Term Paper on Adler vs. Freud
Sigmund Freud is the originator of psychoanalysis, and believed religion to be
"the universal obessional neurosis of humanity." He heeded sexual impulses to be
a primary source of motivation for man, and that mental activity is basically
unconscious, that is the unconscious is a covert reservoir of the mind which is
filled with drives and impulses which reign a person's thinking and behavior.
Born in Moravia, he lived most of his life in Vienna, receiving his medical
degree from the Univ. of Vienna in 1881.
His therapy called the cathartic method that consisted of having the patient
remember and reproduce the forgotten incidents while under hypnosis. The medical
profession poorly received the work, and the two men soon separated over Freud's
growing belief that the undefined energy causing conversion was sexual in
nature. Freud then deserted hypnosis and invented a technique called free
association that allowed emotionally charged material that the individual had
repressed in the unconscious to emanate to conscious recognition. In addition
works like, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900, tr.1913), The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life (1904, tr.1914), and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905, tr. 1910), augmented the bitter antagonism toward Freud, and he worked
alone until 1906. The Swiss psychiatrists Eugen Bleuler and C. G. Jung, the
Austrian Alfred Adler, and others joined him.
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Bleuler, Jung and Freud in 1908 founded the journal Jahrbuch für
psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, and in 1909 the movement
first received public identification when Freud and Jung were invited to give a
series of lectures at Clark Univ. in Worcester, Mass. In 1910 the International
Psychoanalytical Association was created with Jung as president, but the rapport
of the movement was brief: between 1911 and 1913 both Jung and Adler resigned,
constituting their own schools in disapproval against Freud's accentuation on
infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex. In spite of the fact that these
men, and others, who broke away later, objected to Freudian theories, the
fundamental structure of psychoanalysis as the study of unconscious mental
processes is still Freudian.
Discord lay copiously in the scale of emphasis placed on concepts largely
originated by Freud. He contemplated his last bestowal to psychoanalytic theory
to be The Ego and the Id in 1923 and 1927, following which he regressed to prior
cultural abstractions. Totem and Taboo in 1913 and 1918, an inquiry of the
origins of religion and morality, and Moses and Monotheism in 1939 and 1939, are
the information bases of his application of psychoanalytic theory to cultural
problems. In 1938, with the National Socialist occupation of Austria, Freud fled
to England, where he died the following year. Freudian theory has had broad
influence, on fields as diverse as anthropology, education, art, and literary
criticism. Alfred Adler is a well-known dissident from Freud's school of
thought. Adler became the originator of what he called "individual psychology."
He transferred the motivational accentuation from biological instincts to social
relationships. He hypothesized that man's principal motivation to be a "will to
power." Which is based upon his fecundation of the universal need of children to
be dependent upon adults. Dependence of that kind produces feelings of
insecurity and inferiority which each must strive to overcome. As a result he
was considered as a humanist.
Born in Vienna on 7 February 1870, Alfred Adler was the second son of a Jewish
grain merchant. At the age of five he almost died of pneumonia and it was then
that he decided to become a physician. He achieved his degree in medicine at the
University of Vienna in 1895. He then deviated to psychiatry and, in 1902, as
Adler had been one of the few to react auspiciously to Freud's book on dream
interpretation, he was invited to join the debate group of the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society.
In 1905 Adler printed A Study of Organ Inferiority. Starting at that point the
differences between his own and Freud's views became intensifying obvious. While
Adler's theories on organic inferiority had been quite harmonious with Freud's
theories, his paper on the offensive instinct and another paper on children's
feelings of inferiority implied that he contemplated misleading Freud's original
theories that mental problems were originated without exception by sexual
trauma. He also countered Freud's generalization wherefore dreams where without
fail interpreted as sexual. Later Adler founded what was preliminary known as
the Society for Free Psychoanalytic Inquiry, afterward to be renamed the Society
for Individual Psychology. In 1912 Adler printed The Neurotic Constitution, in
which he in addition developed his main theories. He called his psychological
system Individual Psychology, by which he meant "undivided", that is, a system
that seeks to understand people as united wholes, as well as in association to
their physical and social environment and to their style of life, somewhat than
as an accumulation of different parts.
