AAllffrreedd AAddlleerr IInnssttiittuuttee ooff NNoorrtthhwweesstteerrnn WWaasshhiinnggttoonn 2565 Mayflower Lane Bellingham, WA 98226 (360) 647-5670 E-mail: [email protected] Web Site: www;Adlerian.us This digital version of The Science of Living, by Alfred Adler, was created by The Classical Adlerian Translation Project.. The original book was scanned, optically converted to a Word file, exported to a PDF format, bookmarked, and enabled for commenting in Adobe Reader. It is protected by copyright, intended for the individual, personal use of subscribers, and may not be shared, distributed, altered, or reproduced without the expressed consent of Dr. Stein. For information about purchasing a subscription, visit our web site at www.Adlerian.us/subscription.htm. © 2011 by Henry T. Stein, Ph.D. The Science of Living The Science of Living by Alfred Adler 1 The Science of Living THE SCIENCE OF LIVING Copyright in U.S.A., 1929. First Published in Great Britain, iyiv. All Rights Reserved. PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY LOWE AND BRYDONE PRINTERS LTD., LONDON, N.W. I 2 The Science of Living TABLE OF CONTENTS A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR AND HIS WORK I. THE SCIENCE OF LIVING II. THE INFERIORITY COMPLEX III. THE SUPERIORITY COMPLEX IV. THE STYLE OF LIFE V. OLD REMEMBRANCES VI. ATTITUDES AND MOVEMENTS VII. DREAMS AND THEIR INTERPRETATION VII. PROBLEM CHILDREN AND THEIR EDUCATION IX. SOCIAL PROBLEMS AND SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT X. SOCIAL FEELING, COMMON SENSE AND THE INFERIORITY COMPLEX XI. LOVE AND MARRIAGE XII. SEXUALITY AND SEX PROBLEMS XIII. CONCLUSION 3 The Science of Living A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR AND HIS WORK Dr. Alfred Adler's work in psychology, while it is scientific and general in method, is essentially the study of the separate personalities we are, and is therefore called Individual Psychology. Concrete, particular, unique human beings are the subjects of this psychology, and it can only be truly learned from the men, women and children we meet. The supreme importance of this contribution to modern psychology is due to the manner in which it reveals how all the activities of the soul are drawn together into the service of the individual, how all his faculties and strivings are related to one end. We are enabled by this to enter into the ideals, the difficulties, the efforts and discouragements of our fellow-men, in such a way that we may obtain a whole and living picture of each as a personality. In this coordinating idea, something like finality is achieved, though we must understand it as finality of foundation. There has never before been a method so rigorous and yet adaptable for following the fluctuations of that most fluid, variable and elusive of all realities, the individual human soul. Since Adler regards not only science but even intelligence itself as the result of the communal efforts of humanity, we shall find his consciousness of his own unique contribution more than usually tempered by recognition of his collaborators, both past and contemporary. It will therefore be useful to consider Adler's relation to the movement called Psycho-analysis, and first of all to recall, however briefly, the philosophic impulses which inspired the psycho-analytic movement as a whole. The conception of the Unconscious as vital memory—biological memory—is common to modern psychology as a whole. But Freud, from the first a specialist in hysteria, took the memories of success or failure in the sexual life, as of the first—and almost the only—importance. Jung, a psychiatrist of genius, has tried to widen this distressingly narrow view, by seeking to reveal the super-individual or racial memories which, he believes, have as much power as the sexual and a higher kind of value for life. It was left to Alfred Adler, a physician of wide and general experience, to unite the conception of the Unconscious more firmly with biological reality. A man of the original school of psycho-analysts, he had done much work by that method of analyzing memories out of their coagulated emotional state into clearness and objectivity. But lie showed that the whole scheme of memory is different in every individual. In- dividuals do not form their unconscious memories all around the same central motive—not all around sexuality, for instance. In every indi- 4 The Science of Living vidual we find an individual way of selecting its experiences from all possible experience. What is the principle of that selectivity? Adler has answered that it is, fundamentally, the organic consciousness of a need, of some specific inferiority which has to be compensated. It is as though every soul had consciousness of its whole physical reality, and were concentrated, with sleepless insistence, upon achieving compensation for the defects in it. Thus the whole life of the small man, for instance, would be interpretable as a struggle to achieve immediate greatness in some way, and that of a deaf man to obtain a compensation for not hearing. It is not so simple as that, of course, for a system of defects may give rise to a constellation of guiding ideas, and also in human life we have to deal with imaginary inferiorities and fantastic strivings, but even here the principle is the same. The sexual life, far from controlling all activities, fits perfectly into the frame of those more important strivings, for it is preeminently under the control of emotion, and emotion is molded by the entire vital history. Thus a Freudian analysis gives a true account of the sexual consequences of a given life-line, but it is a true diagnosis only in that sense. Psychology becomes now for the first time rooted in biology. The tendencies of the soul, and the mind's development, are seen to be controlled from the first by the effort to compensate for organic defects or for positions of inferiority. Everything that is exceptional or individual in the disposition of an organic being originates in this way. The principle is common to man and animal, probably even to the vegetable kingdom also; and the special endowments of species are to be taken as arising from experience of defects and inferiorities in relation to their environment, which has been successfully compensated by activity, growth and structure. There is nothing new in the idea of compensation as a biological principle, for it has been long known that the body will over-develop certain parts in compensation for the injury of others. If one kidney ceases to function, for instance, the other develops abnormally until it does the work of both ; if the heart springs a leak in a valve, the whole organ grows larger to allow for its loss of efficiency, and when nervous tissue is destroyed, adjacent tissue of another kind endeavors to take on the nerve-function. The compensatory developments of the whole organism to meet the exigencies of any special work or exertion are too numerous and well known to need illustration. But it is Dr. Adler who has first transferred this principle bodily to psychology as a fundamental idea, and demonstrated the part it plays in the soul and intellect. 