The Development of Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology: Theory of Personality, Psychopathology, Psychotherapy (1912–1937) [1 ed.] 9783666403842

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Gisela Eife

The Development of Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology Theory of Personality, Psychopathology, Psychotherapy (1912–1937)

Gisela Eife

The Development of Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology Theory of Personality, Psychopathology, Psychotherapy (1912–1937)

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek: The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: http://dnb.de. © 2019, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Theaterstraße 13, D-37073 Göttingen All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Cover image: Alfred Adler, around 1935/akg-images/Imagno Typesetting by SchwabScantechnik, Göttingen Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISBN 978-3-666-40384-2

Table of Contents

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6 The Dual Dynamic: the Core of Adler’s Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Compensation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 The Neurotic Form of Compensation – The Inferiority-Compensation-Dynamic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Digression 1: Trauma as a Cause of Neurosis? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Digression 2: The Negativity of Neurosis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 The General Form of Compensation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Communality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 The Developmental Line of Movement (1926–1933) . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 The Developmental Line of Emotional Experience (1923/1926–1933) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 The Developmental Line of Community Feeling (1923–1933) 3 The Junction of the Dual Lines: Compensation and Communality 3.1 The Unconscious Life Style as the Ego . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 The Immanent Characteristics of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 The Configuration of Life Force in the Dual Dynamic . . . . . . . . 4 Treatment Instructions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Treatment Instructions from the “Individual Psychological Treatment of Neurosis” (1913a) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Treatment Instructions Between 1926 and 1931 . . . . . . . . . . . . .

 8 11

Prospect: The Relational Dimension of Individual Psychology . . . . . 1 The Generation of Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 The Mind-Body-Processing of Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 The Experience of Co-Movement and Affect Attunement . . . . . 1.3 The Experience of Wholeness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

66 67 68 70 71

12 24 26 28 31 32 34  39 47 48 51 54  59 62 63

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2 The Intersubjective Development of the Life Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 3 The Interaction of Life Styles and the Meeting of Therapist and Patient . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alfred Adler Studienausgabe (Study Edition) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adler’s Writings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scientific Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

77 77 78 78 80

Preface

This book is a revised edition of my introduction to the third volume of the German Alfred Adler Study Edition1 “Persönlichkeitstheorie, Psychopathologie, Psychotherapie” (Adler, 2010). A new chapter has been added: “The relational dimension of Individual Psychology”. The starting point of Alfred Adler’s psychotherapeutic theory is well documented in his major work “The Neurotic Character” (Adler/Stein, 1912a/2002a)2. The further elaboration is made accessible particularly in the third volume (Adler, 2010a) of the German Alfred Adler Study Edition and in Henry Stein’s “The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler” (Volume 1–9). Substantial aspects can also be taken from “Der Sinn des Lebens” (Adler, 1933b). In summary, the following concepts present the essentials of the development of Adler’s theory: the compensation of inferiority feeling and the concept of community feeling anchored in emotional experience, in body and mind and in the philosophy of life. Many influences, impulses and stimulations contributed to the production of this book. I would like to thank all my colleagues who encouraged my individual psychological development. Conversations with my partner, a psychoanalyst and a researcher of Master Eckhart’s writings, Karl Heinz Witte, enriched and inspired me. I myself have translated the German version of this e-book and owe heartfelt thanks to Caroline Murphy for her supervising and correcting my English. Also, I want to thank Corina G ­ ogalniceanu, 1 Starting in 2007, an Alfred Adler Study Edition has been published in German, edited by Karl Heinz Witte. 2 Starting in 2002, a new English translation of Adler’s writings has been published in English, edited by Henry Stein. Most of Adler’s quotations are taken from Stein’s edition; a few quotations are only published in the German Study Edition. The small letter behind the year of publication is part of the German classification of Adler’s papers.

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Erik Mansager, a Classical Adlerian Depth Psychotherapist (CADP), and Paola Prina-Cerai, a member of the editorial board of the UK Adlerian Year Book, for their interest and support. And finally, I want to thank my lector Ulrike Rastin for her kind cooperation and helpfulness.

