Alfred Adler

Adler is the earliest clear statement of an idea this site needs: that the wish to dominate people is not a sign of strength.

To be human is to begin small and dependent, and everything afterwards is a response to that. The response can aim at a task, or it can aim at other people.

Two strivings that look alike

Adler broke with Freud over what drives people. His answer was a movement from a felt minus toward a felt plus: from inferiority toward competence.

He then split that movement in two. Striving for superiority aims at being above other people, and Adler read it as compensation for felt inferiority rather than as strength. It is measured against persons, so it never finishes, because there is always someone else.

Striving toward completion aims at a task and at contribution. It is measured against the work, which means it can actually be satisfied.

The mark of health, for Adler, is social interest: the sense of being one among others with something to give. He treated its absence as the common feature of the conditions he saw, and treated its development as the aim of therapy.

Why this belongs on a site about control

It gives the individual-level version of the claim that runs through the rest of these pages. Systems of control get built where trust and self-restraint have failed. Adler says the same about a person: the need to be over others appears where the capacity to be equal among them did not develop.

He is also useful against the reading that ambition itself is suspect. Adler thought the upward movement was universal and healthy. What he distrusted was its redirection from tasks onto people.

The line to Fromm

Erich Fromm knew Adler's work and carried the argument further, into why whole populations accept domination. Where Adler has an individual compensating for smallness, Fromm has a society fleeing the weight of its own freedom.

Serious objections

• Adler's theory was built from clinical impression rather than controlled study, and almost none of its central claims have been tested in the way modern psychology would require.
• Inferiority feeling explains a great deal and therefore explains too much. It can be fitted to any behaviour after the fact, which is the standard objection to the psychodynamic tradition as a whole.
• Social interest carries a moral judgement inside what is presented as a clinical category, and Adler is not always clear about who decides what counts as contribution.
• His popular influence has far outrun the evidence, particularly through self-help writing that attributes to him claims he did not make.