Alfred Adler

• 1. Introduction

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  Alfred Adler was born on the 7th of February 1870 at Mariahilfer Strasse 208 in Rudolfsheim, a village on the western fringes of Vienna. He was the second of seven children. By the time he was three years old, he had slept next to a dying brother and watched him go. By age four he had developed rickets, and then pneumonia. A doctor standing over his bed told his father, "Your boy is lost."

  Adler survived. And from that survival grew a question that would define his life's work: why do people feel small, and what do they do about it? His answer would become one of the most influential ideas in modern psychology. It would also make him, for a time, the most borrowed-from and least-credited thinker in his field. Who was Alfred Adler, and why does his shadow fall so quietly across so much of what we believe about the human mind?

• 2. The Vienna Circle

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  Adler's medical career began with eyes. He trained as an ophthalmologist, then shifted to general practice and set up his surgery across from the Prater, Vienna's famous combination of amusement park and circus. His patients included circus performers. Their unusual physical strengths and weaknesses shaped his early thinking about what he would call "organ inferiority" and compensation.

  In 1902, Adler wrote an article defending Sigmund Freud's work, specifically The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud read the piece and invited Adler to join a small discussion group that met on Wednesday evenings at Freud's home. The group, called the Wednesday Society or Mittwochsgesellschaft, included Max Kahane and Wilhelm Stekel at the start. By 1906, membership had grown to 17. Each session followed a pattern: a member would present a paper, then the group would pause for coffee, cakes, and cigars before debating the ideas.

  Freud himself referred to Adler in print in 1909 as "My colleague Dr Alfred Adler" - a small detail that matters. Adler was never Freud's student. They were colleagues from the start, and a competitive pair at that. In 1908, Adler presented a paper arguing that aggression and sexuality were two separate instincts that merged over time. Freud disagreed. When Freud later proposed a dual instinct theory in his 1920 work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, without citing Adler, contemporaries noted the overlap. In a 1923 footnote, Freud acknowledged the aggressive drive while distancing his view from Adler's.

• 3. The Split

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  By 1910, Adler had become president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He left the following year. He and a group of supporters formally separated from Freud's circle in 1911, making Adler the first major dissenter from orthodox psychoanalysis - a step Carl Jung would not take until 1914.

  The break was personal as much as intellectual. The two men had grown to dislike each other over nine years. Freud issued what amounted to an ultimatum to Society members: disavow Adler or face expulsion. Freud would continue to resent Adler long after, and the feeling did not soften even after Adler's death. In a letter to a colleague, Freud wrote, "I don't understand your sympathy for Adler. For a Jewish boy out of a Viennese suburb a death in Aberdeen is an unheard of career in itself and a proof of how far he had got on. The world really rewarded him richly for his service in having contradicted psychoanalysis."

  Adler founded the Society for Individual Psychology in 1912. His new circle initially attracted some adherents who found his ideas on power and inferiority closer to Nietzsche than to Freud. Despite the personal enmity, Adler retained a lifelong respect for Freud's thinking on dreams and credited him with developing a scientific approach to their clinical use.

• 4. Inferiority and the Social Self

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  Adler's core idea was that feelings of inferiority are not pathological oddities but a universal feature of human development. His early work on organ inferiority proposed that when one part of the body is weaker than others, the rest of the body compensates. A person with a weak leg might become a great runner. As his thinking matured, he extended the same logic inward: feelings of psychological inferiority drive a person toward compensation, and sometimes overcompensation.

  His book Uber den nervosen Charakter, translated as The Neurotic Character, argued that the unconscious self works to convert feelings of inferiority into superiority, or what he called completeness. When this drive goes unchecked, an inferiority complex forms, and the individual risks becoming egocentric, power-hungry, and aggressive.

  The inferiority complex became his most famous coinage. But Adler placed equal weight on the social dimension. He called this Gemeinschaftsgefuhl, a German word meaning roughly community feeling or social interest. For Adler, a person's sense of worth was not built in isolation. It was built through contributing to others and feeling connected to the family and to society. He argued that the social realm is as important to psychology as the internal realm - a direct challenge to Freud's emphasis on instincts and sexuality. Viktor Frankl later positioned his own logotherapy, which centers on the will to meaning, explicitly against what he called the Adlerian focus on striving for superiority.

