What was the purpose of the “Society for Individual Psychology”
Whole person
What are the basic 5 Adlerian Assumptions?
- All behavior has a social meaning
- All behavior has a purpose and is goal directed
- Behavior represents unity and has a pattern
- Behavior is designed to overcome feelings of inferiority and move towards superiority
- Behavior is the result of our subjective perceptions
What’s the fundamental human motive?
- Search for success
- Superiority
- Freedom from helplessness
- Escape from fear
- Perfection & personal completeness
What did Adler focus on?
The striving to compensate for one’s own PERCEIVED inferiorities, for one’s enforces states of helplessness
Def of inferiority complex
Overcome by a feeling of lack of worth which leads to the impossibility for self improvement
Def of superiority complex
Behave arrogantly and/or exaggerate their achievements
What does felt minus and felt plus mean?
Felt-minus: inferiority
Felt-plus: superiority
What is organ inferiority?
- ALL people succumb to “disease” in the most poorly developed organ
- Early stages is more biological but later more subjective
What is aggressive drive?
- People develop a hostile reaction to their perceived helplessness (ie. baby first cry)
- Aggression may be expressed outright (fighting) or transformed (competition)
What is masculine protest?
- Masculinity implies greater competence or superiority
- Marks shift from biology to psychology
What is Superiority Striving and Perfection Striving
- Masculine protest leads to “mask” of compensatory traits designed to spark self-improvement
- People create “fictional goals” and strive to attain them (NOT perfectionism)
What are the 3 Tasks of life
- Societal Tasks
- Work Tasks
- Love
What is style of life?
- Ind. attitude towards society, work, and love
- Begins as a compensatory process
- Law of movement: direction taken by a person that originates from free choice
3 Mistaken Styles of life
- Ruling: dominate others; confront problems in a selfish way; generally vain and competitive
- Getting: dependent; adopt passive attitude towards others; more likely to be depressed
- Avoiding: tend to isolate themselves; seem “cold”; hide subtle and fragile superiority belief
What is the appropriate style of life
Socially useful type: act in a way that benefits others
What are early recollections used for?
- Assess people’s lifestyles
- first memory remains because it has been thought about repeatedly during life. It is subjectively important to that person
How does family impact personality development?
- Mother: greatest influence and guides development of social interest
- Father: 2nd greatest influence who provides encouragement to pursue interests
- Birth order: Family size/sex of siblings cause ind. differences
What is some advice Adler would give to parents?
- Encourage rather than punish
- Be firm, but don’t dominate
- Show respect to child
- Emphasize cooperations
- Don’t pamper child
- Don’t struggle for power with child
- Don’t show excessive sympathy
Adlers hypothesis: first born
Don’t do well with ‘dethronement”
- potentially act antagonistically
- will “seek others”
Adlers hypothesis: second born
Stimulated to higher achievement via competition with older siblings
- most likely to be successful
- isolate themselves in pursuit of success
Adlers hypothesis: later born
Tend to be pampered/spoiled
- more likely to be “getting type”
- expect over indulgence from others
Adlers hypothesis: only children
Exaggerated sense of self-importance
- must be center of attention
Stages of Adlerian therapy
- Empathy and relationship
- Information gathering
- Clarification
- Encouragement
- Interpretation and Recognition
- Knowing
- Emotional Breakthrough
- Doing Differently
- Reinforcement
- Social Interest
- Goal Redirection
- Support and Launching
What is guided self-ideal
- Subjective and personally meaningful
- Created by the individual to navigate through life’s obstacles