The Dual Dynamic: the Core of Adler’s Theory

Adler’s theory discusses the modality whereby the human being masters his or her3 life in the world. He sees the life of the individual as well as that of the masses as a “compensation process, attempting to overcome felt or alleged ‘inferiorities’ in a physical or psychological manner” (Adler/Stein, 1937g, p. 215). For Adler, the feeling of inferiority is “a chance and necessity for the human being, the onset, the impetus for human development” (Adler, 1926k, p. 258)4. It is a “stimulus” (Adler, 1933l, p. 568)5 and an “incentive” (Adler, 1926k, p. 258) for the compensation process, the striving for a goal of security and superiority. Thus, Adler bases his concept of neurosis in a higher-­ ranking motive, that is the goal-orientation of the human being, instead of a partial motive (Libido) or a system of several motives. At the beginning, Adler called this compensation process the “life plan”, starting in 1926, he used the term “life style”. As a result of his experience during the First World War, in which he felt the lack of a common ground for humanity, Adler introduced the term community feeling6 in 1918. The introduction of community feeling manifests a change in the development of Adler’s theory. He discovered that psychic health cannot be achieved by a correction of psychic disorders. A patient’s health depends on the degree of his or her community feeling. Since the introduction of community feeling Adler’s theory is a value psychology, community feeling serves as a corrective and a criterion. 3 With the exception of quotations both genders or the female gender are mostly used. Psychoanalyst and therapist are used synonymously. 4 1926k: This paper is not included in Stein’s edition. 5 1933l: This paper is not included in Stein’s edition. 6 The German term “Gemeinschaftsgefühl” is generally translated as “community feeling”.

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In 1918, Adler also realized a “dual relatedness” of Dostoyevsky’s heroes: “Our feeling of dual personality [Adler uses dual relatedness]7 is inherent in every character and fixed on two points that we can sense. Every Dostoyevsky hero moves assuredly in an area that, on the one hand, is limited by an isolated heroism, within which the hero transforms himself into a wolf and, on the other hand, the hero is contained behind a line drawn by Dostoyevsky where there is love of one’s fellow human beings. This dual personality [dual relatedness] gives strength and security to his characters and anchors them firmly in our minds and feelings” (Adler/Stein, 1918c, p. 121). “Countering his demand for power […] is the experience of the overwhelming necessity for the community’s aspirations” (Adler/Stein, 1918h, p. 132). Each character is related to two fixed points in which Adler sees the contrast: isolated heroism versus brotherly love. These two tendencies in human life resemble Melanie Klein’s concept of the depressive and paranoid-schizoid position (Klein, 1944/1975, p. 317), but for Adler these concepts gain a foundation in his philosophy of life. At the moment when Raskolnikov changes from one relatedness to another, “he wants to cross the line laid down by his life thus far, fashioned on the basis of his social feeling and his life experiences” (Adler/Stein, 1918h, p. 115). This line can be a turning point of the life-movement, a way out of the compensation dynamic into a life determined by community feeling. Adler did not pursue these thoughts at that time. Not before 1929 did he coin the term “dual dynamic” for these two tendencies in human life. He never gave a definition, but many thoughts went in this direction in his investigation of human life (see chapter 3). In 1918, Adler recognizes, how the human being is related to these two fixed points: isolated heroism versus brotherly love. At that time, he does not yet dissolve these points into movement – a phenomenon that he will conceptualize towards the end of the 1920s. The remarkable thing is that he speaks about relatedness referring to the relationship of two characters and, later on, only about forms of movement. Firm structures are also dissipated

7 Adler’s terminology will appear in brackets in the quotations when it differs from Stein’s translation.

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in quantum physic (Görnitz a. Görnitz, 2008); only relations or movements are left. Adler knew about the new scientific findings of that time. In 1914, he criticized “the outmoded and antiquated natural science with its rigid systems”. “Such an approach eliminates the application of subjective thought and empathy with the patient, which in fact firmly establishes the connection”. This kind of science “today has universally been replaced by a view that […] seeks to understand life and its variations as a unity” (Adler/ Stein, 1914h, p. 26). In 1926, Adler again refers to this dual relatedness, this “striving for superiority […] and the devotion to community that relates this individual to others” (Adler/Stein, 1926m, p. 165). In 1929, Adler is able to concisely formulate the dual dynamic which captures the two kinds of relatedness as movements and which, above all, sees both movements in every phenomenon: It is hence possible to detect “that the ways of expressing social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl] and the striving for mastery run in parallel lines in two or more forms” (Adler/Stein, 1929f, p. 94). “Consequently, in every psychological expression, we can find next to a degree of social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl] the striving for superiority. We can be satisfied with our examination only when we have seen in the neurotic symptom this dual dynamic in exactly the same way as in any other human expressions” (p. 94). Adler describes two forms of movement in every phenomenon, one “in accordance with social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl]” and the other “in accordance with personal power” (Adler/Stein, 1928m, p. 84). The term “dual dynamic” does not mean two oppositional forces, but one life force causing individuals to live in a self-centered and/or social way. In formulating the concept of the dual dynamic, Adler tries to understand human life totally in one concept, in a conceptual design of the philosophy of life. All of his theoretical directions are connected in this view. In my opinion, this is the main feature of Adler’s holistic view: All of human life is determined by this dual dynamic. From this follows that all of Adler’s terms in their existential meaning are to be understood from this dynamic. Therefore, this concept represents for me the inner coherence of Adler’s theory. Next, I shall examine these aspects and tendencies:

