FATHER OF THE INFERIORITY COMPLEX
By WILLIAM LEON SMYSER
An interview with Dr. Alfred Adler, whose psychological theories are based on his own life—for he had to conquer his own inferiority complex, and brave the ridicule of his fellows to put over his "heretical" doctrines.
Scientists of to-day are either hard, cold efficient machines like Freud, or palpitating human beings—no less efficient—like Adler. The two psychologists of Vienna have to be mentioned together. Their conflict has affected the careers of both. Neither would be what he is to-day without the other, yet since Adler is the younger man, revolting from his predecessor, instead of developing along with him, it is natural that Adler should be the more vitally interested in the other's existence, and owe more to it. Adler is human enough to enjoy a good fight for a good cause. His break with Freud so stimulated him that it may be taken as the crucial point of his life, toward which all his childhood pointed, and from which his present stems.
Adler's own version is too swift and inadequate.
"I found Freud leading in the field I wanted to enter. I joined forces with him so long as I found our conferences productive. When we ceased to agree and my interest in psycho-analysis waned I dropped him."
The short "I dropped him" slides without due emphasis over months of attempted compromise. At the time of their quarrel Adler and Freud were meeting with colleagues all stanch disciples of the Freudian theories, in the famous rooms of the ageing psychologist. Jung was among them, and Stekel—both of whom were to rebel. At this moment, however, Freud was still high priest. He had received the revelation. Heresy was not tolerated.
A Natural Heretic
Now, Adler is a natural heretic. His certitude of the authority of individual revelation is as strong as Calvin's. As the years passed scene followed scene between the elder scientist and himself. If Adler kept himself in check during many of the discussions, he, nevertheless, would throw in, here and there, a single question, monotonously repeated:—
"How about the inferiority?"
It became certain that Adler was building up a system of his own—a system which traced many nervous states to simple inferior organs rather than to any sexual complication. Tenaciously, courageously, he was forcing upon Freud a dilemma either to recognise the validity of a half-expressed theory, which seemed to deny the omnipotence of sex, or to cashier a most promising lieutenant. Adler's "Was ist as mit der Minderwertigheit," like Cato the Elder's "Delenda Carthage," admitted of but one answer. Freud finally called upon him to explain at length the ideas which seemed to obsess him. The group set aside three evenings for the first discussion of the Inferiority Complex!
It is significant that even to-day, when he talks of these early years, Adler says:—"When I was an opponent in the discussions of the Freud circle," as if nine years of association had been wiped out, and only the last few evenings had left any impression upon him. The atmosphere of the small rectangular room, its walls of books rising to murky obscurity through dense banks of cigar smoke, must have been charged with an influence subtler than mere nicotine. Adler, his big eyes bulging, his round face sweating and his strong jaw set, spoke fervently. He has an eloquence which gains from his innate sincerity. Nobody sought or wished to interrupt him. Freud, sitting deep in his chair, handsome and contemptuous, took short, terse notes, which later proved to be an analysis of his own rebuttal rather than any extract of the other's speech.
On the fourth evening, after his exposition had come to an end, Adler was set upon and logically annihilated by the Freudians. Six of them attacked him. He held to his position. His jaw got harder and his eyes grew bigger. He was opposing something which was so much more established and powerful than himself that he could not give in. His courage, or his stubbornness, would not let him. In the end, Freud himself spoke; the inferiority complex was inadmissible!
At the next meeting the inevitable happened: Adler was asked to withdraw. It was an added injury that the request was made by one of the most unimportant men in the outer circle.
The "Under-dog"
This scene Adler always omits in any account of his relations with Freud. Yet, according to his own theory, it must have had tremendous influence upon him. The humiliation registered in his mind, instinctively, subconsciously, the feeling that he was so far as concerned this group of doctors, "the under dog."