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The era of controversy
It is important to describe over here the controversial era when Freud and Adler
were t cross roads, because this would then lead us to a correct understanding
of their conflicting theories of therapy. In 1909, there was no international
congress of psychoanalysts, as such because three of the major players, that
were Freud, Carl Jung, and the Hungarian analyst Sandor Ferenczi, had already
had an international congress of sorts during their joint trip to Clark
University in Worcester, Massachusetts. However, in 1910 the congress
reassembled for several days in Nürnberg. According to Ernest Jones, the
scientific content of the meeting was fine, but the disposition of the meeting
was a bad dream. Jung was elected as a president of the newly founded
International Psychoanalytic Association at the time of the congress and thus he
had also organized the conference, thereby arousing a number of distressed
points between him and the Viennese psychoanalysts. The Viennese were
overwhelmed that the Swiss psychiatrists, of whom Jung was the leader, were
captivating the psychoanalytic movement. Their doubts increased when a motion
was upheld to make national and regional psychoanalytic associations into
branches of the International Association. This action would make the Viennese
Psychoanalytic Society and the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society, which had been
instituted in 1908, into branches of the International Association.
Freud would have been the best position to ease tensions, but he did nothing to
help ease the situation. Even though he was conscious of the conflict, Freud
sided solely with Jung and at first did little to calm the battered egos of his
Viennese colleagues. On apex of the individual disagreements over who should
head the Association, there was also a somewhat visible crosscurrent of ethnic
conflict that is the Viennese Jews were differentiated against the Swiss
Gentiles. The actuality that Freud, the Viennese Jewish psychoanalyst par
distinction, was unified against the Viennese Jews only made the position more
complex. Although, the meeting resolved to everyone's satisfaction within a
week, but this balance did not last for a long time. The two-day Weimar congress
in September of 1911 went evenly enough, but in the same year, the discords
between Freud and the Viennese analysts reached a zenith. Three months ahead of
the congress, in June of 1911, Alfred Alder had split the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society, and in October, nine of his followers joined him in constituting the
Society for Free Psychoanalysis.
Point of divergence
Adler's greatest discord with Freud, aside from his exasperation that Freud
favored the Zurich psychoanalysts, was over the basic reasons of neurosis. Adler
adhered to that issues of dominance, submission, and aggression were at the
center of mental illness. In comparison, Freud adhered to that sex was at the
center of all mental illness. Adler's theory of neurosis centered on the
"inferiority complex."
Adlerian psychology, as it is known to be called in English, became really
famous in its own right, in part by reason of its wide appeal to
psychotherapists who forlorn Freud's sole focus on sexuality. One of the points
to note is the fact that in October of 1912, Wilhelm Stekel, who had been
co-editor of the Zentralblatt with Adler, also resigned from the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society. Stekel had had a complex relation with Freud; Ernest
Jones, Freud's memoirist and an active member of the International Association
from its origin, claims that Stekel would repeatedly tell Freud one thing in
private and say another thing in public, as if to dare Freud to repudiate him.
In any case its nature, this kinship fell apart in 1912 and was never fixed.
These acrid resignations were hard for Freud. For a period, the tightly bound
society of psychoanalysts had shared an "us against the world" disposition that
brought them together against the conventional medical community. At this time,
nonetheless, the community was falling apart just as it was starting to gain an
international footing. However for the time being Freud still had Carl Jung,
whom he thought of as the inheritor evident of psychoanalysis. In 1911, he and
Jung were still on superb terms, even though Freud had started to note that Jung
appears far more interested in questions of mythology and mysticism than he was
in neurosis, the primary substance matter of psychoanalysis. In 1912,
notwithstanding, Jung's interest in mysticism led to a basic discord about the
basis of psychoanalysis, and Freud's consanguinity with Jung rapidly fell
asunder. Furthermore to declining to consider the significance of sexuality to
neurosis, as had Adler and Stekel, Jung also privately disliked many of his
colleagues in the International Association, specially those Viennese
psychoanalysts who still remained. During the fourth congress of the
International Psychoanalytic Association met in Munich in September of 1913,
Freud was resolutely opposed to Jung's ideas. Even though Jung was re-elected
president, he resigned from the editorship of the Jahrbuch in October and from
the presidency itself in April of 1914.
