The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, Volume 1 The Neurotic Character

397 Pages·2002·1.77 MB·English

by  Adler

The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler Volume 1
The Neurotic Character
Fundamentals of a Comparative Individual Psychology
and Psychotherapy
By Alfred Adler
Translated by Cees Koen Edited by Henry T. Stein, Ph.D.
Based on the Fourth Edition (1927) Including Endnotes from the 1999
German Critical Edition
Classical Adlerian Translation Project
© 2002 by Henry T. Stein, Ph.D.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage
and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the editor. All inquiries
should be sent via e-mail to Henry T. Stein, Ph.D at [email protected] .
Published 2002 by:
The Classical Adlerian Translation Project Alfred Adler Institute of Northwestern
Washington 2565 Mayflower Lane
Bellingham, WA 98226
[phone]
Web Site: http://www.Adlerian.us
First Printing 2002
Second Printing 2002, revised
Third Printing 2002
Fourth Printing 2003
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 0-9715645-0-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2001099770
Cover design by Donna Mendes, Berkeley, CA
Table of Contents
Prefaces and Introduction
Editor’s Preface – Henry T. Stein, Ph.D. ...................................................... iii To the
Reader (1911) ...................................................................................... v Original
Publisher’s Preface (1912) ............................................................. vi Adler’s Preface to
the First Edition (1912) ................................................ viii Adler’s Preface to the
Second Edition (1919) .............................................. ix Adler’s Preface to the Third
Edition (1922) ................................................... x Adler’s Preface to the Fourth Edition
(1927) .............................................. xii
Theoretical Part I
Introduction .................................................................................................. xv Part I-I:
The Origin and Development of the Inferiority Feeling
And its Effects ......................................................................................... 1
Part I-II:
Psychic Compensation and its Preparation ........................................... 32
Part I-III:
The Accentuated Fiction as Guiding Idea in the Neurosis .................... 41
Practical Part II
Part II-I:
Greed—Distrust—Envy—Cruelty—Derogatory Criticism of the Neurotic—Neurotic
Apperception—Neuroses of Old Age— Changes in the Form and Intensity of the
Neurosis—Organ Jargon ..... 86
Part II-II:
The Neurotic Extension of Limitations through Ascesis, Love, Travel, Mania, Crime —
Simulation and Neurosis —
Inferiority Feeling of the Female Sex — Purpose of the Ideal — Doubt as an
Expression of Psychic Hermaphroditism —
Masturbation and Neurosis —The ‘Incest-Complex’ as a Symbol of the Desire for
Power — The Nature of Delusions .......................... 126
Part II-III:
Neurotic Principles — Compassion, Coquetry, Narcissism — Psychic Hermaphroditism
— Hallucinatory Safeguarding — Virtue, Conscience, Pedantry, Fanaticism for Truth
........................... 148
i
Part II-IV:
Depreciation Tendency — Obstinacy and Wildness —
Sexual Relations of Neurotics as a Metaphor —
Symbolic Emasculation — Feeling of Depreciation —
Equality to Men as a Plan of Life — Simulation and Neurosis — Substitution of
Masculinity —
Impatience, Dissatisfaction and Reticence ...........................................167
Part II-V:
Cruelty, Conscience, Perversion and Neurosis ....................................189
Part II-VI:
Above–Beneath — Choice of Profession — Somnambulism — Antithesis in Thought
— Elevation of the Personality by
Depreciation of Others — Jealousy — Neurotic Assistance — Authority — Thinking in
Antitheses and the Masculine Protest — Dilatory Attitude and Marriage — The
Attitude Upwards as a Symbol of Life — Compulsive Masturbation —
Neurotic Striving for Knowledge ........................................................ 195
Part II-VII:
Punctuality — The Will to be First — Homosexuality and
Perversion as a Symbol — Embarrassment and Exhibitionism — Faithfulness and
Unfaithfulness — Jealousy —
The Neurosis of Conflict ........................................................................ 209
Part II-VIII:
Fear of the Partner — The Ideal in the Neurosis — Insomnia and Compulsive Sleeping
— Neurotic Comparison of Man and Woman — Forms of the Fear of Women
..................................................................219
Part II-IX:
Self-reproach, Self-torture, Repentance and Asceticism —
Flagellation — Neuroses in Children —
Suicide and Suicidal Ideas ..................................................................... 236
Part II-X:
The Neurotic’s Feeling for Family — Obstinacy and Obedience — Silence and
Loquaciousness — The Tendency for Reversal — Replacement of a Characteristic Trait
