INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY1
A NEW WAY TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN NATURE
By DR. ALFRED ADLER
Vienna
Those psychologists who have objected to the system of Individual Psychology have based their objections chiefly upon points which are secondary to the main themes. These critics have for the most part believed that the researches of the Individual Psychologists are wholly encompassed by the terms ‘The Feeling of Inferiority’, ‘The Striving for Power’, and ‘The Various Types of Compensation’. They believe that these are the total gains that our science has to offer; but in this they are gravely mistaken.
The theme of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is set in the first few bars, but to call these few bars Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is an obvious injustice to the composer. The Fifth Symphony is much more. It is a creative activity based upon these few bars, but its beauty and its value as a work of art depend upon its variation and complexities and upon the technique with which the composer has worked out his material. To be sure, the whole system of Individual Psychology is founded upon a recognition of the role played by the feeling of inferiority in the economy of human nature, and the fact that almost all human efforts may be considered as special manifestations of the subsequent striving for power; but Individual Psychology has gone much farther than this. It has also discovered the melody, the harmonies, and the counterpoint of human life. It has developed a new conception of the human soul and shown that the course of any individual life is very similar to that of a symphony. Each man’s life is based upon one or two fairly simple themes, for there is an underlying melody which colours the whole fabric of his existence. Instincts, habits, reflexes, tropisms, proclivities, possibilities—these are but the notes with which the melody is built. Their value, their significance can be best judged, not when we remove them from the composition of which they are an integral part, but when we examine them in their context and in their relationship to the underlying melody.
From our standpoint and in this sense we consider an individual as something of an artist. He becomes a creator, because it is his task to build up a symphony, that is, his life, upon the basis of his inherited capabilities and capacities. Just as every musical work is a unit, dominated by a simple theme, so every individual’s life is a unity, expressed in a behaviour pattern which is coloured by the simple theme of striving for compensation for inherited or interpreted inferiorities.
This unity of the personality is the keynote to Individual Psychology; it is the necessary fundamental premise and assumption on which our researches are based. These researches would be valueless if it could be proven that there are, perhaps, two souls, or even more, in an individual. This assumption of the unity of personality has shown its worth in the understanding which it has given us of the dynamics of human behaviour. It is as necessary to psychology as the assumption of the atom is to physics, or numbers to mathematics.
Were there no unity in man’s soul, every effort to find an explanation of his conduct would be doomed to failure. Nor have we been the first to discover this unity. Great minds of the past have been the noble witnesses of the rightness of this view. Many previous philosophers have felt this unity; and Kant, in particular, proved the unity of the human soul, although he approached it from a non-psychologic viewpoint. It remained for Individual Psychology, however, to establish this unity from a psychological standpoint.
There are, of course, philosophers who deny this doctrine, and attempt to understand the isolated phenomena of the soul-life without recourse to a unifying theme. Such philosophers seem to us comparable to music critics who remove a chord from a composition, examine it, analyse it, and seek to derive a value from it. Their criticism of the composition must certainly be of slight value, for the meaning or value of a single chord can obviously be found only as we examine it in its inevitable place in the melody, knowing what has preceded it and what is to follow. Such analysis of isolated elements is analogous to removing a single photograph from a cinematograph film and attempting to understand the story. Obviously, this also is a valueless procedure.
The unity of the soul and character has been recognized by poets and dramatists since the days of Sophocles. It is a well recognized dramatic principle that a character must be so drawn that his appearance on the stage in the first scene makes the climax and the ending of the play plausible. Good drama is impossible without this unity.
A child enters the world with a number of tropisms, reflexes, instincts, potentialities, and possibilities for action. At a very early stage he must give all these movements a unifying theme, a leitmotiv, and must learn to subordinate each movement to some thematic idea. This idea can be expressed partially by the phrases, ‘the urge for self-preservation’, ‘striving for power’, or ‘striving for independence’, but in all cases it represents a striving for security.
We may thus say that the soul directs our movements toward totality, toward greater strength, toward more power, toward greater activity, toward any exaggeration of movements which seem to offer the individual a measure of security. This movement from incompleteness toward totality, from weakness to power, from below to above, is characteristic not only of the individual child but of all mankind. This movement, which originates in a certain profound dissatisfaction, expresses itself in a ceaseless striving for overcompensation and the achievement of a definitely secure goal. A child’s activity is constantly directed toward such an ego-localization in security. This goal subordinates his total energy trend; and those who observe this more closely will see that the unity of the personality is constantly in flux, constantly attempting to define a more completely secure situation with regard to the three great problems of life.