5 The Science of Living Adler recommends the study of Individual Psychology not only to doctors, but generally to laymen and especially to teachers. Culture in psychology has become a general necessity, and must be firmly advocated in the teeth of popular opposition to it, which is founded upon the notion that modern psychology requires an unhealthy concentration of the mind upon cases of disease and misery. It is true that the literature of psychoanalysis has revealed the most central and the most universal evils in modern society. But it is not now a question of contemplating our errors, it is necessary that we should learn by them. We have been trying to live as though the soul of man were not a reality, as though we could build up a civilized life in defiance of psychic truths. What Adler proposes is not the universal study of psycho-pathology, but the practical reform of society and culture in accordance with a positive and scientific psychology to which he has contributed the first principles. But this is impossible if we are too much afraid of the truth. The clearer consciousness of right aims in life, which is indispensable to us, cannot be gained without a deeper understanding also of the mistakes in which we are involved. We may not desire to know ugly facts, but the more truly we are aware of life, the more clearly we perceive the real errors which frustrate it, much as the concentration of a light gives definition to the shadows. A positive psychology, useful for human life, cannot be derived from the psychic phenomena alone, still less from pathological manifestations. It requires also a regulative principle, and Adler has not shrunk from this necessity, by recognizing, as if it were of absolute metaphysical validity, the logic of our communal life in the world. Recognizing this principle, we must proceed to estimate the psychology of the individual in relation to it. The way in which an individual's inner life is related to the communal being is distinguishable in three "life-attitudes," as they are called—his general reactions to society, to work and to love. By their feeling towards society as a whole—to any other and to all others—man and woman may know how much social courage they possess. The feeling of inferiority is always manifested in a sense of fear or uncertainty in the presence of society, whether its outward expression is one of timidity or defiance, reserve or over-anxiety. All feelings of innate suspicion or hostility, of an undefined caution and desire for some concealment, when such feelings affect the individual in social relations generally, evince the same tendency to withdraw from reality, which in- hibits self-affirmation. The ideal, or rather normal, attitude to society is an unstrained and unconsidered assumption of human equality un- changed by any inequalities of position. Social courage depends upon 6 The Science of Living this feeling of secure membership of the human family, a feeling which depends upon the harmony of one's own life. By the tone of his feeling towards his neighbors, his township and nation and to other nationalities, and even by his reactions when he reads of all these things in his newspaper, a man may infer how securely his own soul is grounded in it- self. The attitude towards work is closely dependent upon this self- security in society. In the occupation by which a man earns his share in social goods and privileges, he has to face the logic of social needs. If he has too great a sense of weakness or division from society, it will make him unable to believe that his worth will ever be recognized, and he will not even work for recognition: instead, he will play for safety, and work for money or advantage only, suppressing his own valuation of what is the truest service he can render. He will always be afraid to supply or demand the best, for fear it may not pay. Or he may be always seeking for some quiet backwater of the economic life, where he can do something just as he likes himself, without proper consideration of either usefulness or profit. In both cases it is not only society that suffers by not getting the best service: the individual who has not attained his proper social significance is also deeply dissatisfied. The modern world is full of men, both successful and unsuccessful in a worldly sense, who are in open conflict with their occupation. They do not believe in it, and they blame social and economic conditions with some real justice; but it is also a fact that they have often had too little courage to fight for the best value in their economic function. They were afraid to claim the right to give what they genuinely believed in, or else they felt disdainful of the service society really needed of them. Hence they pursued their gain in an individualistic or even furtive spirit. We must, of course, recognize that so much is wrong in the organization of society, that, besides the possibility of making mistakes of judgment, the individual who is determined to render real social service has often to face heavy opposition. But it is precisely that sense of struggle to give his best which the individual needs no less than society benefits by it. One cannot love a vocation which does not afford some experience of victory over difficulties, and not merely of compromise with