The self-oriented thinking of Private Logic is the basis for many of the individual’s problems in life, not only to excuse "socially useless" behaviors, but also to justify maintaining a generally mistaken life style. Adler’s own approach was to "make guesses" about the client. For example, a therapist might say, "I wonder if, when you say that your parents compared you unfavorably to your older sibling, you are really giving yourself an excuse to not try as hard as you could." If the client’s response is a wry smile (as in, "You got me there!"), the therapist suspects he is on target in having revealed a piece of private logic. The purpose is not to play "Gotcha!" (which would merely feed into the client’s sense of inferiority) but to make "public" to the client what has been a private reasoning to justify a style of behavior.

Family Constellation

Adler introduced the idea that individual attitudes and behaviors are learned within the family, which is the child’s first experience with society. This takes place in three ways which, like several stars that appear in the sky to make a pattern, is a "constellation":

1. Sibling position (numerical and psycho-social) is influenced by birth-order, comparisons with sibling, and the child’s sex.

While several thousand studies of sibling position support Adler’s early reasoning on the topic, Adlerians view the psycho-social position of the child relative to siblings as more important than mere numerical placement. This takes into account innate intelligence, whether a child is wanted, spoiled, abused or neglected, etc., the influence of the sex of each sibling (including traditional parental preferences), which parent the child most or least favors or resembles, behaviors and attitudes of the siblings among each other, parental comparisons between children, a child’s special gifts or talents, special problems such as handicaps or retardation, and more.

2. Parental examples are important as the young child seeks to understand what it means to be "a grown-up." So the child pays attention to parental models of adult roles: male and female, mother & father, husband & wife, etc. Imitation of these roles in play and imagination becomes the foundation for later adult self-definitions and relationships.

Meadian role theorists as well as researchers in marriage and family have confirmed Adler’s assertions that how a child perceives parental behavior in adult roles is a major influence on how the eventual adult will adopt, adapt, accept, or reject those same roles for the self

3. Family atmosphere includes the family’s social status, its views and definitions of itself, the home’s emotional climate, daily life in the home, family ideas about correct behavior, etc. Adler saw that what is learned in the family (the child’s first experience with community) is central to one’s later self-image, relationships, work, marital choices, parenting, moral behavior, and how one pursues one’s goals.

This is a key point in Adler’s understanding of the formation of the child personality. Again, family sociologists as well as cultural anthropologists have noted the influence of the family setting on the child and later adult. Among such influences are family stories, "place" at the family table, waking and bed-time rituals, family likes and dislikes, the family’s emotional climate (serious, fun-loving, pleasure-seeking, goal-oriented, etc.), celebrations of key events (birthdays, anniversaries) and holidays; vacations, hobbies, and "spare time"; etc.

But what is "family"??

In a graduate school seminar years ago, our professor insisted that, together and with unanimity, we define "family." We couldn't do it. That is, we could not agree on one single definition that took all variations into account. Of course the standard "mom, dad, a son, a daughter, and a dog" was quickly shot down. At some point a key Adlerian idea comes into play: That however we personally define something is the definition we go by. ("Subjectivity is truth" as Kierkegaard said, meaning "What you believe to be true, for you is The Truth on which you will then base your actions." So then, "family" becomes what we decide it means for us. One of us includes adopted children, another of us includes gay partners as parents, a third of us says "This is a family, even though there are no children in it," and so on.

Adler was a person of his time (first third of the 20th century) and place (Vienna, Austria) and family (raised in an at least observant Jewish family with mother, father, brothers and sisters) and cultural circumstances (middle class male in a male-dominated society which had certain notions about men, women, children, work, and the world). All of which, and more, were reflected in some of his ideas (including the family, family atmosphere, sibling position, etc.). In some cases he rejected the ideas of his setting and blazed new trails for the brave to follow; in other case he assumed cultural ideas, perhaps without even questioning them, much as we often do today.

Life Tasks

Adler held that each person is called on to successfully perform three major tasks in life: Society (in relationships and community), Work (in one’s contributions to society), and Sex and marriage (including procreation and responsible child-rearing). He alluded to two others: Self, and One’s Place in the Cosmos.

