Alfred Adler

Author Code: GAAD

Educated at the University of Vienna Medical School, Adler received his degree in 1895. In 1902, he was invited by Sigmund Freud to join a discussion group which would eventually become the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. During the ensuing years, Freud, Adler, Jung and others would establish the foundations of psychoanalysis. After a number of years of active participation in the group, Adler resigned in 1911 in order to form his own school. In 1912, he published The Neurotic Constitution. During World War I, he functioned as a doctor in the Austrian hospital service and shortly after the war established a child guidance clinic in Vienna. Adler lectured at the Pedagogical Institute and helped to establish child-guidance clinics at local schools. From 1926 onwards, he spent a great deal of time in America and when the Nazis came to power in Austria in 1932, he and his wife went to New York where he lectured at Columbia University and was accorded the first chair of Visiting Professor at Long Island College of Medicine. Adler died while on a lecture trip to the University of Aberdeen. Adler's theories differed greatly from those of Freud and his sexually obsessive outlook. His approach was one of socratic dialogue which is still used today by the psychiatric profession. His many influential works include Study of Organ Inferiority and its Psychical Compensation (1917), The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1927), Understanding Human Nature (1927), The Science of Living (1929), Education of Children (1930), Problems of Neurosis (1930) and What Life Should Mean to You (1931).