by Means of Safeguards, Expedients, Profession and Ideal
........................................................... 251
Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 257
Index .................................................................................................................. 260
Appendix
“Classical Adlerian Theory and Practice” ........................................... 290
ii
Prefaces
Editor’s Preface (2001)
The Neurotic Character is Alfred Adler’s magnum opus—complex, profound, and
brilliant in its crystallized capture of the human soul gone astray. Unfortunately, since
1926, the only available English version of the original German text has been a
wrongly-titled,a hastily conceived, frequently mistaken, and somewhat “Freudianized”
translation of the 1917 first edition. It has been reprinted often enough to mislead and
confuse several generations of students and clinicians. Only those able to read the
original German had a chance to appreciate Adler’s breathtaking exploration of mental
aberration and fewer could understand the myriad psychological and literary references
that influenced his thinking, but were not identified adequately. This completely new
translation of the 1927 fourth edition contains about 20% more text than the first
edition, all of Adler’s footnotes, and over 300 endnotes that identify and clarify
references.
More than ten years ago, Kurt Adler and Sophia de Vries, both very dissatisfied
with the earlier translation of the first edition, urged me to find the means of re-
translating what they considered to be one of Adler’s most important publications. Both
were qualified to tackle the job, but advancing years and health limitations prevented
either of them from making such a formidable commitment. The persistent
encouragement of these two senior clinicians ignited a fire that has taken several years
to reach full combustion.
Gradually, a more expansive dream was born—the Adlerian Translation Project.
So many of Adler’s original writings were either out of print, partially translated, poorly
translated, or never translated. Most of the available publications were, and still are, his
popularized writings for the general public. While beginners find these works important
and helpful, experienced clinicians need access to his deeper, more sophisticated,
clinical writings. To satisfy this necessity, and do justice to Adler’s contributions to
psychology and psychotherapy, The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler was
planned.
Although trained as a Classical Adlerian psychotherapist, my knowledge of
German is cursory. Finding an expert translator who was also an experienced Adlerian
clinician seemed improbable--a collaboration appeared to be the best alternative. The
search for appropriate translators took many years. Eventually I found one whose
language skills were impeccable. We began with Adler’s shorter journal articles.
Fortunately, Kurt Adler offered to read and edit the translations. His suggestions,
corrections, and explanations were invaluable. For several years, he helped us refine our
understanding of his father’s ideas and style of writing. After his death, we still had a
considerable quantity of untranslated work ahead of us, but, thanks to his guidance, we
were better prepared to continue. While one translator proceeded with the German
articles, I found Cees Koen, another translator, who began work on Dutch manuscripts
of lectures by
iii Alfred Adler, Alexander Mueller, and Lydia Sicher that were given in Holland.
After completing this project, he offered to continue working on the German
manuscripts. The quality of his work was superb. Since my first translator still had at
least two more years of work ahead of him to complete Adler’s journal articles, I
offered The Neurotic Character to Cees.
Mid-way through work on the fourth edition, a lucky coincidence paved the way
for a greatly enhanced result. Karl Witte, an Adlerian therapist and scholar from
Munich, had just completed the new, German, critical edition of Uber Den Nervosen
Charakter and had sent us a copy. This monumental accomplishment included
references and commentary for all of the names and works mentioned by Adler in his
book. Witte generously offered us permission to translate and use his references and
commentaries. His remarkable, scholarly contribution helped us appreciate the
abundant influences that surrounded Adler: his scientific, medical, and psychiatric
circles; his cultural, philosophical, anthropological and literary environments. Adler’s
repeated references to Nietzsche, Vaihinger, Avenarius, Jerusalem, Kant, Janet, Bleuler,
Kretschmer, Kraepelin, and Stern suggest the impact of each on his thinking. The
organization of the book does not follow a traditional, academic, neatly divided
structure. It vividly reflects Adler’s creative style of fluidly moving back and forth
between theory, practice, and case illustration.
