INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY AND EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
ALFRED ADLER Long Island College of Medicine, Brooklyn
Individual psychology is compelled to adopt a friendly attitude as soon as it begins to consider the various sciences and scientific tendencies. It takes up what may be described as a central position among the various schools of psychological thought and it admits the claims of every school provided that it is seen to pursue what must be the aim of every science, namely, the promotion of human development. It is one of the fundamental claims of individual psychology that this development requires a fostering of the social feeling. For this, and various other scientific reasons, individual psychology is committed to an uncompromising position on psychoanalysis—to give but one example of a science which follows laboriously in the rear of individual psychology which, in its turn, has its sphere of activity at the very centre of human evolution.
The claims of individual psychology to describe personality and character, not by means of the inevitable ambiguity of words and concepts but by means of detailed descriptions, stand and fall with the fundamental assumption that mankind in general, as well as individuals, behaves "correctly," "normally," "reasonably," "intellectually soundly," if it possesses these qualities at any given moment sub specie aeterna and if it be seen from the point of view of an ideal community. In that case every aberration would have to be ascribed as an erroneous attitude; and the fact that this ideal may never be attained and that mankind is compelled never to do more than laboriously approach it, does nothing to invalidate the certainty of this view. And it may well be that every scientist is aware of this fact without necessarily understanding it.
Accordingly whenever we pass judgment on an individual—and every individual is unique; whence the justification of the term "individual psychology"—four main questions must be answered; these questions must be supplemented by other and more detailed questions if the investigation is to be at all exact.
1. In what direction does the evolutionary urge of the individual under examination tend? The significance of this question in my science has been clearly set out in the discussion of aims in the life of the soul and of the urge towards perfection (taken as an individual perfection). This view, I imagine, has today been adopted by all serious psychologists and psychiatrists, under such names as purposivism, teleology, ideal-ego, etc., although no adequate description of this urge has been given outside the range of individual psychology.
2. This perfection which must be the aim of the individual has only one standard of measurement, viz., the ideal of a community. Accordingly what we have to measure is a relation. In our view of the inviolable unity of the individual this relation is one between his various traits (all of which are to be taken solely from the social point of view) and all the other forms in which his psyche finds expression. In this question individual psychology expresses a judgment of values and in doing so it is doing the same as every other science which attempts to substitute the better for the worse. In this science, more perhaps than in others, any error of the object of investigation due to his creative force takes up the foreground of our study.
3. We have to reject typology as being inadequate to emphasize the uniqueness of a personality. Again all the formulae, numbers, and classification, by whatever means they are reached, can only be treated as statistical probabilities and should be used only in order to throw light upon the sphere within which the personality for which we are looking may be found. It is the exact agreement between the part and the whole which is decisive for the final result of the investigation. A result once discovered may be considered as confirmed only if all the partial movements, thoughts, feelings, volitions, and attitudes (as referred to the main questions of life in the social sense) which we think we have "understood' agree with the totality of the individual within the meaning of 1 and 2. Adequate investigations of this kind have hitherto been made only by individual psychologists, and they have been available for some considerable time. The degree of social coöperation is most clearly expressed in connection with vital questions which imply a serious problem for the individual on account of his style of life. Artificial questions can touch the sore spot of a style of life never or only by accident. Accordingly the decisive problem for us is to discover the sore spot, in other words the error in the style of life.
4. Life, with some few fortunate exceptions, tries each individual and tests his preparation for the evolutionary meaning of life. I have investigated these questions and trials in every conceivable situation and have discovered that they invariably imply the necessity of coöperation.1 If there is failure of any kind it invariably arises in connection with the question whether the individual is fit for the community, when it is seen that this is not the case. Question 4 now arises: "Why is that so many men do not possess an adequate social feeling?" I was able to discover that the full measure of social feeling is reached in the very earliest years and that it can be augmented only if the individual recognizes the inadequacies in the structure of his style of life. The capacity for developing a social feeling is absent only in the feeble-minded. With other persons the obstacles which stand in the way of a fairly adequate development of social feeling appear clearly in the course of this investigation and, once they have been discovered, provide us with the possibility of understanding how it is that they have acted as a barrier preventing further development of social feeling. Among these barriers both of a fundamental and of an accidental nature, an important part is played by the spoiling of children; when a child is spoiled his interest is drawn away from real life.
Thus for individual psychology the past life of the individual and any interruptions it may have suffered become the central point of the investigation. Extraneous causes here appear as definite as regular tests. On the other hand experiments do not assume a more scientific appearance and in fact look only like a shadow of reality. Nevertheless it follows from our previous remarks that they can provide good results for students trained in individual psychology, and that, not only with regard to the characterological level of a group; they also allow them to understand the individual, since the results which have been reached can be further tested. It is possible to demonstrate that they agree with other forms of expression and with the individual personality, as well as to determine the unvarying distance from the ideal social feeling.
Fuente: Alfred Adler, «Individual Psychology and Experimental Psychology», Character and Personality. An International Psychological Quarterly 1 (1933), n.º 4 (junio), págs. 265-267 (número dedicado al método experimental en el estudio de la personalidad). Transcripción hecha a partir del OCR del número completo digitalizado en archive.org, cotejada con la imagen de las páginas. Se conservan las particularidades del impreso: «sub specie aeterna» (por aeterni), la comilla de cierre simple en «"understood'», «Why is that» (por Why is it that), «coöperation» con diéresis. El texto es, con toda probabilidad, traducción inglesa (sin firma de traductor) de un original alemán de Adler; la versión alemana de la revista (Charakter) no se ha localizado en los materiales del archivo.
(A. Adler, Der Sinn des Lebens. Epstein: Vienna, 1933.) ↩