ADLER LAYS CRIME TO INFERIORITY IDEA

Viennese Psychiatrist Declares Desire to Be Hero and Play With Power Underlies It.

CALLS PSYCHOLOGY CURE

Crime may be prevented, marital trouble straightened out, financial failure mitigated, the inferiority complex routed and all conditions of mental maladjustment prevented or cured by the application of individual psychology, according to Dr. Alfred Adler, Viennese psychologist and psychiatrist, who arrived in New York on Wednesday for a lecture tour.

Dr. Adler, who has founded thirty child behavior clinics in conjunction with the public schools of Vienna, believes that the first day of a child's life is none too soon to start psychological treatment, he said yesterday at the Gramercy Park Hotel.

"There are three general types of problem children," Dr. Adler said, "into which all children who are not completely adjusted fall. I except, of course, the feebleminded and the insane, and I do not refer to the normal child. The first type is the child born with imperfect organs, a child who, if he has stomach trouble, continually thinks of edibles to the exclusion of his social sense. If he has poor eyes he thinks only of seeing better.

"The second type is the spoiled child, spoiled by his parents and who, when he grows up, wants others to support him. Only children often are of this type. The third type is the hated child, who has never experienced the love of a parent or friend. Such children are often ugly, crippled, illegitimate, orphans or unwanted children."

The three great social problems in life, Dr. Adler believes, are society, occupation and love.

The prevalence of divorce in the United States, Dr. Adler said, is probably due to a lack of social interest on one or the other side. Advisory councils for married persons, he said, would help to prevent divorce.

Children, he said, can be taught to eschew crime if they are taught that a criminal is not a hero but a coward.

"It is a desire to be a hero that is at the bottom of most criminals' minds," Dr. Adler declared. "Criminals are really afraid and are victims of the inferiority complex. They want to play with the power of life and death, to be God."

Dr. Adler does not believe that heredity has anything to do with mental progression or retrogression, he said. "Heredity," he said, "is bodily, not mental. Insanity and feeblemindedness themselves are not inherited. Bodily disease is inherited, which causes insanity and feeblemindedness."

"I am not an atheist," said Dr. Adler, "nor am I a follower of any particular creed. I believe that any religion that helps foster the social sense, the sense of social solidarity in the individual, that teaches him that all men are brothers, is good."

Fuente: "Adler Lays Crime to Inferiority Idea", The New York Times, 19 January 1929, p. 22, unsigned. Transcribed from the page image of the NYT TimesMachine archive (article 95711230), checked against a Tesseract OCR of the same clipping. In "Bodily disease is inherited, which" the punctuation mark is blurred in the print.