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Adlerian Therapy
Assignment No: 1
Submitted by:
Ayesha Noor (BAPY-22-07)
Ammara Tahir (BAPY-22-11)
Aleeza Ashraf (BAPY-22-12)
Rukhsar Alam (BAPY-22-13)
Syeda Farwa Gillani (BAPY-22-24)
Kanwal Kainat (BAPY-22-27)
Sana Aslam (BAPY-22-34)
BS 7th Sem (B)
Submitted to:
Hina Saeed

The Department of Applied Psychology

THE WOMEN UNIVERSITY, MULTAN
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Adlerian Therapy
Introduction
Alferd Adler is the founder of Adlerian Therapy, the psychodynamic field of therapy.
Adlerian therapy assumes that humans are socially motivated and that their behavior is
purposeful and directed toward a goal. Adler believed that feelings of inferiority often motivate
people to strive to success, and he emphasized the conscious over unconscious. Adlerian therapy
recognizes the importance of internal factors, such as perception of reality, values, beliefs and
goals. It has holistic concept of persons, taking into account both the influence of society on the
client and client’s influence on society. To Adler, social interest is a sign of mental health. When
people feel connected to others and are actively engaged in a healthy, shared activity, their sense
if inferiority decreases.
Adler also talked of life tasks: friendship (social), intimacy (love-marriage), and societal
contribution (occupational). Each of these tasks requires a capacity for friendship, self-worth,
and cooperation.
Adlerian therapy begins by investigating a client's lifestyle and identifying
misperceptions and misdirected goals. Clients are then reeducated with the hope they will have
an increased sense of belonging and a higher level of social interest. In short, an Adlerian
therapist encourages self-awareness, challenges harmful perceptions, and admonishes the client
to act to meet his or her life tasks and engage in social activities. Counselors teach, guide, and
encourage.
Idea of Adlerian Therapy
The theory and application of Adlerian psychology have as their lynchpins six critical
ideas:
 Unity of the Individual: Thinking, feeling, emotion, and behavior can only be
understood as subordinated to the individual's style of life, or consistent pattern of
dealing with life.
 Goal Orientation: There is one central personality dynamic derived from the growth and
forward movement of life itself.
 Self-Determination and Uniqueness: A person's fictional goal may be influenced by
hereditary and cultural factors, but it ultimately springs from the creative power of the
individual, and is consequently unique.
 Social Context: We meet the three important life tasks: occupation, love and sex, and our
relationship with other people -- all social challenges. Our way of responding to our first
social system, the family constellation, may become the prototype of our world view and
attitude toward life.
 The Feeling of Community: Social interest and feeling imply “social improvement”
quite different from conformity, leaving room for social innovation even through cultural
resistance or rebellion.
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 Mental Health: A feeling of human connectedness and a willingness to develop oneself

fully and contribute to the welfare of others are the main criteria of mental health. When
these qualities are underdeveloped, feelings of inferiority may haunt an individual, or an
attitude of superiority may antagonize others.
Treatment
Adlerian individual psychotherapy, brief therapy, couple therapy, and family
therapy follow parallel paths. Clients are encouraged to overcome their feelings of
insecurity, develop deeper feelings of connectedness, and to redirect their striving for
significance into more socially beneficial directions. Through a respectful 3ocratic
dialogue, they are challenged to correct mistaken assumptions, attitudes, behaviors, and
feelings about themselves and the world. constant encouragement stimulates clients to
attempt what was believed impossible. The growth of confidence, pride, and gratification
leads to a greater desire and ability to cooperate. The objective of therapy is to replace
exaggerated self-protection, self-enhancement, and self-indulgence with courageous
social contribution.
Therapeutic Process
Adlerian counselling includes forming a relationship based on mutual respect and
identifying, exploring, and disclosing mistaken goals and faulty assumptions within the
persons style of living. The main aim of therapy is to develop the client’s sense of
belonging and to assist in the adoption of behaviors and processes characterized by
community feeling and social interest.
Adlerian do not see clients as being “sick” and in need of being “cured”. They
view clients as discouraged. Symptoms are attempted solutions.
The counseling process focuses on providing information, teaching, guiding, and
offering encouragement to discouraged clients. The loss of courage, or discouragement,
results in mistaken and dysfunctional behavior. The counselor provides clients with a
new cognitive method which is a fundamental understanding of the purpose of
their behavior.