Can we be certain that all is motion, that the soul is a movement, and that all this motion is directed toward a goal? A deeply-rooted tree has little need for a soul, since by its very nature it may not even attempt defence, offence, or change of environment. But in a freely-moving animal the motor centres and the psychic activity must be innately connected. The old theologians spoke of the soul as a little entity which dwelt apart in the human body, and escaped from the flesh with the decay of death. The older psychologists believed in a psycho-physical parallelism. Individual Psychology, however, holds that soul and body are one; that the soul is, so to speak, merely an aspect of the activity of a moving organism. We have discarded the old notions of the soul, and speak rather of the psycho-physical neutrality of the body.
Since in the human being every motion serves but to secure a safer position in his environment, we may conclude that the human soul is an organ of offence and defence. The grand strategy of the individual subordinates the activity of the soul in the same manner as the great needs of the body subordinate the activity of single organs, such as the heart, liver, and stomach. In other words, this grand strategy of the individual dictates a plan of campaign, a behaviour pattern, which will result in security and satisfaction in the struggle for existence. Into this greater behaviour pattern every activity (and even every symptom of disease) must be incorporated; no action, no skirmish, no entrenchment occurs outside the unit plan of campaign.
For psychology this is a standpoint of the utmost importance. Anyone who cannot accept this principal premise will hardly be able to follow our conclusions concerning the various factors of our psychic life; nor will he be able to understand that a movement expressed in a symptom must indicate some situation in the totality of our psychic life. For this symptom becomes understandable only in its context, only when the single psychic movement is seen as a partial aspect of a human being, as the completion of a previous and the beginning of a subsequent movement.
Every activity which we observe in the psychic life of an individual is, therefore, a preparation for a subsequent activity; in all psychic manifestations definite tendencies are present, whose object and whose goal we must first discover before we can hope to understand them as unique phenomena. Character traits may, therefore, mean something quite different from their commonly accepted values, for in different individuals they may be the expression of totally dissimilar tendencies. We conclude, then, that there are no character traits as such, but only an apparatus for achieving security which avails itself of whatever material lies close at hand and applies itself to the solution of the immediate problem.
We know human beings who are afraid to take a step into the street, who lock themselves into a room and then lose their fear. This symptom we cannot understand as a thing in itself. We have observed in the behaviour of anxious children that their anxiety always exhibits a definite tendency; it is not anxiety alone in the ordinary sense of the word. Such children’s cry for help seems always to bind them to some adult in their vicinity. When the child begins to cry as his mother leaves him, becomes anxious, and refuses to let himself be led by others, we acquire an insight from these manifestations into the total personality, which is more significant than any interpretation of these manifestations as single phenomena.
All character traits, irrespective of what we may call them, have in themselves this tendency to approach a single goal; but we will soon learn that they seldom proceed in a straight line towards this unit goal, but show peculiarities and individualities which also are important when we seek to evaluate a personality. It is necessary to know the entire behaviour pattern of an individual before we can draw conclusions concerning the single manifestations of his psychic life. We can, for instance, observe that, whereas one individual approaches his goal in a straightforward direct manner, with no evasions and few compromises, a second individual approaching a similar goal attempts a circuitous approach wherever he presumes that difficulties will beset his path; while a third, again, approaches the same goal by a route so devious that he never even remotely nears his objective.
But it is not at all fortuitous that the individual chooses one or the other of these approaches. We cannot be satisfied with the observation that one individual approaches his difficulties courageously and seeks to overcome them in a straightforward manner, or that another, in creating for himself substitute goals, entirely loses sight of his original purpose. On the contrary, we must suppose that the predisposition for such a style of life and conduct has important precedent in the individual’s previous history; it is not fortuitous circumstance but a characteristic personality which determines the action. And more, we shall always find this individual making similar true or false movements in other situations.
Are these not very daring conclusions to draw? No, we cannot judge otherwise if we consider every symptom at its true value. In the neuroses, we constantly observe patients who have cradled themselves with unjustifiable optimism, but have fallen into doubt and despair in the presence of a slight actual difficulty. There are a great many people who, faced with a problem, express themselves in so many anxious movements and are seized by such terror and distraction, that the solution of their problems becomes impossible. Particularly in the compulsion-neuroses we find individuals who are intensely busy with all manner of extraneous activities, which are of no possible benefit either to themselves or to anyone else. We can understand them, however, when we regard their activities as an expression of a tendency. We know that these are individuals who seek to evade the normal solution of their life problems; unsteady individuals, discouraged, self-doubting, self-reproaching pessimists. For such individuals it is necessary to carry on their activity not in the main arena, but in the side-shows of life. This is the very essence of the neurosis.
