{Dear reader, Human beings have a social nature, they are born with a great capacity to learn and naturally like to co-operate. The great psychologists in Vienna recognised this a good 100 years ago and began to research it. The enclosed text by psychologist Diethelm Raff provides a very good and informative insight into the work and findings of psychologist Alfred Adler, whose work we would highly recommend to our readers. Sincerely, Margot and Willy Wahl}

Adler assumes that psychological problems should never be viewed in isolation from the overall context of the personality. Adler explains a person's character largely by one’s position in the community, by one’s relationship to the other. This is why the concept of a sense of community or social interest is particularly important to Adler.

He even states that a person's mental health can be measured by the extent to which their social interest is developed, i.e. how emotionally connected they are as a unique individual with their fellow human beings, indeed with humanity. Adler expresses this ability anchored in feeling or this personality development giving a sense of meaning and purpose with the following words:

‘To see with the eyes of another, to hear with the ears of another, to feel with the heart of another’

Particularly in the first years of life, each person develops their own way of coping with upcoming problems, a lifestyle. Adler sees people not just as a reflex to the influences of the outside world, but as a creative dialogue between the individual and their environment. One develops a mostly unconscious way of coping with life.

The psychological process can therefore not be understood by recognising the influences on the child or the adult. You have to recognise the individual response to it. It is therefore also understandable that children from the same parental home organise their lives very differently.

This individual response to their environment also consists of goals that people consciously and unconsciously set themselves. These goals are emotionally anchored. By identifying life goals, individual psychologists recognise a logic in people's often contradictory behaviour - their own logic.

Adler therefore also describes people as final beings. For example, the logic of behaviour can consist of avoiding situations that are considered difficult.

A person's character, personality, lifestyle, life plan or guiding principle does not simply emerge from the person themselves, but always within the family, social and cultural situation.

Adler emphasises the importance of emotional affection for the child, and he also places particular emphasis on the sibling situation, as this can mean that the life of every child in the family can be completely different.

Analysing the cultural circumstances led Adler to point out the effect of norms, values, tendencies and objectives within a culture on the development of personality. He particularly analysed the role of women and men and their effects on people's emotional lives. For him, social interest can only arise when people feel equally connected.

He therefore emphasises the devastating consequences for emotional life of loveless, neglectful and authoritarian parenting as well as pampering parenting. Adler does not, however, explain violence in interpersonal relationships simply in terms of the character of individual people.

In contrast to Freud, Adler explains war in particular as a result of economic and political factors. (Adler, 1919)

In their lives, people are faced with tasks that always arise and whose successful and appropriate mastery strengthens the personality. Starting from the individual and analysing his unique lifestyle, he examined - to put it simply - his emotional attitude to questions of community, love and career.

If a person is unprepared, inadequately prepared or completely wrongly prepared in one of these areas, they can try to avoid the problem in various forms of movement in life, be it through hesitation, distance, avoidance or a narrow approach to problems, for example through anxiety or depression.

Life problems arise from the unconscious lifestyle as an expression of the degree of social interest, which can be unapt for certain situations. For example, a child can develop a feeling of inferiority due to a lack of social interest. Based on this, various attempts are made to compensate for this feeling of inferiority, which are related to the degree of courage to face life.

The more a person is in a good relationship with his fellow human beings, the more likely he is to find his validity within the forms that are useful for his fellow human beings, i.e. to find community-based solutions.

Adler writes about this:

‘Individual psychology has pointed out with great acuity that all mentally unhappy people, those who have fallen into neurosis or neglect, come from the ranks of those who were not granted the opportunity to develop their social interest a young age and thus also the courage, optimism, self-confidence that stem directly from the feeling of belonging to the community’ (Psychotherapy and Education, p. 164).

Adler particularly points out that the unconnected person can seek his or her validity in power or subjugation, divides people into above and below and exercises power when given the opportunity.

Adler assigns the psychologist a kind of assistance: he helps people to learn to see how they relate to the problems of life in their entire personality, as an indivisible whole, and how they are able to cope with them with their previous lifestyle, or only partially or not at all. In the areas of community, love and work, the problem of community, of the relationship to you, arises.

The technique of individual psychology can only be applied if the psychologist has a profound knowledge of life's problems and the demands that their solution places on the individual. Coping with each of the three problem areas or areas of life requires a certain degree of social interest, a connection to the whole of life, an ability to co-operate and be a fellow human being.

The lack of this ability leads to various forms and degrees of failure, which can manifest themselves, for example, as neuroses, criminality, neglect, suicides and psychoses. In this case, it is the psychologist's task to investigate the cause of the failure, to identify the goal that lies in the avoidance or compensation mechanism and to discover the origins of the failed attitude towards the community that lie in childhood.

The psychologist raises the advice seeker's courage to face life by improving their social interest. When the person seeking help learns to understand the misguided meaning that he or she has ascribed to his or her life, the path to community becomes clear; as a result, he or she experiences more meaning in life, which can only be found in a successful connection with the you and the common good.

Adler writes:

‘The task of the physician or psychologist is, in fact, to give the patient the experience of contact with a fellow human being and then to enable him to transfer this awakened social interest to others.’ (Adler, Neuroses, p. 39)

Neurosis is a way of life that contradicts the social interest and the adaptation, a way of irreconcilability and despondency that cancels out the full ability to live.

Psychosis is the breakdown of the interpersonal relationship on the real level and the emotional recourse to early childhood experiences that are coloured by all the experiences in life. Psychoses are just as understandable as neuroses. They are their further development and intensification.

Based on this understanding of soul life Adler demands consequences for every educator, parent, teacher, doctor and counsellor. Consequently, he was particularly committed to the prevention of mental disorders. In 1918, he opened the first educational counselling centre in Vienna.

Rudolf Dreikurs built on this experience and developed a number of simple principles to give parents concrete guidance on how to deal with their parenting difficulties:

‘We do not recommend that parents give in or punish. What they need to learn is to become an equal partner with their children, to understand the children's methods and to be able to guide them without giving them the reins completely or holding them too tightly.’ (Dreikurs, p. 7)

Dreikurs emphatically points out that today's education must reflect political changes and be characterised by equality in relationships:

‘To help our children, we must turn away from the outdated autocratic method of demanding submission and turn to a new order founded on the principles of freedom and responsibility.’ (Dreikurs, p. 17)

• Adler Alfred. Psychotherapy and Education. Selected Essays, Fischer, Frankfurt/Main, 1982
• Adler Alfred. Die andere Seite -Eine massenpsychologische Studie über die Schuld des Volkes, Vienna 1919
• Adler Alfred, Neuroses. Case histories. Fischer, Frankfurt/M. 1985
• Dreikurs, Rudolf/Soltz Vicki: Kinder fordern uns heraus, Klett Cotta, Stuttgart 1988,,