Adlerian Therapy (Individual Psychology)

Adler’s theory is teleological rather than causal: behaviour is explained by what it is for, not by what produced it. The person is unitary — Adler chose "individual" from the Latin for indivisible, precisely to reject Freud’s partitioned mind — and moves as a whole toward a self-created goal of significance.

Striving for significance

The single motivational principle: movement from a felt minus to a felt plus. Not domination over others but the overcoming of felt inadequacy.

Inferiority feeling

Universal and normal, arising from the helplessness of childhood. Its compensation drives development; its overwhelming produces the inferiority complex.

Style of life

The unique, largely unconscious pattern of goals, convictions and strategies formed in early childhood, through which all experience is filtered.

Private logic

The individual’s own reasoning, coherent from inside and frequently mistaken. "I only matter if I am first."

Social interest (Gemeinschaftsgefühl)

The felt connection to and concern for the human community. Adler’s criterion of mental health and, uniquely among the early systems, an explicitly ethical standard.

Safeguarding tendencies

Excuses, symptoms, aggression and withdrawal deployed to protect self-esteem from the test of a task one might fail.

Adler paid close attention to family constellation — the psychological position a child occupies, which is not the same as birth order — and to earliest recollections, which he treated not as historical records but as projective material selected and shaped by the current style of life.

Neurosis, for Adler, is discouragement plus a failure of social interest. The person retreats from the three life tasks — work, friendship and love — and constructs safeguards that preserve self-esteem at the cost of participation. The symptom is a "yes, but": I would succeed, but for this.

1. 1Relationship — egalitarian, collaborative, face to face. Adler saw patients sitting up, briefly, and often in public demonstration.
2. 2Investigation — family constellation, earliest recollections, dreams, and the "question": what would be different if you were well?
3. 3Interpretation and insight — disclosing the private logic and the goal of the symptom, tentatively and with humour.
4. 4Reorientation — encouragement, action, and the deliberate cultivation of social interest.