Adler , Alfred

(1870–1937) Austrian psychologist

Adler was born in Penzing, Austria, the son of a corn merchant, and was educated at the University of Vienna, where he obtained his MD in 1895. After two years at the Vienna General Hospital he set up in private practice in 1898.

In about 1900 Adler began investigating psychopathology and in 1902 he became an original member of Sigmund Freud's circle, which met to discuss psychoanalytical matters. His disagreements with Freud began as early as 1907 – he dismissed Freud's view that sexual conflicts in early childhood cause mental illness – and he finally broke away from the psychoanalytic movement in 1911 to form his own school of individual psychology. Adler tended to minimize the role of the unconscious and sexual repression and instead to see the neurotic as overcompensating for his or her ‘inferiority complex’, a term he himself introduced. His system was fully expounded in his Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1927). In 1921 Adler founded his first child-guidance clinic in Vienna, which was to be followed by over 30 more before the Nazi regime in Vienna forced their closure in 1932. From 1926 onward he began to spend more and more time in America, finally settling there permanently in 1932 and taking a professorship of psychiatry at the Long Island College of Medicine, New York, a post he retained until his death from a heart attack while lecturing in Aberdeen in Scotland.