Now it is a postulate of the inferiority complex theory that when a person meets an obstacle, the stronger and more immovable that obstacle proves to be, the more fiercely and irresistibly he bucks it. Adler bucked at Freud, the Freudians, and psycho-analysis. He bucked with all his might. His life for many years was that of H. G. Wells's Professor Hawley, who discovered new species, invented new theories and won a great reputation—all to spite poor Professor Pawkins, who had insulted him.
Even to-day, eighteen years afterwards, the two Viennese psychologists are at each other's throats. Adler declares that all of Freud's work for a decade after their rupture was an attempt to warp psycho-analysis into some sort of agreement with the inferiority complex and individual psychology. On the other hand, he insists that little of his own work has been affected by the master. He tries to be just. He is nothing, if not conscientiously sincere.
"Freud was the first psychologist," he announces quite handsomely, "to shake the materialistic neurology and to put something sound in its place."
Then Adler will proceed to insist upon his own complete independence. Independence is so necessary a part of Adler's concept of the ego that he is ready to do battle with any one with whom his name is linked. His own theory is so sound and flourishing that there is little need to pry under and see if the roots are green. Yet Adler seems painfully conscious of those nine years during which he was an associate of the Freudians.
"Never a Pupil of Freud"
I was discussing with Adler his processes of cure, when, out of a clear sky—as if he had expected me to ask whether he had taken the psychoanalytical treatment which Freud imposes upon every one of his pupils, Adler broke out:—
"You know, I was never a pupil of Freud's, and have never been psychoanalysed. I should like to show you something very interesting and conclusive, which, you will see, scotches effectively the idea that I am, like Jung, a mere rebellious student."
Adler took out of a portfolio an old much folded paper, headed with Freud's personal address, and dated November 2, 1902.
"This invitation," he said, "was my first communication from Sigmund Freud. You can see that it is not an invitation to enrol as a student, but a letter from one professional practitioner to another."
The note, written in a rather careless and friendly style, quite different from the recherche periods of Freud's many books, will bear translation literally:—"Very honored Sir Colleague—A small circle of colleagues and followers is going to give me the great pleasure of meeting at my house once a week in the evening at half past eight in order to discuss the themes which interest us, psychology and neuropathology. I know of Reitler, Max Kahane, and Stekel. Will you have the goodness to join? We have agreed upon next Thursday, and I am expecting your kind answer whether you would like to come and whether this evening would suit you. With hearty greetings as your colleague."
The master's letter sounds so cordial, so decent and friendly, that to have revealed it seems, in the younger man, almost a betrayal. The war between the two scientists, however, has long ago exhausted its heavy artillery, and for years has been employing poisoned gases.
It is a chemical fact that many venomous relationships produce important by-products. The courage, stubbornness and pride which the conflict with Freud exaggerated in Adler are characteristic. He wouldn't hurt yet he'd try to dethrone a Czar. He is an iconoclast. It is all due to the inferiority complex. Adler himself is the inferiority complex. Just as the history of the dinosaur can be reconstructed from its vertebrae, Adler's whole career can be built up from his most casual phrases.
"All who are handicapped by inferior organism or by an unfriendly environment develop a defence mechanism, which may lead them to surpass others better equipped but less spurred on by their thwarted social, sexual, or professional strivings."
This sentence is Adler's vertebra. It is also his epitaph, as it might have been that of Demosthenes, who learned to be an orator because he stuttered, or that of Lord Byron, who swam the Hellespont because he had an injured leg. Adler, in his mature years, had the unfriendly environment of the Freudians. In his crucial boyhood he had his own small stature, his disproportionate features. He discovered the inferiority complex much as Newton discovered the law of gravitation—it fell on him. Instead of carrying a bump on his head where the apple landed, Adler carried a weight deep within him, where the feeling of inferiority first settled.
