakukan
atas inferiority tersebut?
• Apa arti sukses/berhasil bagi kamu?
• Menurut kamu, apakah ada kaitan antara
kelemahan/keterbatasan dengan pemahaman
kamu akan arti sukses/berhasil?

Page  46
 Refleksi 2
• Coba pikirkan dan tuliskan, mana dari antara
jenis safeguarding tendencies yang
dikemukakan oleh Adler, yang paling sering
kamu tampilkan/ tunjukkan ketika berada dalam
suatu masalah.
• Kira-kira hal apa dalam diri kamu yang sedang
berusaha kamu ‘lindungi’ ketika menampilkan hal
tersebut?

Page  47
 Refleksi 3
• Isilah kuesioner birth-order survey yang dibagikan.
• Apakah hasil kuesioner sesuai dengan urutan
kelahiranmu? Ya/tidak
• Menurut pendapatmu, apa yang kira-kira memberikan
perbedaan terhadap hal tersebut?

Sumber:
http://oconto.uwex.edu/files/2011/02/Birth-Order.pdf

Page  48
 Refleksi 4

• Tuliskan 3-4 early recollections yang paling

kamu ingat.
• Menurut kamu apa kira-kira tema dari
recollections tersebut?
• Apakah tema tersebut ada kaitannya dengan
style of life kamu saat ini? Berikan
pendapatmu.

Page  49
 Link about Adlerian

www.adler.edu
http://www.alfredadler.edu/about/theory
http://www.adler.edu/page/about/history/about-
alfred-adler/
http://www.lifecourseinstitute.com/index.htm

Page  50
 Referensi
Feist, J., Feist, G.J., & Roberts, T. (2013). Theories of
personality (8th Ed). New York: Mc.Graw-Hill International
Edition
Schultz, D.P., & Schultz, S.E. (2013). Theories of
personality (10th Ed). Toronto: Cengage Technology
Edition
Pervin, L.A., Cervone, D., & John, O.P. (2005). Personality
theory and research (9th Ed). New York: John Wiley &
Sons, Inc.

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