52 Facts About Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology.

Alfred Adler proposed that contributing to others was how the individual feels a sense of worth and belonging in the family and society.

Alfred Adler considered a human being as an individual whole, and therefore he called his psychology "Individual Psychology".

Alfred Adler was second of the seven children of a Jewish couple, Pauline and Leopold Adler.

Alfred Adler was an active, popular child and an average student who was known for the competitive attitude toward his older brother, Sigmund.

Early on, he developed rickets, which kept Alfred Adler from walking until he was four years old.

Alfred Adler was very interested in the subjects of psychology, sociology and philosophy.

Alfred Adler began his medical career as an ophthalmologist, but he soon switched to general practice, and established his office in a less affluent part of Vienna across from the Prater, a combination of amusement park and circus.

Alfred Adler's clients included circus people, and it has been suggested that the unusual strengths and weaknesses of the performers led to his insights into "organ inferiorities" and "compensation".

In 1902, because of his defense article, Alfred Adler received an invitation from Sigmund Freud to join an informal discussion group that included Rudolf Reitler and Wilhelm Stekel.

When Freud in 1920 proposed his dual instinct theory of libido and aggressive drives in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, without citing Alfred Adler, he was reproached that Alfred Adler had proposed the aggressive drive in his 1908 paper.

Alfred Adler remained a member of the Society until 1911, when he and a group of his supporters formally disengaged from Freud's circle, the first of the great dissenters from orthodox psychoanalysis.

Alfred Adler wanted to prove that he had never been a disciple of Freud's but rather that Freud had sought him out to share his ideas.

Alfred Adler founded the Society for Individual Psychology in 1912 after his break from the psychoanalytic movement.

Nevertheless, even regarding dream interpretation, Alfred Adler had his own theoretical and clinical approach.

Alfred Adler traveled and lectured for a period of 25 years promoting his socially oriented approach.

Alfred Adler's intent was to build a movement that would rival, even supplant, others in psychology by arguing for the holistic integrity of psychological well-being with that of social equality.

Alfred Adler's efforts were halted by World War I, during which he served as a doctor with the Austro-Hungarian Army.

Clinically, Alfred Adler's methods are not limited to treatment after-the-fact but extend to the realm of prevention by preempting future problems in the child.

Alfred Adler's popularity was related to the comparative optimism and comprehensibility of his ideas.

The tasks of life are not to be considered in isolation since, as Alfred Adler famously commented, "they all throw cross-lights on one another".

Alfred Adler died from a heart attack in 1937 in Aberdeen, Scotland, during a lecture tour.

Alfred Adler was influenced by the mental construct ideas of the philosopher Hans Vaihinger and the literature of Dostoyevsky.

Alfred Adler was an early advocate in psychology for prevention and emphasized the training of parents, teachers, social workers and so on in democratic approaches that allow a child to exercise their power through reasoned decision making whilst co-operating with others.

Alfred Adler was a social idealist, and was known as a socialist in his early years of association with psychoanalysis.

Alfred Adler was pragmatic and believed that lay people could make practical use of the insights of psychology.

Alfred Adler was an early supporter of feminism in psychology and the social world, believing that feelings of superiority and inferiority were often gendered and expressed symptomatically in characteristic masculine and feminine styles.

Alfred Adler spoke of "safeguarding tendencies" and neurotic behavior long before Anna Freud wrote about the same phenomena in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.

In one of his earliest and most famous publications, "Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation," Alfred Adler outlined the basics for what would be the beginning foundation of his personality theory.

Alfred Adler postulated that the body's other organs would work together in order to compensate for the weakness of this "inferior" organ.

Alfred Adler's book, defines his earlier key ideas.

Alfred Adler argued that human personality could be explained teleologically: parts of the individual's unconscious self ideally work to convert feelings of inferiority to superiority.

Hence, Alfred Adler can be considered the "first community psychologist", a discourse that formalized in the decades following Alfred Adler's death.

Alfred Adler developed a scheme of so-called personality types, which were however always to be taken as provisional or heuristic since he did not, in essence, believe in personality types, and at different times proposed different and equally tentative systems.

Alfred Adler often emphasized one's psychological birth order as having an influence on the style of life and the strengths and weaknesses in one's psychological make up.

Alfred Adler believed that the firstborn child would be in a favorable position, enjoying the full attention of the eager new parents until the arrival of a second child.

Alfred Adler himself was the third in a family of six children.

Alfred Adler never produced any scientific support for his interpretations on birth order roles, nor did he feel the need to.

Alfred Adler argued therefore that teachers, nurses, social workers, and so on require training in parent education to complement the work of the family in fostering a democratic character.

Clearly, Alfred Adler himself had little problem with adopting a metaphysical and spiritual point of view to support his theories.

Alfred Adler died suddenly in Aberdeen, Scotland, in May 1937, during a three-week visit to the University of Aberdeen.

Alfred Adler's body was cremated at Warriston Crematorium in Edinburgh but the ashes were never reclaimed.

Much of Alfred Adler's theories have been absorbed into modern psychology without attribution.

In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Alfred Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement and a core member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society: indeed, to Freud he was "the only personality there".

Alfred Adler was the first major figure to break away from psychoanalysis to form an independent school of psychotherapy and personality theory, which he called individual psychology because he believed a human to be an indivisible whole, an individuum.

Alfred Adler imagined a person to be connected or associated with the surrounding world.

Alfred Adler's writings preceded, and were at times surprisingly consistent with, later Neo-Freudian insights such as those evidenced in the works of Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, some considering that it would take several decades for Freudian ego psychology to catch up with Adler's ground-breaking approach.

Alfred Adler emphasized the importance of equality in preventing various forms of psychopathology, and espoused the development of social interest and democratic family structures for raising children.

Alfred Adler argued for holism, viewing the individual holistically rather than reductively, the latter being the dominant lens for viewing human psychology.

Alfred Adler was among the first in psychology to argue in favor of feminism, and the female analyst, making the case that power dynamics between men and women are crucial to understanding human psychology.

Raissa, Alfred Adler's wife, died at 89 in New York City on April 21,1962.

Alfred Adler appears as a character in the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.