Man with a Will

The night before his first (1926) voyage from Vienna to the U.S., "the legitimate father of the inferiority complex," as Alfred Adler once described himself, dreamed that he was "on a ship traveling to an unknown destination with all that he had acquired in the way of treasures during his lifetime. A collision took place and the boat sank; everything he possessed was lost; but he himself, after a long struggle, succeeded in reaching shore."

In terms of Adlerian psychology, this dream revealed both pessimism and courage. It was also a pretty accurate prophecy. Adler made the U.S. his home for the last three years of his life, but in collision with both Freudians and Jungians, his fame and influence took a hard beating. Today, 21 years after his death in Scotland (where he was lecturing), Adler's Individual Psychology is still the Cinderella of depth psychology's Big Three. To Freudians, Adler's views are superficial and inadequate; to more mystical Jungians, they seem earth-bound and unimaginative. But in a new, revised edition of Alfred Adler (Vanguard; $5), British Novelist Phyllis (Private Worlds, The Mortal Storm) Bottome, biographer and longtime friend of Adler, sets out the principles of Individual Psychology so clearly and completely as to suggest that the Adlerian boat is not only still afloat but still carrying riches in its neglected cargo. Adler's theories are perhaps most fascinating for the light they cast--by contrast--on Freudian teachings; for unlike the Freudians, Adler emphasizes man's free will and his individual moral responsibility.

As-lf Philosophy. Freudian man stems largely from the great Victorian period of machine genius: the psyche is a systematic motor, complicated but explicable in its deep and unconscious workings. The motor is controlled beyond the individual's power, largely by environment and sex, and can be tinkered with only with the help of that indispensable repairman, the analyst. Adler's starting point is evolution, as interpreted by philosophical Darwinians. Like Darwin, Adler saw man as an evolving species but like Samuel Butler and Nietzsche, he rated man's will far above man's environment and physical heredity.

Man, as Nietzsche sees him, may will himself to supermanly heights, provided his goal is proportionately lofty. But man cannot ever be absolutely certain whether his inspired goal is true or false, concluded Germany's Hans Vaihinger (Adler's "special favorite" among contemporary philosophers); the best he can do is follow it as if it were true.

"To Adler," says Author Bottome, "man was an animal who chooses." If it can be said that Freud "chose" the Oedipus complex on the basis of his relations with his father and mother, it can be said equally that Adler "chose" the inferiority complex on the basis of his relations with a "model eldest brother." Born (1870) in a Vienna suburb, the son of a Jewish corn merchant, Adler could never forget that brother, who became a successful businessman. "He was always ahead of me," Adler once sighed to Author Bottome when he was in his 60s, "and for the matter of that, he is still ahead of me!" Author Bottome suggests that the Freud-Adler conflict was partly an Elder v. Younger battle in which the systematic, authoritarian senior (Freud was 14 years older) held his own against the challenge of a rebellious, free-and-easy junior.

Logic from the Whole. Short in stature, rachitic in boyhood, Adler was fascinated from youth on by the power of the human will as an antidote to physical defects. He took for granted that Beethoven should be afflicted with deafness, that painters should suffer from eye trouble or even be color blind, that Napoleons should be little men--the greater the stumbling block, the greater the readiness with which a determined will changed it into a mounting-stone. In his first and greatest work, the bulky Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation (1907), Adler ran the range of the whole ailing human body, from scrofula to fallen arches, describing in full the many ways in which his patients used their frailties as spurs to their striving for superiority. As Adler saw it, this striving was the very key to evolutionary man, dangerous only when the goal was brutal or otherwise antisocial, tragic only if a failure of courage led to surrender and a falling back into an "inferiority complex" of self-frustrating disillusion. The correction of false or illusory goals and the reawakening of personal courage seemed to Adler the one and only duty of the practicing psychiatrist.

No psychologist with such beliefs could work for long with a colleague who believed with equal passion in a sexual basis of human activity. Sex, to Adler, was neither more nor less basic than eating, drinking, thinking and surviving--"Perhaps I should not call it my favorite function," he said blandly. If his interpretations of psychological behavior seemed shallow to Freud. Freud's seemed intolerably circumscribed to Adler. Nor could Adler follow Fellow Heretic Jung into the distant reaches of the "collective unconscious"--not because Adler scorned mystical conceptions ("Mysticism," he used to say, "is any science that scientists do not understand"), but because he refused to divide man into conscious and unconscious halves. To Adler, man was always all of a piece; what Freud and Jung deemed unconscious, Adler preferred to describe as "the not understood." Said he: "There is a logic from the head. There is also a logic from the heart. There is an even deeper logic from the whole."

Organ Jargon. Plump, jovial, determined, informal, Adler preferred lecturing to writing. But he was happiest as a practitioner, combining sympathy with what Author Bottome calls a "strong antiseptic of common sense." Rejecting the Freudian couch, he waved incoming patients to a choice of chairs, quietly alert to see if they chose one too far away from him (i.e., at a safe distance) or too close (suffocation tactics). Sure that the body expresses the general tendency of the whole man ("Bodies do not lie so easily as the minds behind them"), he set great store by a patient's posture, gestures and movements, as well as by physical illnesses caused by psychic factors--"the organ jargon."

"There is nothing . . . so upsetting to the ordinary layman," writes Author Bottome, "as [the idea] that his sickness or mental troubles should require any improvement in his character." So-called "scientific" psychologists were equally apt to shy away from any invasion of ethical and moral fields that lay (they felt) outside the sphere of pure science. Adler had no such qualms. Every neurotic, he insisted, was a person who knew what he ought to do but devoted his energies to finding reasons for not doing it. Much as Nietzsche had concluded that the highest will-to-power lay in the highest form of selfdiscipline, so Adler concluded that no man could rise from an inferior condition to a truly superior one without what he called "social interest." "What a word!" cried one of his followers, on first hearing it. "It does not even exist in philosophy!" An ex-Adlerian doctor told Author Bottome that, as a scientist. Adler should have known "that if he insisted on spreading this sort of religious science through the laity, we, as a profession, could not support him."

Popular Prophets. Adler knew it. but chose to follow his beliefs at the expense of his prestige. He carried his teachings of social interest directly to the U.S. layman in half a dozen books (mostly poorly put together and badly translated) and innumerable brilliant lectures. Deserted by the Freudian "priesthood," ignored by leftist intellectuals in search of systematic formulas, Adler died leaving no school behind him, no formidable center or training ground for the education of future Individual Psychologists. Many of his discoveries were quietly absorbed by other factions (e.g., the psychosomaticists and child psychologists of almost all persuasions). Much that he had expressed plainly but severely was mouthed to death in mangled form by popular prophets, such as the late Dale Carnegie.

Today, only the inferiority complex remains inseparable from the name of Alfred Adler. But Author Bottome's biography, in a world that is increasingly distressed by over-systematized modes of collective thought, may help restore the reputation of a doughty spokesman for human choice and free will.

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