Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler (1870 to 1937) was an Austrian medical doctor and psychotherapist who founded the school of individual psychology. Born in a village on the western edge of Vienna and trained at the University of Vienna, he began as an eye doctor before turning to general practice, neurology and psychiatry. He is remembered for breaking with Sigmund Freud's circle and for stressing belonging, family relationships and birth order over drives, and for coining the phrase inferiority complex. He argued that a person gains a sense of worth by contributing to others, which he called social interest, and he carried psychiatry into the community, opening child guidance clinics in Vienna in the years after the First World War. A 2002 survey of psychologists ranked him 67th among the most eminent of the twentieth century. This entry records what he held and taught, not medical advice.