Alfred Adler:
An Originator of Modern Psychotherapy Presented by Robert L. Powers, LCP

Web Conference Description

"Life (and all psychological expressions as part of life) moves ever toward overcoming, toward perfection, toward superiority, toward success. You cannot train or condition a living being for defeat. But what an individual thinks or feels as success (as an acceptable goal) is unique with him. In our experience we have found that each individual has a different meaning of, and attitude toward what constitutes success. Therefore a human being cannot be typified or classified. We believe that the parsimony of language causes many scientists to come to mistaken conclusions, to believe in types, entities and racial qualities. Individual Psychology recognizes . . . that each individual must be studied in the light of his own peculiar development. To present the individual understandably, in words, requires an extensive reviewing of all his facets. Yet too often psychologists are tempted away from this recognition to take the easier but unfruitful roads to classification. That is a temptation to which, in practical work, we must never yield." – Alfred Adler (1956, p. 167)

Alfred Adler is recorded as having written this in 1935, two years before his death. As followers in the school of Adler, my wife and co-author, Jane Griffith and I chose this statement to mark the preface of the second edition of our text, The Key to Psychotherapy: Understanding the Self-Created Individual. We said that, with him, “we evoke the artistic quality of personality development, focusing on how the self-created person shapes outlook, attitude, and patterns of movement,” in our efforts to present individuals, understandably, in words, to themselves, “with all the liberation and encouragement this important work can bestow.”

We are not the only ones who seek or have sought to follow Adler in this way. Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, and Carl Rogers, the founders of the Humanist Psychology Association were all immediate and personal students of Adler in the course of their theoretical developments, and many others who follow in the way of phenomenological psychology credit him as well.

Of course it must be admitted that Adler’s attractive way of getting quickly to a picture and an understanding of a person’s unique way of moving (and therefore of erring, and of making troubling mistakes and intractably pathological patterns of suffering) is as liable to reduction, misunderstanding, and banality as any other useful scheme. Is there any way to avoid “limitations and risks” such as these in considering any effective method?

This Web Conference is designed to help clinicians:
1) Consider intra-psychic and inter-psychic conflict at play in psychological disturbances;
2) Understand the difference between analytic metaphor (borrowed by analogy from chemistry) and the indivisible unity of the person implied in Adler’s Individual Psychology;
3) Investigate the purpose of behavior as the clue to understanding individual movement instead of speculating about possible prior causes posited to account for present action or activity;
4) Consider how collaboration in the therapeutic transaction becomes the foundation for the encouragement that is the key to any new learning.

If you have any questions about this Web Conference, or would like more information, please contact us here.