Whenever we find an individual sidetracked in useless activity, we may be sure that there is some underlying reason which drives him to avoid human associations which are self-understood and self-explanatory to the great mass of human beings. It now becomes our task, as psychologists, to show where character traits such as cowardice and doubt originate. And we must also show how these characteristics are conditioned by a goal which colours the entire behaviour pattern of such an individual, by an ideal that remains continually before his eyes.
How shall we examine the evolution of the neurotic character? If we go back to the earliest days of childhood, we can state with some degree of certainty that the neurotic personality, its common goal, its typical expression, is already very well crystallized in the second year of life. It is extraordinarily important to realize that this unit personality exists quite beyond all consciousness and quite beyond all self-criticism. It is conditioned by situations which do not last forever, and which, when impartially observed, seem to be quite unimportant. The child interprets situations, however, not as an impartial observer, but in the light of his own weakness and insecurity. It thus happens that incidents which adults consider trivial are highly overvalued by the child. It very often occurs that the child’s interpretation of an environment is absolutely mistaken, and in direct contrast to the actual facts. As psychologists, then, we have the task, first, of understanding the total behaviour pattern, and secondly, of removing those errors of interpretation which may be its most essential elements.
As educators we approach every problem child with this premise: here is a behaviour pattern founded upon errors of interpretation for which this child can in no sense be held responsible, since no educator has ever made these errors clear to this child. It is of no use to punish bad character traits, childish pecadilloes, and mischievousness; nor is it necessary to war with a child concerning his little crimes. The behaviour pattern cannot thus be changed; the final goal is not thus to be reached; the child will not recognize his errors, and will be unable to improve himself. On the contrary, each new difficulty, each battle with his adult environment will only increase his despair of ever adjusting himself adequately to the communal life. This sounds like too graphic a scheme, but we cannot otherwise acquire a standpoint which will enable us to view this broad field. We must avail ourselves of a schematic basis as a useful fiction upon which we may construct a system of psychology.
Individual Psychology has constructed a system of partial concepts which is similar to a network. With this we are able to encompass all human activities; but that this network is valid only for our civilization and our culture is self-understood. In the future other problems will be solved with other techniques. In order that we may understand this network, let us examine those challenges which every human being must meet in life. We find that there are three problems, three questions in life, to which all other problems of human existence may be subordinated. These three problems never exist as separate entities, but only in relation to one another.
The first of these great life questions is that of the relation of one man to another, the problem of society and communal life. Let no man think this does not concern him; it is a problem which must be solved even by those who attempt to evade it. A man indicates how he stands in relation to his fellow-men when he evades the social question entirely, as well as when he solves it.
The social question is in process of evolution. Today’s conceptions are only specific points in a stream whose boundaries we are not able clearly to define. But we are not concerned with absolute values; we are interested only in liberating all powers for progress.
The questions of friendship, of comradeship, of fellowship, of the community, are questions which concern all human beings, all human societies. And the possibility of solving these problems is inherent in every human being. The concept ‘man’ carries with it that quantum of social feeling which is necessary to the adequate solution of this problem. We cannot imagine a human being standing entirely alone, entirely free from all responsibility to other human beings. Even Robinson Crusoe on his desert island did not escape these relationships, because he acted, even in this unusual situation, as though there were other human beings present.
Whoever is interested in investigating the origin of this social feeling which draws one man to another must turn to the study of biology. Biologists teach us that wherever an organism appears which, as an individual, is incapable of maintaining a successful struggle for existence, it seeks security in the herd, in the group, in the communal life. A lion, perhaps, or a gorilla, can live alone; but weaker organisms gather themselves into groups and achieve a new strength through the co-operation of many individuals, and substitute for an inherent weakness the strength of the organization. Among those organisms which have been treated by nature in a very step-motherly fashion, man takes first place. He is very poorly equipped for the struggle for existence. More than any other organism, he must fashion for himself new tools, new instruments, and new defences in order to prevent his extinction. Man’s whole culture is a part of this striving for security, and is therefore a product of his innate helplessness.
