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Title: Adler Lectures on Human Beings
Description: Stockton Independent, 1 March 1929, p. 4 (editorial page). Unsigned summary of Alfred Adler's lectures at the University of California, Berkeley (February 1929); the goal of superiority as the motive of success and failure alike, useful and useless goals, the boy who wanted to be a grave digger, the influence of childhood environment.
Author: Periodista sin firma
URL: https://adler.school/archivo/adler/cronicas/original/1929-03-01%20Adler%20Lectures%20on%20Human%20Beings
---


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# Adler Lectures on Human Beings

Why do human beings spend the years between birth and death in eternal striving, or in eternal idleness, to become good citizens, bad citizens, successes, or failures?

A new answer to this popular question of why men behave like human beings was presented to the Pacific Coast this week by Dr. Alfred Adler, distinguished psychologist of Vienna, speaking at the University of California. He attributes the life activities of human beings to the establishment of a goal of superiority, and constant efforts to reach that goal for the purpose of becoming more something or other than our fellows.

Even life's failures, Dr. Adler states, are activated by this desire for superiority. The social pariah, the social misfit, the parasites, gain a feeling of superiority to their fellows through being different, through living on their wits while others must work with their hands, through not working at all while others labor to provide them food.

The difference between the good citizen and the bad, Dr. Adler asserts, lies not in the lack of a goal in life on the part of the latter, but rather in the fact that the bad citizen establishes a useless goal of superiority. Where sickness and death in the family turns some children toward the study of medicine to reach superiority by relieving the suffering of humanity; an occasional child is turned toward such a profession a [sic] gravedigging, because in the burying of other people who can never bury him, he reaches a goal of superiority.

In seeking the reason for the establishment of useless goals of superiority in life, Dr. Adler explains, psychologists have come to regard lack of proper training and social adjustment in childhood as the probable cause. His life is more or less determined by his environment, his position in the family, his relations with his parents, the appreciation and attention they extend him. Pampering, neglect, physical handicaps, undernourishment, lack of warmth, any or all of these things, Dr. Adler says, may lead a child to establish a useless goal rather than a useful one.

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*Fuente:* "Adler Lectures on Human Beings", *Stockton Independent*, Stockton, Calif., Friday morning, 1 March 1929, p. 4 (editorial page), cols. 7-8, unsigned. Transcribed from the page image of the California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC, SDI19290301.1.4); the CDNC OCR, which misses the headline, was used only for orientation. The whole piece is legible. "This week" is as printed, although Adler's Berkeley lectures took place in early February 1929; the item may have been taken over from another paper. The other items on the page (George A. Dorsey's column "Hows and Whys of Human Behavior", Lulu Hunt Peters' "Diet and Health", etc.) are not included.