Alfred Adler

Austrian physician and psychotherapist (1870–1937), founder of individual psychology and the first of Freud's collaborators to break away and build a theory of his own. He had been a neighbourhood doctor in Vienna with a clientele of craftsmen and shopkeepers, and that experience left a mark he never lost: his first book is a study of the health of tailors, and his psychology always kept one foot in the material and social conditions in which people live.

He joined Freud's Wednesday circle early and rose to preside over the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, but in 1911 he broke with it. The disagreement was fundamental: against the primacy of sexuality, Adler placed at the centre the feeling of inferiority and the compensatory movement arising from it. Every person begins small and dependent, and mental life organises itself as an effort to overcome that initial insufficiency. From this come concepts that have since travelled much further than his name: inferiority complex, style of life, birth order, fictional finalism.

The piece usually left out is the one he thought decisive: *Gemeinschaftsgefühl*, social feeling. The compensatory movement can run towards superiority over others or towards cooperation with them, and for Adler health is the second direction, not the first. That is why he devoted his last years to child guidance clinics and to training teachers, and why he died at Aberdeen in the middle of a lecture tour.