All those capabilities which we most value in man arise from this connection with other human beings which we have designated as the social feeling. From necessity arise all those psychic powers, such as speech and logic, whose sole purpose is to bind human beings closer together, and whose existence is entirely dependent upon the need of human beings to communicate with each other. The very nature of man demands that he continually forge new chains, new bonds, which will enable him to enter into closer communal life with his fellow-men. Reason is certainly one of these bonds; and this aspect of reason is suggested even in our language by the words ‘common sense’. And so, also, ethics and morals are instruments of security which would be quite unthinkable aside from man’s necessity of preserving his communal life.
The potentialities of an individual are largely determined by his connection with the communal life of his fellow-men. The corollary must also be true: where the bond between the individual and his fellows has been damaged or entirely abrogated, the field of his activities must also suffer in consequence. All human potentialities are seen, from the standpoint of Individual Psychology, as functions of the social feeling and the communal activity. Take, for instance, a child who fears every adult, who sees in every other individual an enemy, and imagine what his speech will be. The unhindered bond between man and man will be lacking here, and the child’s speech will be coloured by his essential attitude toward society. Instead of having normal speech, such a child will stutter, stammer, or not speak at all. His approach to other men, his bond, and in consequence his speech, will be fundamentally paralyzed by the essential attitude of fear and suspicion.
The development of reason and understanding must of necessity follow the same rule. Imagine another child in whom the social feeling has been undermined. Placed in school, forced to do lessons without having the necessary preparatory introduction to communal life, he will appear ‘stupid’, ‘retarded’, ‘untalented’, and unable to accomplish the simple tasks of concentration and memory which almost any other child will find easy. We conclude, then, that ‘talent’ and ‘adaptability’ are not inherited, but are the product of an early acquaintanceship with the phenomena of social and communal life. This point is of utmost importance to the educator. When we consider in how many cases absolutely no attention is paid to a preparation for communal life before the school age, it is easy to understand why the entrance into school so often represents a difficult adjustment. This lack of preparation will manifest itself by perfectly obvious signs, which will usually continue to characterize the individual’s behaviour whenever he has a difficult situation to meet in his subsequent life. And in such a child we would expect to find gaps in the development of ‘common sense’, reasoning ability, speech, morals, affects, and sensibilities.
Every individual must of course have some feeling of inferiority before nature, before the difficulties of life, before the tasks of communal adjustment, and before the fleeting nature of all things mortal. To be a man is to have a feeling of inferiority. This is not a misfortune. Rather is it lucky for us, as human beings, that we have this feeling, for it is the spur which stimulates us to new evolution and to new techniques for the acquisition of further security. What man is, is the result of his ineradicable striving to overcome his deficiencies.
But, on the other hand, this feeling of inferiority may be exaggerated to an enormous extent by various circumstances. The security factors that a frightened child demands for satisfaction are not to be found on this earth. In the case of exaggerated feelings of inferiority we have to deal with individuals who consider themselves so weak that they posit impossible conditions of security which can never be fulfilled.
Children in whom the sense of their own power has been damaged, whose self-esteem has been undermined, whose independence has been shaken by false education, exhibit an abnormal feeling of inferiority. The preparation of these children for the difficulties of life has been bad. It will soon be evident that they have been insufficiently schooled, and will have to repeat some of their schooling in order to better their preparation as much as possible.
Who is the most reasonable and adequate agent through whose care the child may be prepared to solve this first problem of life? Naturally, the mother. The ability to adjust to society is inherent in every child, and it is the task of the mother to demonstrate to the child the proper relationship between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’. It is her task to prove to the child the existence of another entirely trustworthy individual, to habituate him to the double concept ‘I-you’. Through his relationship with his mother the child learns for the first time the processes of communal life; he accustoms himself to another human being.
This function of the mother bears good friut when it is so exercised that no errors of interpretation creep into the child’s mind. From the standpoint of preparation for later life, it is inadequate if the connection with the mother is so close that the child is robbed of all ability to make adjustments to a third individual, even his father. The normal experience of the mother as the first trustworthy individual outside the ‘I’ then degenerates into a pathological parasitism. The mother becomes the ‘only’ other individual and the child is spoiled for any future adjustments to a communal life. Such a child has no place in his cosmos for other individuals. His total effort is directed to being always with his mother. That he should be spirited or courageous, in the social sense, is improbable, since he needs a second individual, his mother, as a necessary condition of life. This longing for another individual close-by is manifested as social cowardice. Such children will not be in a position to give a correct account of their discouragement by themselves. They will stretch their hands always to their mother, and indicate their dependence with this simple gesture. In sleep the gesture is identical; and by the arrangement of night terrors, the attention of the mother is secured even during the night.
