A Great Psychologist Dr. Alfred Adler, who died in Aberdeen
last week, will be known to history, if for nothing else, as the coiner of the ubiquitous phrase " inferiority complex." Once a pupil and colleague of Freud, he found himself half way through his career no longer able to accept the central assumptions of Freudian psychology and compelled to challenge it with theories of his own. The essential difference between the theories of Freud and Adler was that while Freud regarded all psychological disorders as ascribable to sexual maladjustment, Adler held that they were caused by the failure of the indi- vidual to adjust his inner life to his environment, and main- tained that sexual maladjustment was only one among several possible causes of disorder. Adler held that the impulse to seek compensation for deficiency was fundamental to human nature, and argued that, just as in a man psychologically deficient in one sense the other senses tend to be abnormally developed, so mental disorders could be explained as the result of difficulties encountered in the struggle for compensation induced by the feeling of inferiority. Neurosis, criminality or lunacy was thus the result of the failure to adjust. Adlerian psychology today has probably as much support as Freudian among psychologists, and in several countries it has had prac- tical effects upon education and the treatment of crime.
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