The Drive for Self: Alfred Adler and the Founding of Individual Psychology (review)

The founder of Individual Psychology, Alfred Adler, M.D. (1870–1937), pioneered in social medicine, child guidance, and community mental health. His ideas were probably more acclaimed by lay audiences than by professionals, who nevertheless were considerably influenced by them. Idealistic, ebullient, antiwar, egalitarian in economic and social venues, Adler became a fixture on the lecture circuit in the United States and Europe in the 1930s, a social critic touting parent and teacher education and Gemeinschaftsgefühl: cooperation rather than competition. He contradicted his sometime colleague Sigmund Freud (Adler hated to be called his disciple or follower) on instinct, sexuality, and the Oedipus formula.

Less mystical than Carl Jung, less erudite than Otto Rank (whom he introduced to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society), less articulate than Freud, Adler was more sociopolitical than those three, more eager to engage the proletariat. In this he was successful, achieving fame and fortune as a popular speaker and writer. Biographer Edward Hoffman provides fascinating material on Adler’s American financial backers, Charles Davis (who got him a teaching post at Long Island College of Medicine) and Edward Filene. That Adler’s star faded may have been due to his disinterest in writing and research, a tendency to be disorganized and irascible, and some bad luck: his strong American collaborator, psychiatrist W. Beran Wolfe, died at thirty-five in an accident, while two leading British Adlerians came to ignominious ends.

Adler’s first book, Studie über Minderwertigkeit von Organen (1907) (translated as Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Physical Compensation in 1917), argued that congenital weakness lay at the core of neurosis, spurring individuals to compensation and overcompensation in social adaptation. The only member of Freud’s little society who belonged to the Social Democratic party, he campaigned for good housing and sanitation, higher wages, and better education. Adler postulated an “aggression drive”—in today’s terms, assertiveness—that led to “social feeling.” He presented a paper on Marx (1909) that displeased Freud, and the next year added the concept of “masculine protest” to the inferiority paradigm. He struck a chord for feminism: “That woman is devalued by man is clearly expressed in our culture; indeed, it can even be regarded as a driving force in our civilization” (p. 71). A founding member of the group that launched the psychoanalytic movement, Adler was forced out after nine years (in 1911) for his deviance.

Adler’s marriage to Raissa Epstein (in 1897) produced four children; Hoffman acknowledges contributions from Drs. Alexandra and Kurt Adler (the latter wrote a foreword). Raissa, Moscow native and active socialist, brought the couple close to Leon and Natalia Trotsky during their five years in Vienna. Although Adler preached and apparently practiced monogamy and gender equality, he and Raissa seem to have had a distant, not happy, marriage. This, and the qualities of Adler’s parenting and his friendships, get uncertain treatment from Hoffman. One does not come away from the book with a sure sense of the person.

As for Adler’s psychological system, this book lacks the intellectual rigor, clarity, objectivity, and thoroughness of Paul Stepansky’s In Freud’s Shadow: Adler in Context (1983). Hoffman (also the biographer of Abraham Maslow) is sympathetic, not adulatory. He is generous with local color and information for the nonhistorian, but his prose is pudgy, larded with needless descriptors that slow the pace. He reminds us often of Adler’s busy schedule and his German accent, but leaves open many questions while speculating to no avail on others. Thus, regarding daughter Vali’s terrible death in a Siberian prison camp in 1942: “It is difficult to say how Adler would have taken the news intellectually. In his optimistic system of individual psychology, there was little effort devoted to understanding the inner subtleties of a Hitler or Stalin” (p. 329). Hoffman relies a great deal on secondary sources, and frustrates the reader who wants documentation for some apparently...