The translation and preliminary editing took three years of draft refinement. Our
goal was to retain Adler’s meaning, making it as readable as possible, without
disturbing the complexity of his style. Although breaking the text up into shorter
sentences might have made it easier to read, the nuances of meaning would be different.
While leaving the original complexity in tact may require a slow, careful, reading and
re-reading of many paragraphs, I believe that the effort will be rewarding. (Lydia
Sicher, one of Adler’s associates in Vienna, recalled the first time she discovered The
Neurotic Character. She found it so compelling, she stayed up the entire night to finish
it.)
After the first phase of translating and editing was completed, the manuscript was
read by three Classical Adlerian psychotherapists who were trained at the Alfred Adler
Institute of San Francisco. Jim Wolf and Martha Edwards provided extremely valuable
comments, corrections, and suggestions which have contributed greatly to the
readability of the material. My special thanks to Dyanne Pienkowski for her
extraordinarily thorough and painstaking effort to edit and refine the manuscript.
However, final responsibility for the accuracy of the translation falls jointly on the
shoulders of the translator and me.
The Neurotic Character is the first publication from The Adlerian Translation
Project. It will be followed by a series of volumes, The Collected Clinical Works of
Alfred Adler, featuring over 200 new translations of Adler’s journal articles written
between 1898 and 1936.
Readers who are unfamiliar with Adlerian constructs, or unaware of the evolution
of Adlerian practice, may wish to prepare for a study of The Neurotic Character by
reading “Classical Adlerian Theory and Practice” in the appendix.
To The Reader (1911)
The initiative for the foundation of the ‘Verein für freie psychoanalytische
Forschung,’ in June 1911, came from some members of the ‘Wiener psychoanalytische
Vereinigung,’ led by Professor Sigmund Freud; they believed that it was the intention of
the older organization to commit its members scientifically to Freud’s doctrines and
theories. This seemed to them not only difficult to combine with the general
fundamental principles of scientific research, but also, in a science as young as
psychology, to contain a specific danger. In their opinion, the value of what had been
achieved so far would be called into question if one would commit oneself too hastily to
certain formulas and abandon all alternatives in researching new solutions. Their
conviction that psychoanalytical methods and the definition of its subjects were of
decisive importance made it seem to them a scientific duty to create a safe haven to
assure that independent psychoanalytical research might be conducted.
In October 1911 the ‘Wiener psychoanalytische Vereinigung’ declared that
membership of both associations was inadmissible, after which a number of members
left the old association. At this moment, therefore, there is no relation whatsoever
between the ‘Verein für freie psychoanalytische Forschung’ and the organizations that
are united in the ‘Internationale psychoanalytische Vereinigung.’ It seems an obligation
for us to state this here explicitly, because we would consider it an injustice when
scientific criticism would saddle the responsibility of our work on men with whom we
disagree on the fundamental preconditions of free scientific work. Similarly, we would
like to claim that we be judged only on the basis of our own work.
The Directors of the ‘Verein für freie psychoanalytische Forschung.’
v
Original Publisher’s Preface (1912)
The aim of the publications of the ‘Verein für freie psychoanalytische Forschung’
is to apply the empirically obtained results of the psychology of neuroses, as far as these
have proved to be suitable, to the further study of philosophic, psychological and
pedagogical questions. In doing this we are guided by the idea that it is possible, in the
search for the ‘sense’ or ‘meaning’ of a psychic phenomenon, to discern not only its
causes, but also its direction and goal, elements and correlations as they are developing.
