Adler… Or the Most Progressive Psychoanalysis

Opinion

April 5th, 9:40am

Hazem Saghieh

Hazem Saghieh -

“It is true that women are often portrayed as the cause of all evil in the world, as in the story of the original sin in the Torah, or in Homer’s Iliad, where one woman sufficed to drown an entire people in misery (…) Similarly, the lack of respect for women is shown in the wages paid to them, which are much lower than men’s wages even when their work is equal in value to men’s work.” Vastly more progressive than Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Alfred Adler wrote this in 1927. In fact, some believe that the psychoanalysts who made up the post-Freudian wave, such as Karen Horney and Eric Fromm, are “neo-Adlerians” because they adopted his concepts to one extent or another. Adler is among the most prominent psychoanalysts to come out of the 20th century. If Freud and Jung were more famous, the fact remains that “it would not be easy,” as Henry Ellenberger wrote, “to find another author from which so much has been borrowed from all sides without acknowledgment than Alfred Adler.” However, Adler’s progressiveness is not only apparent in his views on women. He argued that the social is the primary mover of individuals’ lives. When he broke away from Freud in 1911, we saw him stress that the key to understanding the individual does not lay in the past, as the founder of psychoanalysis had taught, but in the present and the future, which enable us to rationalize how we came to be what we are. The past may increase or decrease likelihoods of various outcomes, but its influence is not inevitable. Thus teleology, the study of a particular phenomenon’s purpose, is more important than etiology, the set of causes. As for sex, he saw it as more of an allegory or a way of understanding, while neurosis is not necessarily born of repressed sexual drives but rather as an outcome of a sense of inferiority. In turn, the unconscious is not a separate entity, but what is unknown in individuals’ pursuit of their objectives. While Freud saw repression as a coping mechanism, Adler believed that we have an inherent capacity to be social and that all we have to do is develop it by building our social sense. Lacking this means lacking the desire to adapt and socialize, which is considered a pathology that drives the individual to seek absolute superiority. Thus, Adler respected individuals and their capacity to change and become responsible for their affairs, with his former mentor finding fault in his emphasis on consciousness and its functions. He was genuinely interested in striving for superiority. However, though it was not free of Nietzschean influences, Adler’s notion of superiority was nonetheless socially regulated. It is the fundamental drive behind human striving, as we are pushed to improve our lot and “go from a position of inadequacy to a position surplus.” The “self-ideal” that individuals choose for themselves and that takes shape in early childhood determines the goal that one pursues to arrive at superiority. The weaknesses that hinder our path towards this goal often give rise to feelings of inferiority that stem from our evaluation of ourselves and our experiences. In addition to physical deficiencies, “objective deficiencies” often stir feelings of inferiority, as when a man who is poor - and feels very strongly that he is poor - ties his superiority to wealth. In other instances, this sense of inferiority can arise because of totally baseless conceptions people have of themselves. Feeling inferior is not a disease, but it becomes pathological when it is not recognized or confronted. If we lose a job, we search for another one, and if we lack a skill needed to obtain a particular position, we learn that skill. We may compensate for our weaknesses by strengthening ourselves in other fields; if we have difficulty hearing, we can develop our lip-reading skills, thereby confronting our feelings of inferiority with the courage needed to change. However, we could also avoid the problem, denying it and resorting to behaviors aimed at protecting ourselves that deflect our failures onto external factors beyond our control (Arab political culture is brimming with this). Those who exhibit such defensive attitudes could resort to physical ailments they say that they suffer from, such as headaches or chronic fatigue, or psychological causes like chronological anger or anxiety. They may also seek to distance themselves from the problem at hand, thereby exempting themselves from facing it and remaining in their comfort zone, presenting a variety of pretexts and excuses to avoid confrontation. However, these protective individuals are pitiful; they use delusions to escape life’s challenges, as these delusions become less effective the more they use them, thereby leaving a negative impact on their mental health and quality of life. Many of those who live in denial resort to overcompensation, downplaying the importance of others and belittling them, or boasting about past accomplishments while avoiding situations that could expose them as phonies. This is where the superiority complex, in the pathological sense, arises. Adler argued that the one aim in life that allows us to overcome our perception of ourselves as weak and inferior, is cooperating with others to emphasize common goals, or what he called "gemeinschaftsgefuhl," (community feeling), the desire for communal life and the energy expended to this end. Often, the source of our pain is not life's challenges but rather the solutions we adopt to confront those challenges, as we are less governed by our experiences than the meaning we ascribe to them. Adler's emphasis on social bonds led him to the world of children, with whom he worked individually and in medical clinics. Children see themselves as weak and subordinate to adults, and they are aware that their lives depend on finding a safe and secure place in the family. Children set a "life goal" for themselves based on their understanding of how to improve their position in the family. What other objective does our behavior as children, and thus as adults - including the "lifestyle" we adopt - serve than bringing us closer to that goal we chose in childhood? Thus, the main challenge of raising children is encouraging them to have this "collective feeling," which becomes the fundamental driving force for humans throughout their lives and is the only way they can overcome their sense of inferiority. These ideas were more than enough to push Adler to break with Freud and work on establishing what is now known as "individual psychology" - his psychology.

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/4255016/hazem-saghieh/adler%E2%80%A6-or-most-progressive-psychoanalysis