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In the middle of whole of the chaos within the psychoanalytic tepees, Ernest
Jones, who remained constantly sanctified to Freud and to psychoanalysis,
destined to take action. He accessed Freud with the idea of making a secret
group of loyal psychoanalysts who would help to protect Freud, and
psychoanalysis itself, from desertions such as Adler, Stekel's, and Jung's. To
this idea Freud agreed ardently. In 1911, a modernistic psychoanalytic journal
called Imago was instituted. It centered on the non-medical applications of
psychoanalysis. That was a sector in which Freud had become increasingly
attentive, in part by reason of his discussions with Jung about the part of
unconscious symbols in mythology and legend. The part of such "collective"
symbols and paragon was to become the center of Jung's psychology after his
break with Freud in 1913.
For Freud, the application of psychoanalysis to art and history remained an
active appeal, one that became increasingly significant in the years after the
First World War, even though it never took the fame in his psychology that it
did in Jung's. Freud's essay Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood,
initially published in May of 1910, interpreted one of the artists dreams
correctly, it turns out, due to a acute error in translation as a sign of da
Vinci's homosexuality. A more important work was Freud's Totem and Taboo; he
painted a picture of a tribal unruly crowd in which a dominant father figure
controlled the women and children. In this, his sons ultimately rose up against
him, killed him, and ate him. Thereupon, driven by the culpability of their act
and covetous of a way to stop them from killing each other, they established a
law against mating within the horde that is of having sex with their sisters.
According to Freud this was the origin of the incest taboo. The totem, an animal
that symbolizes the unruly crowd, was assumed to be a depiction of the murdered
father and consequently a reminder of the sons' guilt and of the taboo contra
incest. Any person who shared the family totem was unfit for mating. Freud's
work was grounded, to some limit, on earlier reports of the use of totems and
taboos in "primitive" cultures, but it was an unusually theoretical picture.
Freud protracted this style of theoretical reasoning in sporadic works all over
his life, including Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930, and
Moses and Monotheism published in 1938.
Further to the theme of Adler, who once wrote "The test of one's behavior
pattern; relationship to society, relationship to one's work, relationship to
sex" in favor of his theory. Adler argued that people are a product of the
social influences on our personality. People are motivated not so much by drives
and instincts as by aims and inspirations. The future and one's expectation for
what it holds are often more meaningful than one's past. For Adler, people’s
goal in life is the accomplishment of success or superiority. This goal is
fabricated in childhood when, because we are then weak and susceptible, we
develop an inferiority complex, that is the feeling that we are less able than
others to solve life's problems and get along in the world. Whereas we may seem
inferior as children, with the assistance of social support and our own
creativity, we can overwhelm and succeed. And contra to this is the Freudian
theory that every thing is based on sexual instincts that are either suppressed
or not in the childhood gives rise to the personality later on that basis.
References
Dr. C. George Boeree (1997) Alfred Adler 1870 - 1937
Inferiority Complex (from Britannica.com), November 18, 2001, http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=43343&tocid=0
B. Spenser “The Core of Personality”, November 18, 2001, http://oldsci.eiu.edu/psychology/Spencer/Adler.html
S. Carpenter: In APA Monitor “Freud's Dream Theory Gets Boost From Imaging
Work”, November 18, 2001,
http://www.apa.org/monitor/sc.html
Grunbaum's Argument Against Freud (from Great Ideas in Personality), November
18, 2001, http://psych.nwu.edu/~coriat/grunbaum.htm
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