Therapist’s Function and Role

Therapists tend to look for major mistakes in thinking and valuing such as mistrust,
selfishness, unrealistic ambition, and lack of confidence. A major function of the therapist is to
make a comprehensive assessment of the client’s functioning.
Therapists gather information by means of a questionnaire on the client’s family
constellation (parents, siblings, and others living in the home). This gives a picture of the
individual’s early social world. The therapist is able to get a perspective on the client’s major
areas of success and failure and on the critical influences that have had a bearing on the role the
client has decided to assume in the world. Early recollections are also used as a diagnostic tool.
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These are single incidents from childhood that we are able to reexperience. These memories
provide a brief picture of how we see ourselves and others and what we anticipate for our future.
Early recollections are summarized and interpreted. The therapist then identifies some of
the major successes and mistakes in the client’s life. This process is called a life style assessment.
When this process is completed, the therapist and the client have targets for therapy.
Client’s Experience in Therapy
Person’s style of living serves the individual by staying stable and constant. It is
predictable. However, it is also resistant to change throughout most of one’s life. Generally,
people fail to change because:
 they do not recognize the errors in their thinking or the purposes of their behaviors.
 do not know what to do differently.
 are fearful of leaving old patterns for new and unpredictable outcomes
In therapy, clients explore private logic - the concepts about self, others and life that constitute
the philosophy on which an individual’s lifestyle is based. Client’s problems arise because the
conclusions based on their private logic often do not conform to the requirements of social
living. The core of the therapy experience consists of clients’ Discovering the purposes of
behavior or symptoms and the basic mistakes associated with their coping. Learning how to
correct faulty assumptions and conclusions is central to therapy.
Relationship Between Therapist and Client
Adlerian consider a good client-therapist relationship to be one between equals that is
based on cooperation, mutual trust, respect, confidence, and alignment of goals. The place
special value on the counsellor’s modelling of communication and acting in good faith. The
client-counselor relationships seen as two persons working equally toward specific, agree upon
goals. At the outset of counseling, clients should begin to formulate a plan, or contract, detailing:
 What they want.
 how they plan to get where they are heading.
 what is preventing-them from successfully attaining their goals.
 how they can change nonproductive behavior into constructive behavior.
 how they can make full use of their assets in achieving their purposes.
The therapeutic contract sets forth the goals of the counseling process and specifies the
responsibilities of both therapist and client.
Application: Therapeutic Techniques and procedures
There are 4 Phases that are considered as a construct that leads to a therapy:
 Establishing the proper therapeutic relationship.
 Exploring the psychological dynamics operating in the client (an assessment).
 Encouraging the development of self-understanding (insight into purpose).
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 Helping the client make new choices (reorientation and reeducation)