The Universal Malady
In establishing the inferiority complex as the universal malady, he has but sought a justification for himself. He is like the madman who finds that all the world is mad. Having wanted social recognition, professional eminence, and the approbation of the fair sex, he puts down those three ambitions as those of Jedermann. He is probably right. To him the honor of discovering and naming it! Adler's magnificent virtuosity in tacking the "inferiority complex" label upon persons, classes, nations and sexes gives a highly personal flavor to his conversation. With his characteristic sense of humor he accuses all his opponents of being victims of "transparent insincerity." They must, he argues, appreciate the superiority of his theory, yet the very process of thought which it ascribes to persons who feel their inferiority prohibits them from confessing that he is right, and drives them instead to attack him.
From war among the doctors Adler turns among the sexes. Suffragists, he diagnoses, are inspired by woman's age-old inferiority complex. He grants them equality with men. But love should not be ruled out just because women are men's equal. "Love is the basis of all our culture, and without it our present civilisation would collapse. Monogamy is the highest form of love. I have no patience with the movements to make love easier. If it is made too easy it degenerates into cheap pleasure."
Companionate marriage, trial marriage, and all the other new theories are debated on the Adler forum. Adler's consulting room is a place of all work. Early in the morning, long before the patients begin to arrive, he works there. At 11 o'clock, friends, visitors, and pupils gather around his flat-topped desk for his daily talk on whatever, during the last 24 hours, has most interested him in clinic, school, or public life.
"Don't spank the boy who runs away from school," he said one morning when the subject turned upon education. "The fault is not his, but the fault of the school. He's not bad; he's bored. Our problem is to make the school hold his interest, meet his requirements."
Practising "For Fun"
After the "children's hour," while Adler is still lunching, the waiting-room begins to fill up, so that by 2 o'clock, the hour when, in Vienna, all doctors seem to receive their patients, Adler finds a polyglot mixture of paupers and millionaires waiting to see him. Adler's charges are so low that one may finally be sure that he practises for the pure fun and power of his profession. He makes the ordeal of consultation a quite unterrifying conversation. Probably in opposition to the Freudian habit of closing the blinds and having the patient lie in darkness while searching the mind for whatever may bubble up from the subconscious, Adler throws open his windows to whatever sunlight may enter and relegates the consulting couch to the attic.
"I let them run around," he says; "I like to look in their eyes. I feel a contact when I see them and they can see me. It's easier to cure when you see the person."
Good cheer is Adler's richest stock in trade. As a child he had to fight for it. He did not escape an early sense of inferiority. His parents were not rich. He was under-sized, nervous. At school there were bigger boys who neglected him, and crueller boys who teased him. He found solace in the future, where he would confound all his tormentors in his great success as a doctor. His own illness and his own feeling of inferiority to others, to nature and to life itself, instructed him. He would be a doctor. The doctor was the only person whom his parents and his teachers and his bullies obeyed. And his doctor fought against sickness and death, two mysterious enemies. He would be a doctor!
It took courage for a poor boy to make such a decision—courage, and, perhaps, ignorance of the world. Yet, as his realisation of difficulties grew, Adler's courage mounted to meet it. His break with the Freudians removed the last obstacle between him and independence. From his initial sense of inferiority, and from his late struggle with his colleagues, he built up a saving sense of inner strength, of good cheer, and of courage. These three, the three best medicines of his own history, he has introduced first into his theory and then into his practical teaching and working.
Fuente: William Leon Smyser, «Father of the Inferiority Complex», The Advertiser (Adelaida, Australia), sábado 10 de agosto de 1929, p. 23. Transcripción hecha sobre la imagen de la página en Trove (National Library of Australia, nla.news-article73771016), con un OCR Tesseract propio y el de la plataforma, corregidos contra la imagen. El orden de lectura sigue el de la página (la primera columna recorre toda su altura y la segunda empieza arriba con «revealed it seems»). La pieza procede seguramente de un original estadounidense o británico no localizado. Se respetan las erratas e incorrecciones del impreso: «Was ist as mit der Minderwertigheit» (por «Was ist es mit der Minderwertigkeit»), «Delenda Carthage», «He wouldn't hurt yet he'd try to dethrone a Czar» (parece faltar algo como «a fly»), «recherche» sin acento.