DR. ADLER CRITICAL OF PAMPERED CHILD
Poor Companion for Marriage, Always Focused on Self, Says Psychologist.
SUICIDE ALWAYS COWARDLY
Struggles Necessary to Develop Success, He Holds—Calls Palmistry "Rubbish."
Dr. Alfred Adler, Viennese psychologist, who has just arrived here for a lecture tour, discussed yesterday in his suite in the San Jacinto Hotel, 18 East Sixtieth Street, his theories on melancholia, pampered youth and suicide, as an exponent of "individual psychology" and denied that, contrary to popular belief, he ever had been a pupil of Dr. Sigmund Freud.
"All psychological illness," he said, "is based on some mistake in early childhood. The child who is pampered always tries later to be the centre of society. Things in which he is not the central idea do not interest him. The pampered child is a bad companion in marriage because he always focusses his thoughts on himself. Marriage is a task for two."
Dr. Adler said it was not possible for persons to commit suicide without preparation and that "every suicide is a cowardly escape." He said handwriting and palm reading, as tests in the determination of character, were "rubbish" because many circumstances in a person's life caused changes in his attitude. Successful persons, he said, always had struggled early in life, and their early difficulties had kept them from losing their courage.
"We cannot develop," he said, "without struggling with difficulties."
As tests for companionship in marriage, Dr. Adler told four short stories illustrating a girl's thoughtlessness in failing to impart knowledge which she possessed and which was of importance to the man's welfare; man's worry about himself as a consequence of which the woman is neglected; his selfishness in protecting first his own possessions, and the ability to share their work together equally.
Dr. Adler will give a series of lectures at the New School for Social Research before going to Philadelphia, Chicago and other cities where he is to speak. He will return to Vienna late in May.
Fuente: The New York Times, domingo 5 de febrero de 1928, pág. 19; noticia sin firma. Transcripción hecha sobre la imagen del recorte en TimesMachine (artículo 95550004), cotejada con un OCR propio. Las mismas declaraciones, en versión más breve, aparecen en The Philadelphia Inquirer de la misma fecha («Character Fixed at 4, Dr. Adler Declares»; Id AA1928-14).