Adler noted that "all tasks which are put to the individual are social problems, for which the family is the exercise and training ground." (AA, Ansbachers, 1964, p. 52.) Thus seemingly individual (or personal) tasks are in fact social tasks, arising out of the community which sets the standards for successful accomplishment. To behave as a responsible member of society is not a "personal" choice, but is required by the community. To work at a job is not a "personal" thing, but is required by the community as a way to contribute to the betterment of all. Even sex is not a "personal" thing, but is set within the larger context of the community’s requirement having to do with procreation, responsible child-rearing, etc. And so on.

While Adler had very liberal views on many topics, in other ways he was traditional and a product of his times. He viewed sex as an activity that should take place only in marriage, and then mainly for procreation rather than, for example, recreation. He assumed marriage was the goal of every normal male and female. He saw homosexuality as a neurotic avoidance of one's responsibility to the community to reproduce another generation of human beings. Even so, at a time when social sex role definitions favored men, he asserted the equality of the sexes. He saw work as another way one defines oneself rather than as a labor one had to do to earn a living, and also as one’s contribution to the community which created him, or in the case of criminal activity, takes something away.

In LEAP we consider six important features of life, incorporating the Adlerian life tasks with core beliefs arrived at in childhood from experiencing specific events (Adlerian Early Recollections). LEAP presents them as concentric circles around the individual, beginning with self and going outward through love, others/community, work, the world, to mystery/limits. With Adler, we assume that one must deal adequately with all six in order to be said to have attained maturity as a human being. And following the concept of holism and personality-unity, we can also assume that a failing in any one of the areas suggests a weakness in all. Likewise, with Adlerians, LEAP assumes that dealing appropriately with all six areas is an indicator of mental or personality "health."

Social Embeddedness

What ties everything together for Adler is the individual within the community. It would not be too much to say that, for Adler, human being" is defined by the human community, and one cannot be said to be human apart from that community. Or: Community Creates Human Beings.

"Community" is found best in Adler's central concept of Gemeinschaftsgefühl, a word as hard to define as to pronounce! It has been translated as "Social Interest," "Social Sense," Social Feeling," "Community Feeling," "Community Sense, and "Feeling of Community." It is found in his ideas of The Iron Law of Communal Life, Family Constellation, and nearly all of his concepts.

For a good summary of Adler's concept of community, and of other major Adlerian ideas, see Henry Stein's web site for a complete chapter from the book Psychoanalytic Versions of the Human Condition: Philosophies of Life and Their Impact on Practice, edited by Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg, published in 1998 by New York University Press. The article is "Classical Adlerian Theory and Practice" by Henry T. Stein and Martha E. Edwards.

Adler began in 1902 with Freud to help explore the inner psychic life of the individual. Today we call the general approach that concentrates on the individual's inner life and personality "psychodynamic psychology." Adler had already seen the necessity of including the individual within the shaping influence of the community, whether that be the family, the neighborhood, friendship, the work setting, or the world and culture. Thus he saw that concentrating on the individual alone was too narrow a focus for psychology and for psychotherapy. Adler expanded his viewpoint in various ways to include the various ways that human organize themselves in larger groups. His term for his approach, "Individual Psychology," (or, in the original Austrian: Individualpsychologie) seems to focus on the individual. However, in German it means the psychology of the indivisible, undivided person. He wanted to contrast his way with Freud's, who separated the personality into parts or pieces: Id, Ego, Super-Ego, Conscious/Unconscious/Preconscious, etc. And it is this personality which is shaped and influenced and, indeed, created by its Social Embeddedness within the human community, beginning with the family.

From birth onward, a person is part of a social setting whose influences and responsibilities cannot be avoided. Society, experienced first as the family, insists on certain beliefs, actions, attitudes, etc. A person is as much a creation of social setting as of personal choice or genetic design. Adler said this influence is so strong and basic that he called it "The Iron Law of Communal Life." Society’s demands are transmitted through games, friendship groups, fairy tales, rules, customs, folk sayings, religion, school, and more.