It seems unnecessary to refer at any length to the opinions of those authors who seek a sexual connection between mother and child in such situations. It is self-understood that the sexual moment must play a certain role in a relationship which is so close that the child can consider the existence of no other individual outside his mother.
So much for the first problem of life. We come now to the consideration of the second question, that of occupation. Here is the challenge: “How will you make yourself useful?” And no one can evade this challenge any more than he can evade the first. There may be another planet on which work is unnecessary, but our connection with this poor earth’s crust makes of work a self-understood virtue and necessity. All our virtues arise out of inner necessities, out of the correct solution of our life-problems; and there is no standard of value other than that arising from the social relationship. The maintenance of the group is the task of each individual, and is, after all, the basis of his development.
In respect to this second problem also, we shall find that the poorly prepared child falls into difficulties because of errors in his education. His feeling of inferiority may have been heightened temporarily by the misguided efforts of adults. Robbed of all sentiment of his own value as a personality by being denied the right to think, to talk, to act, in the presence of others, the child has his ego-consciousness shattered by his experiences. It is remarkable that petted children, as well as brutally mistreated children, do not feel themselves equal to the question of occupation when they are grown. The community sense from which each individual derives his sense of personal value has never been fostered in such children; they have not learned what communal life is. We, as educators, must bring these children into some kind of a community; we must prevent their further isolation. This should not be confined to child communities, but also to communities of adults. They must experience the world in parvo. It is the children who have been well prepared for communal life that are the ‘talented ones’ and the ‘good scholars’; whereas the poorly prepared children find themselves in the shadows.
And then the third question, the question of love. The solution of this problem is implicit in the other two, since identical principles are involved. There are two sexes. To overlook this fact is very difficult; and we will not be astonished to find those who do succeed in overlooking it making all manner of very clever justifications for their standpoint. Because our life is a life of communal co-operation, our capabilities and powers for love are conditioned by our social contacts. In a word, our lives can be fruitful only when we regard them as partial aspects of the greater community life. We cannot exist alone.
The solution of the problem of love is analogous to that of the other two questions. Wherever we find an evasion, a side-tracking in this problem, we shall be able to find the contributing causes in the previous history. For instance, we can find indices in the early history of every homosexual which point to the final homosexual constellation. Homosexuality is a mistaken solution of the erotic problem. It is an error to believe it is due to congenital or hereditary degeneration. We can find identical errors of development in respect of the other two questions, errors which have been fostered only by mistakes of environment.
Homosexuals are those who are ‘interested’ in the same sex. It might seem as though it were only ‘interest’, but in reality it is much more. In the case of a normal individual whose ‘interest’ is directed toward the other sex this ‘interest’ is not an isolated phenomenon, but is bound up with numerous other tendencies, strivings, urges, and preparations, and with a broad training whose general purpose is the adequate solution of the challenge of existence. We are thus forced to interpret the ‘interest’ of the homosexual as something more than a mere exaggerated attention for the same sex, and to view in it a deep-reaching, intensive training, whose cause and whose purpose we must examine.
In the case of homosexuals we can almost always determine that we are dealing with individuals who have experienced in their childhood too great a fear of the parent of the opposite sex; as for example, boys who grow up in the shadow of very strict mothers. Such boys see the feared parent as the epitome of the female sex, and transfer the fear of the parent to the whole sex. At the same time, we find that such mothers only very inefficiently fulfilled their role as the agent of transfer to the child of the social feeling. The result is a behaviour and conduct pattern neither right nor adequate, because the great necessity for social and community consciousness has been neglected.
We must constantly reiterate that errors of environment are always at the basis of inadequate preparation for life. This inadequacy is usually felt for the first time when the individual confronts one of his life problems. In addition to the inadequate training there is also an insecurity and anxiety which makes the difficulties so much the greater. Such individuals, be they problem children, criminals, neurotics, or sexual perverts, have always come to a premature termination of their activities somewhere along the road to the solution of their great problems, and have busied themselves with the side-shows of life. It is as though they could not get up to life’s front-line trenches, but were forced by some inner necessity to ‘dig-in’ at some distance from the firing-line. They do not feel themselves equal to life’s major problems because the risk of imminent defeat seems too great.