By saying this, we mean that in our psychological analyses we dedicate a certain
room for the representation of the goal that guides us in our research of a problem or a
personality. However, in our observations, whenever we make them, any individual, or
any phenomenon, is a picture of a series of developments, a microcosm, a symbol of the
whole. Insofar as we are looking for points of comparison in the genesis of a
phenomenon, the direction of our search is comparative and extends to the whole
individual. Since we gather our understanding of the personality from its past as well as
from its future, we take into account all factors that contributed to its development. In
the dynamics of the human psyche we can see how direction is provided by an
unconsciously set and constantly active goal. From it derives the individual’s formation,
the direction of his thought and will and the special character of his personality. The
inexhaustible force of human demands and desires then wells up from the sanctity of the
guiding idea. Coming to an understanding of its traces, whether they be expressed as a
world view, art, science or religion, is the challenge we pose to our work. And this
reveals yet another characteristic of our conception, that of the planned observation of
the psychic phenomenon as it takes place under the guidance of an unconsciously active
idea.
In a similar sense, the physical characteristics of individuals are a symbol that
betrays its origin, its present and its destination. The marks of its inner value are the
shape and performance of the physical organs, and these provide a picture of the
position of their carrier in the world. The comparative inferiority of his physical organs
is mirrored in the psyche of the child, bringing about a fundamental feeling about the
insecurity of life. The child, in his dark awareness, uses this insufficient self-evaluation
to create his plan of life. And the stronger his inferiority feeling is pushing for
compensation, the tighter he will hang on to this plan. The plan of life is the most
extreme, directing limit for his will and it is what he seeks to fulfill in the unrest, in the
chaos of a reality that calls for action. The theory of organ inferiority, of psychic
compensations and security tendencies harks back to ancient popular wisdom and
introduces the genius of earlier authors’b utopias into the mainstream of science.
Thus the theory of people’s forms of expression blends into the other demands of
our science. We can find its traces in the life and play of children as well as adults, in
their psychic disturbances, in their behavior and in phenomena of mental disorders.
Simultaneously, our work strives to come to an understanding between the guiding lines
of morality and ethics, to acquire a better insight into the popular psyche, into the
artistic psyche, the psyche of the normal person as well as the one affected by mental
disease.
The ‘Verein’ under whose name I publish these writings is intended to be the
nursery of our science in the future. Those studies destined to be published have
matured there as a result of collective labor. They will demonstrate that we do not argue
with the validity of other viewpoints in psychology and other directions. We do,
however, reserve the right to cut ourselves loose from all dogma and to follow our own
way. All are invited to cooperate who realize the importance of our direction of
research. We expect that our readers will be unhampered by the prejudice that so often
accompanies new work and findings.
Vienna, on the 25th of March, 1912
Dr. Alfred Adler
The following publicationsc are in preparation:
Alfred Adler: Masturbation und Neurose.
Felix Asnaourow: Sadismus und Masochismus in der Erziehung.
Robert Freschl: Das Griselda-Problem.
Hermann Frischauf: Zur Psychologie des jüngeren Bruders.
Gustav Grüner: Die Mutterleibsphantasie. (Mit einer teilweisen Psychoanalyse von
Shakespeares ‘Hamlet’).
Otto Kaus: Der Fall Gogol.
Paul Loewy: Das Unlustprinzip in der Neurosenpsychologie.
Paul Schrecker: Bergsons Philosophie der Persönlichkeit und das Persönlichkeitsideal.
Leopold Erwin Wexberg: Erotik und Übertagung.
vii
Adler’s Preface to the First Edition (1912)
After I attempted, in the Studie über Minderwertigkeit von Organen (1907), to
observe and consider the structure and tectonics of organs in relation with their genetic
basis, their actual performance and their later development, I set about – supported
equally by existing evidence as by my own experiences – to introduce an identical
method of observation into the field of psychopathology. The present work contains the
most important results of my comparative individual psychological studies of neuroses.