It was this expansion of psychology beyond the individual to include the community that made him so important and influential in psychological circles, to the extent that all who came after him (as well as most who studied with him) included the social element in their studies, and even based their therapeutic methods on Adler's concepts. That the community is key in shaping the individual is central to Individual Psychology. It became so much a part of basic thinking that it quickly came to be assumed by others, including "neo-Freudians." Consider the following, which one would assume is about a book by or about Adler:

This book provides a systematic presentation of the later thinking of the psychiatrist who, perhaps more than any other, pushed psychiatry toward a keener recognition of social factors in mental health and mental disease. (He) believed in viewing the individual in his relations to other people and to his social setting. Psychiatry became, to him, not the study of mental disorder, but the study of human living. [Italics added.]

But the quote is not about Adler. It is from an introduction to Harry Stack Sullivan’s The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. (Sullivan, 1953, p. x.) Like so many other psychological thinkers over the years, Sullivan came to see the importance of society and community ("social factors") in personality, psychology, and mental health issues. My point here is not that Sullivan was not an important factor in social psychiatry...but that it was Adler who was the "psychiatrist who, more than any other, pushed psychiatry toward a keener recognition of social factors in mental health and mental disease" long before Sullivan or any others, laying the groundwork in stressing the shaping influence of the community on individual personality. Today we simply assume that society and community are part of who we are as persons, and we have never learned, or have forgotten, that it was the psychiatrist Adler who introduced and extended the concepts.

Law of Movement

Adler believed the concept of Movement was his greatest contribution to understanding personality. He wrote:

Everyone carries within himself an opinion of himself and the problems of life, and a law of movement which keeps fast hold of him without his understanding it or giving himself an account of it. The law of movement in the mental life of a person is the decisive factor for his individuality. The declaration of this law was actually the strongest step Individual Psychology has taken. We have always maintained the view that all is movement. (Ansbachers, 1964, p. 87)

Movement through life may be thought of as proceeding along a guiding line leading toward one’s ultimate guiding goal. All events, thoughts, and actions describe that line and are oriented around it. Adler spoke of all one’s actions being able to be traced on "the graph of life, and said "We can never know what actions will characterize a man if we know only whence he comes. But if we know whither he is going we can prophesy his steps and his movements towards his objective." His major student, Rudolph Dreikurs, said that one could connect an individual’s important life events and so plot a person’s life goal and direction "like points on a line."

Although all of life is movement, not all movement is useful. Some movements may distract the individual’s movement toward worthwhile goals, or move the individual toward goals which are not worthwhile. Adler described "neurotic types of movement" by which individuals prevent their positive forward movement: distancing, hesitating, detouring, and the "narrowed path of approach."

The idea that life can be described in terms of movement along a path is, of course, hardly new with Adler. Major world religions speak of the "journey" or "way" of life. And we find the idea in such folk sayings, such as: "falling behind," "hitting a bump in the road," "going astray," "being in a rut," "catching sayings. It’s interesting that men, more than women, and "executive types" (male or female) tend to find this easier. I wonder if it has to do with something cultural: men more than women, and business-types more than non-business-types, tend to think in terms of "movement." Which reminds us of another saying: "the rat race."

In LEAP classes, I ask members to think of how such Movement through life may be thought of as proceeding along a guiding line leading toward one’s ultimate guiding goal (Adler’s categories). All events, thoughts, and actions describe that line and are oriented around it. Adler spoke of all one’s actions being able to be traced on "the graph of life, and said "We can never know what actions will characterize a man if we know only whence he comes. But if we know whither he is going we can prophesy his steps and his movements towards his objective." His major student, Rudolph Dreikurs, said that one could connect an individual’s important life events and so plot a person’s life goal and direction "like points on a line."

I also find that clergy tend to find this an easy task. Their thinking, especially as they consider sermon topics, often involve the concept of movement, the future, life as a journey, etc.

Fictional Finalism

Adler believed that, of all a child’s problems, one will stand out as so important that one decides this I must spend my life to solve. It is fictional because a child is in no position to judge life’s real problems; and it is final because to solve it becomes the ultimate goal of life. Adler held that people arrange their lives in order to justify and enable their fictional, final goal, or what he earlier called (in The Neurotic Constitution, 1912) the guiding self-ideal.

