Medicine: Man with a Will

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"To Adler," says Author Bottome, "man was an animal who chooses." If it can be said that Freud "chose" the Oedipus complex on the basis of his relations with his father and mother, it can be said equally that Adler "chose" the inferiority complex on the basis of his relations with a "model eldest brother." Born (1870) in a Vienna suburb, the son of a Jewish corn merchant, Adler could never forget that brother, who became a successful businessman. "He was always ahead of me," Adler once sighed to Author Bottome when he was in his 60s, "and for the matter of that, he is still ahead of me!" Author Bottome suggests that the Freud-Adler conflict was partly an Elder v. Younger battle in which the systematic, authoritarian senior (Freud was 14 years older) held his own against the challenge of a rebellious, free-and-easy junior.

Logic from the Whole. Short in stature, rachitic in boyhood, Adler was fascinated from youth on by the power of the human will as an antidote to physical defects. He took for granted that Beethoven should be afflicted with deafness, that painters should suffer from eye trouble or even be color blind, that Napoleons should be little men—the greater the stumbling block, the greater the readiness with which a determined will changed it into a mounting-stone. In his first and greatest work, the bulky Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation (1907), Adler ran the range of the whole ailing human body, from scrofula to fallen arches, describing in full the many ways in which his patients used their frailties as spurs to their striving for superiority. As Adler saw it, this striving was the very key to evolutionary man, dangerous only when the goal was brutal or otherwise antisocial, tragic only if a failure of courage led to surrender and a falling back into an "inferiority complex" of self-frustrating disillusion. The correction of false or illusory goals and the reawakening of personal courage seemed to Adler the one and only duty of the practicing psychiatrist.

No psychologist with such beliefs could work for long with a colleague who believed with equal passion in a sexual basis of human activity. Sex, to Adler, was neither more nor less basic than eating, drinking, thinking and surviving—"Perhaps I should not call it my favorite function," he said blandly. If his interpretations of psychological behavior seemed shallow to Freud. Freud's seemed intolerably circumscribed to Adler. Nor could Adler follow Fellow Heretic Jung into the distant reaches of the "collective unconscious"—not because Adler scorned mystical conceptions ("Mysticism," he used to say, "is any science that scientists do not understand"), but because he refused to divide man into conscious and unconscious halves. To Adler, man was always all of a piece; what Freud and Jung deemed unconscious, Adler preferred to describe as "the not understood." Said he: "There is a logic from the head. There is also a logic from the heart. There is an even deeper logic from the whole."