It is not easy to understand the actions of such individuals; their chicanery is quite capable of transforming a phenomenon into its exact opposite. We see, for instance, an individual who continually strives for love, whose whole activity is directed to the consummation of a love relationship, yet who defeats his own ends by the manner in which he approaches the problem. Another seeks to cure his neurosis with enormous haste, and his readiness to accede to all that the physician says is astounding. But because of his very impatience to arrive at an immediate cure he does not work it out and so falls short of his goal. Problem children in the same way recognize their failings and complain of them, but make no effort to change them. This we understand when we concede that the dynamics of the unit personality have simply remained veiled to the individual.
Consider, for instance, the lazy child. Laziness is no virtue; the lazy individual stands off from the community and the communal work, and so is unable to accomplish his own work. For this reason we combat laziness. To war against it, however, by picking out single aspects or phenomena and seeking to obviate them, is a most inadequate procedure. When a lazy child is brought to our child-guidance clinics, the parent or teacher usually has the same formula: “We tried to cure him with kindness, and it did not work; and we tried to cure him with punishment, also without success.” We do not recommend either of these ways. We are continually astonished that teachers expect a child who has heard the same formula over and over again to react to the particular magical powers of this pedagogic abracadabra, or fall conquered by the enchanted forces of their admonishing words.
When we investigate the history of the lazy child whose latest mischief the teacher has attempted to exorcise with exhortation, prayer, or punishment, we will find that this final phenomenon is the flower of a long development, and the product of complicated antecedent forces. A lazy child is always a child who has lost faith in himself; he is a child who hides his anxious face behind the camouflage of laziness. Secure behind this screen, entrenched behind this rampart which has vouchsafed him a situation of impregnable security, we cannot expect him to give up with alacrity his defence against life, and come out into the open, to the risk of battle. Laziness is only one aspect of the unit-personality; it can be evaluated only in its context and only when its causes and its ends are known.
Another childhood trait which results from inadequate preparation is lying. Let us ask ourselves the question: “Under what circumstances would I become a lying child? If I were face to face with a situation which threatened my peace, a situation with which I felt myself too weak to cope, might I not from time to time avail myself of the lie as an opportune defence?” And now we suddenly see the childhood lie as a defence-mechanism, not as a single, solitary, asocial phenomenon.
The lie may also be seen as part of a great movement in the direction of superiority and domination. The tendency to achieve a dominant position becomes very marked in some individuals. We often find children lying, not because they feel the threat of an assailing danger, but because they want to be more than they are, because out of their inner insecurity, their inner feeling of worthlessness, is born the necessity to appear more than they are. This childhood feeling of worthlessness is but another example of traits formed very early, but which play an essential role in the whole life.
And now we can explain why our experience is of so little value to us, why we actually learn so little from it. Only the exceptional individual learns from his experiences. The unit-personality reconstitutes, reconfigures, and assimilates every experience until it fits into the conduct pattern of the individual, until it has been lent that colour which the individual desires. The unity of the personality works like Procrustes and his bed. Experiences that do not fit into the pattern which has been determined in childhood are stretched or cut until they do. This is analogous to the digestion and assimilation of a beefsteak, which is analysed into its component amino-acids by the digestive juices, with here a molecule lopped off and here a molecule added, until it coincides with the protein formula of man, when it is assimilated and used to build up the structure of the physical personality.
Take a spoiled, petted child whose purpose in life is to lead an existence bounded by his mother’s apron strings, and let us imagine how he will act in school. Such a child will cry, misbehave, vomit, and weep, all with the thought: “If I were only at home again!” He will approach his school problems only with disaffection and resistence. Some teacher will brand him as stupid or untalented, and a further weight will be added to his already heavy load. He is given a bad report, and this strengthens his presumption: “School is not a good place for me.” All subsequent experiences of this nature confirm him in his prejudiced viewpoint. Punish the child at this juncture, and the effect is only to evoke: “I told you so! I don’t belong here!” Should the teacher on the other hand be extraordinarily kind, the child will have a new prop to support him, since he will have the idea: “She is so like my mother—acts just like my mother!” But even so it is very difficult to reproduce a situation in the schoolroom analogous to his mother situation. The school has other rules, sets other challenges than the nursery. The child suffers keenly the pressure of being misunderstood. In consequence, he enters into life awaiting only unpleasant experiences, having lost all sense of personal value and all confidence in his ability to cope with the business of existence. We see him shuddering before every decision, withdrawing from every occupation which brings him into contact with life. He has already suffered so much at the hands of the world, his hopes have so often been blasted by cruel realities!
