Austrian physician and psychotherapist, founder of individual psychology (his own term for his school, meant to stress the indivisible unity of the person) and the first major figure to break with Freud. Adler was among the earliest members of the Wednesday Psychological Society that met at Freud's apartment from 1902, and for a time presided over it; his resignation and formal break in 1911 — several years before Jung's — turned on his rejection of Freud's insistence that the sexual drive was the master concept of psychic life, and on his own conviction that the primary dynamic was the person's struggle with felt inferiority and the drive toward mastery, meaning, and social belonging.
His central concepts are familiar, though often in forms he would scarcely recognize. The inferiority feeling, in his account, is the universal starting condition of human development — rooted in the long helplessness of childhood — and the inferiority complex is what happens when that feeling is not transformed into productive striving but fixed, defended, and compensated for in distorted ways. The style of life, formed in the first years, is the characteristic way a particular person attempts that compensation, and the task of therapy is to make the style of life visible and then to modify it in the direction of more realistic goals and fuller social feeling. Gemeinschaftsgefühl — "social interest" or "community feeling" — is the mature form of psychic health on Adler's view: not self-realization alone but the capacity to contribute to the common life. This was a significantly more social and less tragic anthropology than Freud's, and it put Adler at home with the progressive educational and social-democratic politics of interwar Vienna, where he was heavily involved in child-guidance clinics and teacher training until the rise of fascism drove him out.
Adler emigrated to the United States in the early 1930s and died of a heart attack on a lecture tour in Aberdeen in 1937. His direct school is smaller than Freud's or Jung's, but his influence through other lines is very large: Horney and Fromm took up his emphasis on cultural and interpersonal factors; May and the humanistic psychologists took up the teleological and meaning-centered frame; cognitive and family therapies took up the attention to "private logic" and style of life; and the whole vocabulary of "inferiority complex" and "compensation" passed into ordinary English, where it is now used with no awareness of its author.
Adler is here because his emphasis on social feeling (Gemeinschaftsgefühl), inferiority, and the individual's relation to community made his psychology the most directly political of Freud's early circle, and the one that most easily connects with democratic and educational thought.