Alfred Adler’s Place in the Field of Psychology
by Rebecca LaFountain, EdD
Penn State Harrisburg
psychology text books that address topics on which he has made major contributions and where he rightfully belongs? I do not think this represents that Adler played an insignificant role in the field of psychology; rather, it heralds the fact that his theory is so comprehensive that authors attempting to write introductory texts have difficulty knowing where to place him! In this article, I will show that much of the subject matter covered in an Introductory Psychology course has links to Adlerian Psychology.
Psychologists who practice Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology attempt, among other things, to help individuals find their place in the world. Isn’t it ironic then, that Alfred Adler is often left out ofWhen I teach Introduction to Psychology, the infamous Psych 100 on most college campuses, I tell students that the course is like an infomercial for all the other offerings in the department. In a survey course of this nature, we are only able to provide to students a glimpse of each subject area in hopes of teasing them to seek out a more in-depth study of those topics that interest them. Many Introductory Psychology texts today begin with a chapter on the definition of psychology, attributing the original meaning of psychology to its Greek roots where psyche means mind. They explain that while originally psychology was attributed to the study of the mind, today psychologists take a more holistic perspective that is a biopsychosocial (and sometimes spiritual) one. This would be a critical point to introduce that when Adler parted from Freud in 1911, he began to call his approach to psychology Individualpsychologie (in German) since he saw each person holistically as an indivisible human being embedded in a social context; therefore, serving as a forerunner in holism. Unfortunately, the English translation has been misinterpreted as if it were to mean the study of the individual in isolation from its social context. Therefore, in order to avoid this misunderstanding, Adler’s theory is often known as Adlerian theory (Powers & Griffith, 2007). Shortly after Adler named his theory, he became aware of Jan Smutt’s use of the term Holism, and when his book, Evolution and Holism, was published in 1926, Adler got permission to have it translated into German for his students. Adler realized that the term Holism more appropriately embodied his approach (Ansbacher, 1994).
Adler’s early emphasis on social embeddedness, meaning to understand the individual within a social context, positions him as a pioneer in social psychology. Those familiar with Gardner Murphy’s renowned Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology will recall that in 1931 he said, “Adler’s was the first psychological system in the history of psychology that was developed in what we should today call a social-science direction” (p. 341). It appears that Adler’s contemporary knew the state of the field at the time, but current authors have lost sight of Adler’s role in the roots of social psychology. In social psychology such topics as aggression, attraction, cooperation, and parenting are regularly covered. Likewise, these same topics are often explained in terms of evolution, but only following an overview of evolution.