What is the result of the contact of such a behaviour pattern with the actualities of our civilization? The man may have solved his work-problem excellently, but have no friends, know nothing of other human beings, and have hardly developed his erotic life at all. Is this really a solution of the problem of life, to do nothing but work from early morning to midnight? Is this really for the benefit of mankind? Tremendous occupational activity is only a sorry compromise for an inability to meet the full problems of existence—it represents flight from life rather than a solution of its challenge. This type is not unknown, and poets and novelists have understood it well. Scrooge is its perfect exemplification.
Let us now apply the methods of Individual Psychology to the case of a man thirty years old, charged with criminally misusing young children in order to satisfy his sadistic sexual lusts. We are concerned chiefly to understand by what series of circumstances this man was forced to solve his erotic problem in this perverse way. We will first look at him as he was at the point where his development had come to its premature end. He had no friends, no work. He existed on the fruits of occasional wild speculations on the stock exchange, in which he sporadically indulged but which only temporarily held his attention. His life was spent in sitting in cafes, reading papers, and watching for a possible opportunity of satisfying his lusts. He never read a book, went to no theatre; these he detested. His carriage and speech were characteristic, and clearly illuminated the unity of his personality. His most characteristic gesture (and his whole body spoke with this one gesture) was a deprecatory movement of his hand from above to the side, as though to say: “Nothing matters; nothing counts.” No matter what one said to him, on what subject the conversation might be, he repeated always this simple gesture. And this gesture was reflected in his handwriting, which also mirrored his personality and showed the same movement. At the end of every sentence there was the same deprecatory curl, showing his despite of all things human.
If now we investigate the charges on which he was brought before judgment, we find the same motive which marked the rest of his life colouring his criminal actions. Just as he deprecated every human effort, so he attempted to solve his erotic problem by despising, degrading, and harming the sexual object, evading his responsibility as a human being with the same gesture. All this is much more than just saying: “This is a human being with an inferiority complex, striving for power.” It is, of course, both of these, but much more besides. It is obviously not logical for him to choose to exhibit his power only on the defenceless bodies of children; but that he has chosen these very defenceless victims in order to be the undisputed victor, can also be understood as a striving for power. Are both the feeling of inferiority and the striving for power to blame here? We must ask ourselves: “How did this develop? Where did the error begin?”
Let us look at the circumstances of his youth. His father was a very weak mild man, but his mother was the living embodiment of the deprecatory attitude of our patient. Her whole life was a deprecatory gesture. Her whole pressure was directed toward her son, who sought to escape her by every possible artifice. He finished his schooling with excellent success, but his mother always found something to nag him about. He was an excellent pianist and a good musician, but this did not suffice for her. During the war he wanted to come home for a furlough. His mother wrote him: “Your cousin is already a lieutenant, and you are only a corporal. Don’t come home before you, too, are a lieutenant!”
The poor child had early become a victim of her tendency to degrade everyone. She was, of course, quite incapable of implanting in him that social feeling which it is the prime function of the mother to impart. And so our patient also came to this “nothing matters” attitude; became spiritually and physically unable to meet the competition of life.
The sexual urge appeared in him, as in many children, at an early age. As his mother noticed sexual activities in her three-year-old son, her wrath was boundless, and she persecuted and tortured the child without ceasing. He began, in secret, to practise those acts which he knew his mother violently opposed. In such secret activity he acquired, in the course of the exercise of his childish sexuality, the feeling that he was the stronger, that with this device he had finally conquered his mother. And such was the story of his whole development; secret war against his nagging, seemingly unassailable mother.
His father, on the other hand, was very mild, always took the boy’s part, fulfilled every wish for him. Why did he not succeed in putting the boy on the right path? The reason lies in the fact that the bitterness of his war with his mother required all his efforts and defence. Every kindness that he experienced from his father became just one more index of the evil of his mother’s treatment. Where one parent is weak and the other obdurate, the war against the strong one goes on the more bitterly.
