Freud Vs Adler

Freud vs. Adler

By Jean Chiriac, President of AROPA

Alfred Adler was one of Freud’s first disciples. He even

held important positions in the psychoanalytical activity

initiated by Freud and his supporters. But it is the same

person who was the first great dissident from Freudian psychoanalysis,

whose purely sexual sense he criticizes, inclining

towards the will to power seen as a main source of

neuroses.

Adler is undoubtedly one of the most important dissidents

to psychoanalysis. In addition, just as Jung, Adler

also created his own psychoanalytical school which, in order

to distinguish it from Freud’s, he called individual psychology.

Since the very time of their work together as colleagues,

Freud would express his disagreement with Adler. He didn’t

make it publicly yet but - wishing to spare the emerging

psychoanalytical movement - restricted himself to epistolary

remarks, such as those addressed to Jung.

Long time after his official separation from Adler and

his group, Freud gave up restraint and started passing ironical

remarks on his former adept in a manner that, we have

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to admit it, was downright irresistible. In the chapter written

on clarifications and explanations of all sorts from “New

Introductory Lesson to Psycho-Analysis”, 1933), Freud used

to draw a parallel between the odd career of a country doctor,

who diagnosed every health problem in the same way

and Adler’s practice. “For, whether a man is a homosexual

or a necrophilic - Freud wrote - a hysteric suffering from

anxiety, an obsessional neurotic cut off from society, or a

raving lunatic, the «Individual Psychologist’» of the Adlerian

school will declare that the impelling motive of his

condition is that he wishes to assert himself, to overcompensate

for his inferiority, to remain «on top», to pass from

the feminine to the masculine line.”

In reality, this perspective is not to be wholly rejected.

Nevertheless, it covers a concept that Freudian psychoanalysis

created too - the secondary benefit of the disease. “The

self-preservative instinct will try to profit by every situation;

the ego will seek to turn even illness to its advantage.

In psycho-analysis this is known as the «secondary gain

from illness». Though, indeed, when we think of the facts

of masochism, of the unconscious need for punishment and

of neurotic self-injury, which make plausible the hypothesis

of there being instinctual impulses that run contrary to

self-preservation, we even feel shaken in our belief in the

general validity of the commonplace truth on which the

theoretical structure of Individual Psychology is erected.”

Confronted with the obvious fact that Adlerian psychology

has been successful in many instances, Freud made a

remark that he would permanently turn to in Jung’s case:

“But a theory such as this is bound to be very welcome

to the great mass of the people, a theory which recognizes

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no complications, which introduces no new concepts that

are hard to grasp, which knows nothing of the unconscious,

which gets rid at a single blow of the universally oppressive

problem of sexuality and which restricts itself to the

discovery of the artifices by which people seek to make life

easy. For the mass of the people themselves take things

easily: they call for no more than a single reason by way of

explanation, they do not thank science for its diffuseness,

they want to have simple solutions and to know that problems

are solved.”

Fritz Wittels (“Sigmund Freud”, 1923) shows more generosity

to Adler, also acknowledging his merits; we

shouldn’t lie to ourselves, though: “Adler is one of Freud’s

most outstanding students”, but only for one shortcoming:

“he could not analyze. He had no easy access to facts of

unconscious life. His interpretations of dreams could be

often corrected by people outside the field and, in dealing

with his patients, he would rarely go down to areas Freud

and his students usually reached”.

Adler’s theory came from Nietzsche and was called “the

will to power”. “What does man want? What does every

being want? To be powerful. Therefore, what exactly affects

us most? Weakness, inferiority. Pushed by its own thirst

for power, the lower being passionately strives to improve,

as it cannot bear the feeling of inferiority. Thus, in a huge

psychic effort, stammering Demostene became an orator; a

shortsighted person turns into a painter and a paralyzed one

into Stilicon or a Torstensson. If the strife is successful,

inferiority is compensated for and overcome by psychic

over-elevation. Inferiority turns into added value. The two

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generals mentioned above were known and feared for the

lightning action speed of their armies”.

But what happens if the effort towards inferiority compensation

does not prove successful? “Under such circumstances,

individuals take refuge in their disease, just like

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