The development of the mental life is accomplished with the help of a fictional teleology through the proposing of a certain end under the pressure of a teleological apperception. The goal of the mental life . . . becomes its governing principle, its causa finalis. Here we have the root of the unity of personality, the individuality. It does not matter what the source of its energies may have been. Not their origin but their end, their ultimate goal, constitutes their individual character. (Ansbachers, 1964, p. 94)

A part of Adlerian therapy is to reveal the goal so it can be revised, resulting in a different and more satisfying line of movement.

In LEAP we speak of the Mistaken Mission to mean the same thing. The image is of a journey toward an idealized solution to the childhood problem. On this mission, unrelated issues take second place. With Adler, specific activities are associated with this Mission: education, career, marriage, parenting, religious and political activities, etc. The purpose is to bring one nearer to the goal where the Problem is solved.

Life Style

This is the largest concept in Individual Psychology, and probably in all of psychology. It represents the totality of the person and personality, the individual’s basic approach to life, the unified and self-consistent pattern of beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, relationships, and actions which make up the complete person. Adlerians use it to refer to the central core of a person’s life, who this person is – past, present, and future – who seeks such-and-such final goal. Adler himself posed the concept early on, and then simply assumed it in his writings without extended definition. Perhaps the closest he came to an actual definition was relatively late, in The Science of Living in 1929. He begins by describing a pine tree in two conditions:

Its style on top of the mountain is different from its style growing in a valley. The style of life of a tree is the individuality of the tree expressing itself and molding itself to an environment. We recognize a style when we see it…for we then realize that every tree has a life pattern and is not merely a mechanical reaction to the environment. It is much the same way with human beings. We see the style of life under certain conditions…and it is our task to analyze its exact relation to the existing circumstances, inasmuch as mind changes with alteration of the environment….We have seen how human beings with weak organs, because they face difficulties and feel insecure, suffer from a feeling or complex of inferiority. But as human beings cannot endure this for long, the inferiority stimulates them…to movement and action. This results in a person having a goal. Individual Psychology has long called the consistent movement toward the goal a plan of life but because this name has sometimes led to mistakes among students, it is now called a style of life. (Adler, 1929, pp. 98-100)

Because the term is used in other ways today, the LEAP approach uses LifeCourse, summarized in ten Patterns (a term Adler also used for Life Style) which are created in childhood and carried into adult life. Review the ten LifeCourse Patterns covered in LEAP, and as you do, think of all of them as various ways to describe the single, integrated "life style" (what we call "life course") of the individual human being. Everything that you read about there (family history, family atmosphere, siblings, parental roles, childhood events...everything... is part of and contributes to the total person: The Adlerian Life Style. So it is no accident or exaggeration when I begin this definition with "the largest concept in . . ."

Meaning

Fundamental to the Life Style is meaning, which cannot be imposed from without but must be decided from within. We speak of it in terms of the meaning for oneself which are attributed to otherwise objective events in one’s life. Thus the meaning of an event is not "the meaning of the event" but "the meaning of the event for me." The original event in every life is the natural inferiority of infancy and young childhood, to which the child must find personal meaning. Adler says that such meaning is found, in general, in a "will to power," that is, in the early establishment of the goal of superiority; and in specific (that is, in The Problem of childhood), in The Solution which the child poses for him or her self as an adult to successfully conclude. In What Life Should Mean To You, he said:

The goal of superiority, with each individual, is personal and unique. It depends upon the meaning he gives to life; and this meaning is not a matter of words. It is built up in his style of life and runs through it like a strange melody of his own creation….The greatest part of his meaning must be guessed at; we must read between the lines. So, to, with that profoundest and most intricate creation, an individual style of life. The psychologist must learn to read between the lines, he must learn the art of appreciating life-meanings. It could not be otherwise. The meaning of life is arrived at in those first four or five years of life; and it is not arrived at my a mathematical process, but by dark gropings, by feelings not wholly understood, by catching at hints and fumbling for explanations. (Adler, 1931, pp. 57-58)

In this sense, then, Adler proposes to answer the question "What is the meaning of life?" in highly personal terms. No no universal answer fits everyone. Instead, there is a highly personal and subjective meaning which each person discovers individually. Early in life, the individual posits that personal meaning in terms of the Fictional Final Goal (the Solution to the child's Problem), and the Life Style, with its Guiding Goal and Guiding Line, as the means by which it is carried out.