From our standpoint, the inadequate solution of this young man’s erotic problem is not of exclusive interest, since we can learn more about him by regarding his total personality and reconstructing from this the form that his erotic life must take. We have only to refer to the fact that this was a solitary, eccentric, lonely man, and that from his earliest days he had developed an erotic life appropriate to this behaviour pattern. He would have remained in this behavior pattern, had not opportunity presented him with another factor.
This boy, who encountered the world with anxiety and hostility, very soon found his greatest interest in fairy tales and novels. He considered, of all the stories with which his youth had acquainted him, that the very acme of human wickedness was manifested in Moloch, to whom children were offered as sacrifices. His interest in the Moloch legend was twofold. In the first place the essential inhumanity of his own conduct led him to an interest in the historical development and organization of cruelty. And on the other hand, he identified himself with the role of one of these sacrificial children, saying to himself; “I, too, am one of these sacrifices!” The frightful psychic torture that he imagined as the lot of such a child evoked in him a corresponding feeling of anxiety.
But how did this lead him to become a sadist? He is one of that group of individuals who transfer all anxiety experiences to the sexual sphere. Anxiety is a common human experience, but its manifestations are various. Anxiety is often manifested by disorders of the heart, and is evidenced by palpitation or pain or a sense of precordial constriction. Other individuals belonging to a different type manifest their fear by having their hair stand on end. Another type becomes dizzy, trembles, and feels nausea, referring the anxiety-affect entirely to the gastro-intestinal tract. Further types in which motor or respiratory symptoms predominate have been described. And there is the large type in which the sexual apparatus plays a sympathetic role—and our case belongs to this group.
The educational mistakes involved in this case have become obvious through our analysis. This individual based his whole life on two misinterpretations. His first great mistake was to categorically apply to all mankind without further critique or investigation, those consequences which he drew from his experiences with his mother. The second error was that he failed to recognize that his mother’s conduct was pathologic in its manifestations, and believed that since his mother was a woman, all women must be similar, and such conduct was an unalterable characteristic of womanhood. From his third year he began a training period in which he directed his whole attention to those activities which seemed most readily to give him a sense of power and security and domination. He grew up in isolation, untouched by experiences with other children, and remained aware only of those impressions which characterized his life and his suffering as the only child of his psychopathic mother.
The incomplete and pathologic solutions of this man’s erotic problems were very similar to his pathologic solutions of the other problems of his existence. He degraded love as he deprecated every other communal activity. This tendency to deprecate all human activity was quite appropriate to his early impressions of humanity. He became a sadist because this type of victory over weaker individuals fitted into his behaviour pattern. His urge to make himself powerful expressed itself in the subjugation of others; his perversity is clearly marked by this design.
Should someone demand whether the whole conduct of this man were not the product of his sexuality, we would have to repeat this entire paper in answer. We have already shown that such a point of view is inadequate and unjustifiable. The total personality of this individual showed a characteristic unit-construction; every part of him was directed toward the goal of the total personality; and the type of his sexuality was, therefore, merely an echo of his whole being.
With this statement we have at least begun our thesis. If we have succeeded in interesting the reader in this type of psychologic research, we have done well. The much more difficult task now concerns him. Upon this simple melody he must build a larger symphony in the immediate circle of his friends and neighbours.
To treat the neurotic patient, to increase our knowledge of human nature, intensify our insight into the problems of the individual, and broaden the understanding of every man of the dynamics of being a human being, that is the goal of Individual Psychology. The relation of man to man would be radically altered could we but know our fellow-man, not as a mysterious aggregation of unknown forces and unmeasured powers to be approached cautiously and defensively, but as a fellow human being, striving, like us, for some measure of security.
We are concerned with a philosophy, a cosmic point of view which is closely bound up with the realities of life, which is directed toward the understanding of the dynamic of character foundation, whose purpose is to make it easier for human beings to be human, and to courageously solve the three great problems of existence.
Fuente: Psyche (Londres) 7 (1927), n.º 4 (abril), págs. 46-63 (número completo digitalizado en Internet Archive). Transcripción a partir del OCR de archive.org, corregida y cotejada con las imágenes de página en los pasajes dudosos (comillas, división en párrafos, cortes de página). Se conservan la ortografía y las erratas del impreso («pecadilloes», «resistence», «friut»), y la grafía británica con algún americanismo aislado («behavior»). La nota al pie es de la redacción de la revista; el traductor y adaptador inglés es Walter Béran Wolfe.
This paper has been adapted and translated by Walter Béran Wolfe, M.D., F.R.S.M. ↩