Who Was Alfred Aldler?
Who was Alfred Aldler ? Though Adler’s contemporary Sigmund Freud gets most of our modern attention, the two worked closely side by side on many projects.
So, who was Alfred Aldler? Adler was an Austrian doctor and psychologist that helped to found the field of psychotherapy. Adler worked with Sigmund Freud and many other colleagues in order to erect the very first school of psychoanalytic movement. However, Adler eventually broke away from Freud and his other colleagues in order to form the first independent school of psychotherapy and personality theory. It can be easily said that Adler had a direct impact upon the field of psychology today.
Throughout his life, Adler greatly influenced many other famed psychotherapists including Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow, and Albert Ellis. Adler was a strong proponent of social equality, and he felt that all people must be equal if certain psychopathological illnesses were to be avoided. In fact, it is solely due to Adler’s work that we now understand the term “inferiority complex” – a term that Adler coined himself. Additionally, Adler is credited with being one of the first psychologists to recognize feminism.
In order to answer the original question (who was Alfred Aldler?), we must first recognize the somewhat political stance that this man took. He believed that there was a real difference between man and woman, he understood the female plight in all its forms, and he was a strong proponent of Nietzsche. His psychological theories were largely influenced by all of these factors, and he always tried to place people on equal ground with one another. Adler believed that eliminating inequality would eliminate various mental behaviours – quite a groundbreaking notion.
Adler greatly differed from many of his colleagues based upon his ideas of socialism. Still, after his death (he died of a heart attack while giving a lecture in 1937), neo-Freudians picked up on his thoughts spreading them all over the world. In many ways, Adler’s beliefs are far easier to grasp when they are compared to Freud’s own thoughts, but this has a lot to do with the ways in which his theories really adhere to modern thought.
Who was Alfred Aldler? He was a man that stuck by his political and social ideas, but he was more than that. Thanks to his magnificent concepts, Adler changed the face of psychology as we now know it. In fact, more than seventy years after his death Adler is still impacting the field of psychology due to his incredible ideals and theories.