Establishing the relationship: Adlerian therapists seek to make person-to-person contact with
clients rather than starting with “the problem.” The initial focus should be on the person, not the
problem. Therapists start by helping clients become aware of their assets and strengths, rather
than dealing continually with their deficits and liabilities. A positive relationship is created by
listening, responding, demonstrating respect for clients’ capacity to understand purpose and seek
change, and exhibiting faith, hope and caring. During this phase, the main techniques used are
attending and listening with empathy, following the subjective experience of the client. They
attempt to access the core patterns in the client’s life.
Exploring the Individual’s Dynamics: The 2nd phase consists of two interview forms: The
subjective interview (the counselor helps the client to tell their story as completely as possible.
The counselor is listening for clues to the purposive aspects of the client’s coping and approaches
to life, should extract patterns in the person’s life, develop hypotheses about what works for the
person, and determine what accounts for the various concerns in the client’s life. The objective
interview – (a) how problems in the client’s life began (b) any precipitating events (c) a medical
history (d) a social history (e) the reasons the client chose therapy at this time (f) the person’s
coping with life tasks (g) a lifestyle assessment. The family constellation-Factors such as cultural
and familial values, gender-role expectations, and the nature of interpersonal relationships are all
influenced by a child’s observation of the interactional patterns within the family. Assessment
includes an exploration of the client’s family constellation, including the client’s evaluation of
conditions that prevailed in the family when the person was a young child, birth order, parental
relationship, family values, and extended family and culture. Early recollections – Asking the
client to provide their earliest memories, including the age of the person at the time of the
remembered events and the feelings or reactions associated with it. Personality priorities -people
rely on a number-one priority, a first line of defense that they use as an immediate response to
perceived stress or difficulty. Each priority involves a dominant behavior pattern with supporting
convictions that an individual uses to cope. (a) superiority (striving for significance through
leadership, or accomplishment (b) control – looking for complete mastery of situations (c)
comfort – wanting to avoid stress or pain at all costs (d) please – avoiding rejection by seeking
constant approval and acceptance. Most common mistakes include (1) overgeneralizations (2)
Impossible goals (3) misperceptions of life and life’s demands (4) minimization or denial of
one’s basic worth (5) faulty values.
Encouraging Self-understanding and Insight: Adlerian believe almost Everything in human
life has a purpose. For insight, Adlerian are referring to an understanding of the motivations that
operate. In a client’s life it is a special form of awareness that facilitates a meaningful
understanding within the therapeutic relationship and acts as a foundation for change.
Helping with Reorientation: This phase helps people discover new and more functional
alternatives inshort useful side of life which involves a sense of belonging and values, having an
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interest in others and their welfare, courage, the acceptance of imperfection, confidence, a sense
of humor, a willingness to contribute, and an outgoing friendliness. Encouragement is the most
distinctive Adlerian procedure and Commitment is an essential part of this process. Adlerian
practitioners focus on motivation modification more than behavior change and encourage clients
to make holistic changes on the useful side of living.
Area of Application
Adlerian therapy espouses a philosophy of human relations based upon social equality
and emphasizes the influence of contextual factors. Further, as psychoeducation model, Adlerian
ideas can be applied in individual, group, couples and family counseling as well as in the
classroom and at the community level.
Adlerian Therapy from Multicultural Perspectives
Adlerian introduced notions with implications toward multiculturalism that have as much
or more relevance today as they did during Adler’s time. Adlerian therapists tend to focus on
cooperations and socially oriented values as opposed to competitive and individual values.
For Example
Native American clients tend to the values of cooperation over competition. Adlerian
therapy is easily adaptable to cultural values that emphasizes community. Adler was one of the
first psychologist at the turn of the century to advocate equality for women.
Limitations
 Self as the locus of change and responsibility may be problematic for some clients.
 Detailed exploration of one early family experiences may violate some cultural values.
 Some clients may expect therapists to provide them with solution to the problems.
 Social equality, sensitive to cultural and gender issues.
 Focusing on a person in a social context.
 Social interest sense of belonging cooperations (instead of competition).
 Focusing on family.
Contributions of the Adlerian Approach
 Flexibility and its integrative nature: Adlerian therapists can be both
theoretically integrative and technically eclectic. The Adlerian therapy approach
tends to lend itself to short-term formats.
 One of Adler’s most important contribution is his influence on other therapy
systems.
 Many of his basic ideas have found their way into other psychological schools
family systems approaches, Gestalt therapy, learning theory, reality therapy,
rational emotive behavior therapy, cognitive therapy, person-
centered therapy, existential therapy, and the post-modern approaches to therapy.
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Limitations and criticisms

A large part of the theory still requires empirical testing and comparative
analysis. Adlerian theory is of limited use for clients seeking immediate solutions to their
problems and for clients who have little interest in exploring early childhood experiences and
memories.