them. It is the third of these life-attitudes—the attitude to love—which determines the course of the erotic life. Where the two previous life- attitudes, to society and to work, have been rightly adjusted, this last comes right by itself. Where it is distorted and wrong it cannot be improved by itself apart from the others. Although we can think how to improve the social relations and the occupation, a concentration of 7 The Science of Living thought upon the individual sex-problem is almost sure to make it worse. For this is far more the sphere of results than of causes. A soul that is defeated in ordinary social life, or thwarted in its occupation, acts in the sex-life as though it were trying to obtain compensation for the kinds of expression of which it fails in their proper spheres. This is actually the best way in which we can understand all sexual vagaries, whether they isolate the individual, degrade the sexual partner or in any way distort the instinct. The friendships of an individual also are integral with the love-life as a whole ; not, as the first psycho-analysts imagined, because friendship is a sublimation of sexual attraction, but the other way about. Sexual compulsion—sex as an insubordinate psychic factor—is an ab- normal substitute for the vitalizing intimacy of useful friendships, and homosexuality is always the consequence of incapability for love. The meaning and value which we give to sensations are also united closely with the erotic life, as many good poets have testified. The quality of our feeling for Nature, our response to the beauty of sea and land, and to significances of form and sound and color, as well as our confidence in scenes of storm and gloom, are all involved with our integrity as lovers. The aesthetic life, with all it means to art and culture, is thus ultimately derived, through individuals, from social courage and intelligent usefulness. We ought not to regard the communal feeling as something to be created with difficulty. It is as natural and inherent as egoism itself, and indeed as a principle of life it has priority. We have not to create, but only to liberate, it where it is repressed. It is the saving principle of life as we experience it. If anyone thinks that the services of 'busmen, railwaymen and milkmen would be rendered as well as they are without the presence of very much instinctive communal feeling he must be suspected of a highly neurotic scheme of apperception. What inhibits it is, to speak bluntly, the enormous vanity of the human soul, which is, moreover, so subtle that no professional psychologist before Adler had been able to demonstrate it, though a few artists had divined its omnipresence. All unsuspected as it often is, the ambition of many a minor journalist or shop-assistant, to say nothing of the great ones of the world, would be enough to bring about the fall of an archangel. Every feeling of inferiority that has embittered his contact with life has fed the imagination of greatness with another god-like assumption until, in many cases, the fantasy has become so inflated as to demand not even su- premacy in this world for its appeasement, but the creation of a new world altogether, and to be the god of it. This revelation of the depth of human nature is verified, not so strikingly from the study of cases of practical ambition, however Napoleonic, as from those of passive 8 The Science of Living resistance, procrastination, and malingering, for it is these which show most clearly that an individual who feels painfully unable to dominate the real world will refuse to co-operate with it, at whatever disadvantage to himself, partly in order to tyrannize over a narrower sphere, and partly even from an irrational feeling that the real world, without his divine assistance, will some day crumble and shrink to his own diminished measure.1 The question is thus raised, how should we act, knowing this tendency to inordinate vanity in the human soul, and that we dare not merely add to that vanity by assuming ourselves to be miraculous exceptions? Adler's reply is that we should preserve a certain attitude to all our experience, which he calls the attitude of "half-and-half." Our conception of normal behavior should be to allow the world or society, or the person with whom we are confronted, to be somehow in the right equally with ourselves. We should not depreciate either ourselves or our environment; but, assuming that each is one-half in the right, affirm the reality of ourselves and others equally. This applies not only to contacts with other souls, but to our mental reactions towards rainy weather, holidays or comforts that we cannot afford, and even to the omnibus we have just missed. Rightly understood, this is not an ideal of difficult and distasteful humility. It is in reality a tremendous assumption of worth, to claim exactly equal reality and omnipotence with the whole of the rest of creation, in whatever particular manifestation we may be meeting with it. To claim less than this is a false humility, for what results from any contact we make does in fact depend for half its reality upon the way in which we make it. The individual should affirm his part in everything which occurs to him, as his own half of it. This is often a particularly difficult counsel to keep in relation to the occupation. In their business, people face more naked realities than are usually allowed to appear in social life ; and it is often almost impossible to allow equal validity to one's own aims and to the conditions of a disorganized world. To do so, means the admission that conditions, just such as they are, are one's real problem—and, indeed, one's proper sphere of action. The division of labor, logical and useful as it is in itself, has given 'opportunity for human megalomania to create entirely false inequalities, distinctions and injustices, so that we live in 1 In case this should seem an exaggeration, we may recall the fact that nearly all the narrowest kind of sects, religious or secular, have a belief in world- catastrophe: the world from which they have withdrawn, and which they despair of converting, is to be brought to destruction, and only a remnant will survive, who will be of their own persuasion. 9