Medicine: Man with a Will

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Organ Jargon. Plump, jovial, determined, informal, Adler preferred lecturing to writing. But he was happiest as a practitioner, combining sympathy with what Author Bottome calls a "strong antiseptic of common sense." Rejecting the Freudian couch, he waved incoming patients to a choice of chairs, quietly alert to see if they chose one too far away from him (i.e., at a safe distance) or too close (suffocation tactics). Sure that the body expresses the general tendency of the whole man ("Bodies do not lie so easily as the minds behind them"), he set great store by a patient's posture, gestures and movements, as well as by physical illnesses caused by psychic factors—"the organ jargon."

"There is nothing . . . so upsetting to the ordinary layman," writes Author Bottome, "as [the idea] that his sickness or mental troubles should require any improvement in his character." So-called "scientific" psychologists were equally apt to shy away from any invasion of ethical and moral fields that lay (they felt) outside the sphere of pure science. Adler had no such qualms. Every neurotic, he insisted, was a person who knew what he ought to do but devoted his energies to finding reasons for not doing it. Much as Nietzsche had concluded that the highest will-to-power lay in the highest form of selfdiscipline, so Adler concluded that no man could rise from an inferior condition to a truly superior one without what he called "social interest." "What a word!" cried one of his followers, on first hearing it. "It does not even exist in philosophy!" An ex-Adlerian doctor told Author Bottome that, as a scientist. Adler should have known "that if he insisted on spreading this sort of religious science through the laity, we, as a profession, could not support him."

Popular Prophets. Adler knew it. but chose to follow his beliefs at the expense of his prestige. He carried his teachings of social interest directly to the U.S. layman in half a dozen books (mostly poorly put together and badly translated) and innumerable brilliant lectures. Deserted by the Freudian "priesthood," ignored by leftist intellectuals in search of systematic formulas, Adler died leaving no school behind him, no formidable center or training ground for the education of future Individual Psychologists. Many of his discoveries were quietly absorbed by other factions (e.g., the psychosomaticists and child psychologists of almost all persuasions). Much that he had expressed plainly but severely was mouthed to death in mangled form by popular prophets, such as the late Dale Carnegie.

Today, only the inferiority complex remains inseparable from the name of Alfred Adler. But Author Bottome's biography, in a world that is increasingly distressed by over-systematized modes of collective thought, may help restore the reputation of a doughty spokesman for human choice and free will.