• 5. Building a Movement

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  Adler spent roughly 25 years traveling and lecturing to promote his ideas. World War I interrupted that work. He served as a doctor with the Austro-Hungarian Army, first on the Russian front and then in a children's hospital.

  After the war, the political landscape in Vienna shifted. The Social Democratic Party of Austria came to power in the new Austrian Republic and backed childhood educational reform. That opening allowed Adler and his colleagues to establish 28 child guidance clinics across the city. Vienna became the first city in the world to offer schoolchildren free educational therapy. In 1919, Adler had opened the first of these clinics.

  From 1921 onward, Adler lectured regularly across Europe. He arrived in the United States in 1926 and became a visiting professor at Columbia University in 1927. He discarded the analytic couch, one of the most visible symbols of Freudian therapy, and replaced it with two chairs - clinician and patient seated more or less as equals. This was not a casual gesture. It expressed his conviction that recovery depended on restoring a person's sense of equality and social belonging, not on the patient's submission to a figure of authority.

• 6. Birth Order and Memory

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  Adler was the first to argue systematically that birth order shapes personality. In his early writings from 1908, he mapped out what he expected for each position in a three-child family. The oldest child, once the sole center of parental attention, suffers "dethronement" when a sibling arrives. Adler thought this position carried the highest risk of neuroticism and substance addiction, as compensation for the loss of a pampered position. The youngest child, perpetually overindulged, would tend toward poor social empathy. The middle child - experiencing neither dethronement nor overindulgence - was most likely to succeed but also most likely to rebel and feel squeezed out.

  Adler did not produce scientific proof for these patterns. He offered them as heuristics, ways of mapping sibling influence on a client's psychology. His broader argument was that children raised in the same family do not actually share the same environment. The oldest grows up with younger siblings; the youngest grows up with older ones. The position shapes the experience.

  On memory, Adler was equally precise. He wrote that memories are never incidental: "There are no 'chance' memories. Out of the incalculable number of impressions that an individual receives, she chooses to remember only those which she considers, however dimly, to have a bearing on her problems." Early recollections, in this view, are not neutral records but chosen metaphors for a person's philosophy of life. This made them one of Adler's primary clinical tools, used with patients and schoolchildren alike.

• 7. Exile and Death

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  In the early 1930s, antisemitic policies forced the closure of most of Adler's Austrian clinics. Adler was ethnically Jewish; his wife Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein, whom he had married in 1897, was Jewish too, and she had long been connected to Russian socialist circles, counting Leon Trotsky among her acquaintances. Adler left Austria in 1934 for a professorship at the Long Island College of Medicine in the United States.

  He died on the 28th of May 1937 in Aberdeen, Scotland, during a lecture tour. He collapsed while walking down a street. A man rushed over and loosened his collar. Adler murmured "Kurt" - the name of his son - and died. The autopsy established the cause as degeneration of the heart muscle.

  His remains were cremated at Warriston Crematorium in Edinburgh. The ashes were never claimed. They sat in a casket at Warriston for 70 years until their rediscovery in 2007. In 2011, the ashes were finally returned to Vienna for burial. Kurt Adler, the son whose name was his father's last word, had himself become a psychiatrist. So had Adler's daughter Alexandra.

• 8. An Uncredited Legacy

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  Psychology historian Henri F. Ellenberger put the problem plainly: "It would not be easy to find another author from which so much has been borrowed on all sides without acknowledgement than Alfred Adler." Ellenberger traced the pattern to several causes, including Adler's style of writing, his tendency to make complex ideas seem obvious once stated, and the absence of a large and well-organized following to carry his name forward.

  The thinkers Adler influenced include Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow, and Albert Ellis. His insights on safeguarding tendencies and neurotic behavior preceded Anna Freud's treatment of the same themes in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. His advocacy for the female analyst and for understanding power dynamics between men and women placed him among the earliest voices for feminism within psychology.

  A survey published in 2002 in A Review of General Psychology ranked Adler as the 67th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century. The number is striking given how rarely his name appears on the ideas he generated. Organizations promoting his work now operate in Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Switzerland, the United States, Jamaica, Peru, and Wales - a reach that the man who died with unclaimed ashes in Edinburgh might have recognized as a particularly Adlerian kind of ending: influence without credit, belonging without recognition.