Alfred Adler's Accomplishments

Alfred Adler was born on February 7th, 1870 in what is now Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus, Vienna, Austria. He also grew up there with six siblings, one of which died beside him in bed when he was only three years old. He was the second child of his father who was a Jewish grain merchant. He was also an active child who was very popular, but early on he developed rickets and was subsequently kept from walking until he was four. When he came down with pneumonia at age four he heard a doctor say to his father, "Your boy is lost" and at he decided to become a physician. He was also very interested in psychology, sociology and philosophy. He studied at the University of Vienna and specialized as an eye doctor and then later in neurology and psychiatry. He began his career as an ophthalmologist, but quickly switched to general practice on mainly circus performers due to his office’s proximity to a combination amusement park and

circus. In 1902 Adler received an invitation from Sigmund Freud to join an informal discussion group called the "Wednesday Society" (Mittwochsgesellschaft) because they met on Wednesday evenings at Freud's home.

In this time, in 1910 to be specific, he became the president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He eventually left the Freud’s discussion group in 1911 due to differences with Freud and in 1912 he founded the Society for Individual Psychology. He enjoyed considerable success and celebrity in building an independent school of psychotherapy and a unique personality theory after founding his new society and he traveled and lectured for a period of 25 years promoting his socially oriented approach. In the early 1930s Adler left Austria for a professorship at the Long Island College of Medicine in the US since most of his Austrian clinics had been closed due to his Jewish heritage. He then died from a heart attack on May 28th, 1937 in Aberdeen, Scotland, during a lecture tour. Oddly enough, his remains went missing and were unaccounted for until

2007.
Most of Adler’s major contributions centered around individual psychology. His thoughts significantly differed from Freud’s because he believed that the social and community realm is equally as important to psychology as the internal realm of the individual. He was actually one of the first psychotherapists to ditch the couch and use two chair to create a sense of equality between patient and clinician. He actually introduced the term “inferiority complex” which he provided the distinctions between the primary and secondary of individual’s inferiority feelings of their dependency, helplessness and weakness.