Idea of Women's Inferiority Immortal Myth, Dr. Adler Says
Viennese Psychologist, Here, Holds Biology Belies Theory 'Promoted by Men,' but Calls Change Impossible—Declares 'Emancipation' and Suffrage Movements Mere 'Bluff.'
The domination of the male and the inferiority of women may be "mere fictional invention," but the idea is so firmly rooted that nothing can shake it, according to Dr. Alfred Adler, noted Viennese psychologist, who arrived yesterday on the Cunard White Star liner Aquitania for his fourth season as lecturer at Long Island Hospital Medical School.
The college, where he is Professor of Medical Psychology, is the only one in the world requiring such training for a medical degree, but the time is coming when institutions of learning all over the world will adopt it, Dr. Adler predicted.
Dr. Adler talked at length of the inferiority of women, which is, he said, absolutely without biological reason. As the liner departed from Quarantine and moved up the bay into the lower Hudson the little group around the psychologist increased from time to time as women passengers happened along and were caught up sharply by those fighting words, "female inferiority." They remained on the edge of the group or at a reasonable distance, smiling enigmatically at the spectacled lecturer.
"All this talk of suffrage, emancipation, and so forth, this is real bluff, that is all. From the very beginning they are made to feel that they are not on a level with men. This, contrary to popular belief, has not been changed by the advances of women during the last few decades. As a matter of fact, the very increase in education and culture among women has made them feel their supposed inferiority more than ever. There is no biological basis for this feeling; it is merely a fictitious invention of the male sex."
The word "psychoanalysis" makes Dr. Adler wince with pain. He has never been identified with the Freudian term and prefers to speak of his work as individual psychology, which seeks "the totality" of a complex subject to be studied, as opposed to the conception of a human being as having all its reflexes in sex. The Freudians base everything on what Dr. Adler terms "inner drives" instead of taking the person in relation to what he is and the problems he has to meet.
Dr. Adler steadfastly refused to subscribe to the old cliché which has it that most of the world's great men were and are neurotics; nor does he think that the modern American, frequently viewed as a flibbertigibbet, dashing about amid a great mass of machinery pulling his hair and getting nowhere in particular, is such a neurotic person. We today are no more neurotic than the Colonial fathers or our European brothers either, he assured his hearers.
Some one asked the doctor where he would be stopping in New York. He took a quick side glance at a phalanx of truculent faces which appeared about to hedge him in. "Gramercy Park Hotel," he whispered, and then quickly added: "And about the inferiority. Of course men have it, too. In fact, the majority of all people suffer from this complex at one time or another."
Fuente: «Idea of Women's Inferiority Immortal Myth, Dr. Adler Says», The New York Times, Nueva York, 7 de septiembre de 1935, p. 17, sin firma. Transcripción hecha sobre la imagen del recorte en TimesMachine (artículo 1935-09-07_p17_93703162), cotejada con el OCR. Los titulares van en cursiva en el impreso. Las palabras partidas a final de línea se unen («nothing», «psychologist», «Aquitania», «lecturer», «institutions», «increased», «women», «inferiority», «distance», «emancipation», «belief», «biological», «psychology», «reflexes», «person», «neurotic», «whispered»). El nombre de la facultad se da como lo imprime el periódico (Long Island Hospital Medical School; en realidad, Long Island College of Medicine).