Similar to the theory of organ inferiority, comparative individual psychology also
uses an empirical basis to formulate a fictional, normative standard, with which the
extent of the deviation may then be measured and compared. In both fields of science,
comparative research takes the origin of the phenomenon into account, comparing it
with the present and attempting to deduce the trend for the future. This method of
examination leads us to view the force of evolution and pathological realization as the
result of a struggle that flares up, in the organic field, over the maintenance of balance,
performance and adaptation; in the psyche, an identical readiness to fight is led by a
fictitional idea of the personality, whose activity reaches as far as the development of
the neurotic character and neurotic symptoms. If organically then, ‘the individual
becomes a unified whole in which all parts work together toward a common goal’
(Virchowd) — if the multifarious abilities and tendencies of an organism develop
purposefully into a systematic, unified personality, then we may consider every single
phenomenon of life as if it contains traces of a higher, guiding idea that is present in its
past as well as in its present and future.
This is the path that the author of this book has followed, that is to say, that a
purposive dynamic is flowing through every feature of psychic existence, no matter
how small. Comparative individual psychology discerns in every psychic event the
imprint, or, in a manner of speaking, the symbol of a uniformly directed plan of life that
only assumes an even clearer expression in the psychology of neuroses and psychoses.
The results of such an examination of the neurotic character must give evidence of
the value and practical usefulness of our method of comparative individual psychology
concerning the problems of the psyche.
Vienna, in February of the year 1912 Dr. Alfred Adler
viii
Adler’s Preface to the Second Edition (1919)
The philosophical, all-encompassing theory of the human psyche with which I
investigated the neurotic character has developed, for myself and a large circle of
followers, into a view of the world and a knowledge of human nature in comparison
with which every other way of looking at psychic activity seems to be incorrect or
incomplete.
Between both editions of this book lies a world war with all its consequences, lies
the most terrible mass neurosis to which our neurotically diseased civilization, eroded
by its striving for power and its policy of prestige, has resorted. The gruesome course of
contemporary events confirms in a frightening way the straightforward reasoning of this
book.
A course that reveals itself as the demoniac work of the striving for power that has
been let loose everywhere, throttling or cleverly abusing the immortal community
feeling of humankind.
Our Individual Psychology has far transcended the deadlock of descriptive
psychology. To perceive and discern a human being in our sense means: to tear away
the aberrations of his injured, excited, but powerless striving to become like a God, and
turn him to the imperturbable logic of human social life, the community feeling.
The development of my theory has made a number of elucidations and additions
necessary in the present volume. For the same reason, a second volume will shortly be
published which, besides important preliminary studies, will comprise a number of
necessary additions and new papers1.
Looking back on the development of my theory of Individual Psychology will
reveal the uninterrupted expansion of psychic research on three interlocking levels:
from the infantile inferiority feeling an excited striving for power will originate, which
finds it is hemmed in by the demands of the community and the reminders of the
physiologically and socially rooted community feeling, and goes astray. This concise
explanation, easy to understand as it is, may perhaps offer a helping hand in dealing
with the often senseless drivel of freebooters and storytellers.
The serious reader will, I hope, come to share with me the viewpoint that enables
us to see through every human psyche in its consistent advance to a goal of superiority,
so that movements, characteristics and symptoms are without fail indicating points
higher than themselves. The insights that they gain, however, will burden them with a
task for life: to lead the way in demolishing the striving for personal power and in
educating the community.
Vienna, in May 1919 Dr. Alfred Adler
1 Published in the meanwhile: Praxis und Theorie der Individualpsychologie 3. Aufl.
1927, J. F. Bergmann, München, and Menschenkenntnis 1926, S. Hirtzel, Leipzig.
Adler’s Preface to the Third Edition (1922)
It is perhaps not superfluous to point out that our Individual Psychological
opinions, which were explained for the first time in this book, refuse to acknowledge a
compulsory connection to an organic substratum.
Our conclusions rather make it possible to perceive that the psychic development
of an individual with all his failures and mistakes, as well as neuroses and psychoses,
originate in his attitude toward the absolute logic of human coexistence. The degree of
his failure — his lack of understanding of and cohesion with cosmic and social
demands — is the basis of all psychic disturbances and determines the extent of their
development. The neurotic lives and toils for a world that is not ours. His resistance
against the absolute truth is larger than ours.