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ȤȤ Compensation, ȤȤ Communality, and ȤȤ Starting in 1931, the merging of both. Adler first investigates the compensatory neurotic striving.

1 Compensation Adler starts with organic compensation (Adler/Stein, 1908e). As early as 1908, Adler realised that compensation occurred by “increased growth or functions” (Adler/Stein, 1908e, p. 78). A representative feature of inferior organs would be, in his opinion, the fact that they are not fully differentiated in their embryonic development; however, this deficiency can be compensated for in their further development. Adler transposes the organic compensation into the psyche, into the psychological development as well. The incentive for compensation would then be inferiority and the feeling of inferiority. “The feeling of inferiority has grown out of real impressions that are later tendentiously adhered to and reinforced” (Adler/Stein, 1913a, p. 118). Thus, the feeling of inferiority must be compensated for. Adler found a general principle of human life in this compensation, which reveals the existential approach in his dynamic. For him, the individual creates unconscious conceptions of him- or herself, how he or she wants to be, in order to be able to live in this world.8 In his early writings, the compensation is called “the masculine protest” and in “The Neurotic Character” (Adler/Stein, 1912a), it appears as “the will to power” and “the striving for personal superiority”. The masculine protest is only mentioned twice after this, in two articles dating from 1930 (Adler 1930n, p. 373)9 and 1931 (Adler/Stein, 1931n, pp. 21–24). It would not be 8 It would be interesting to examine the link between these unconscious conceptions and Melanie Klein’s concept of unconscious phantasy (Klein, 1944/1975, p. 311) or ­Barangers’ and Barangers’ concept of the unconscious phantasy structuring the “dynamic field” (2009). 9 1930n: This paper is not included in Stein’s edition.

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anything other than “the ascertainment of a striving for power compelled by social underestimation and undervaluation of women in our culture” (Adler, 1930n, p. 382). “The will to power” is no longer mentioned in the following articles. Adler did not give up this concept, but he changed the name into the terms “striving for superiority”, for “godlikeness” and, starting in 1926, into “striving for overcoming and perfection”. Adler’s teaching of neurosis was presented in his major work “The Neurotic Character” (Adler/Stein, 1912a) in its final version and never changed its fundamental structure after that. Adler first described the neurotic form of the striving for compensation, and then, starting in 1926, the human condition in general. 1.1 The Neurotic Form of Compensation – The Inferiority-Compensation-Dynamic This chapter includes topics that Adler regarded as essential. They were already discussed in Adler’s major work in 1912 and were again and again depicted and expanded throughout his life. These topics describe the neurotic life style and are to be understood from Adler’s holistic view and from his fundamental unconscious dynamic that he later called the “dual dynamic”. The topics are organ inferiority, psychic inferiority, fiction, finality, personality ideal, compensation, unity of personality, will to power, individuality, subjective thinking and feeling, conscious and unconscious, experience of infancy and goal-orientation, creative power, body and psyche. Adler takes “organ inferiority” (Adler/Stein, 1908) as the basis for neurosis; it is extended by the psychological dimension of inferiority feeling, but Adler’s interest for organ inferiority can be seen throughout his entire work. Because the neurotic feels inferior towards life, he or she is striving “to prove his ability to cope with life” (Adler/Stein, 1913a, p. 118) and to secure it. Adler even discusses “a compulsion for securing superiority” (p. 116). This compulsion “is so strong that, aside from what appears on the surface, every psychological phenomenon under comparative psychological analysis also displays another trait: escaping from a feeling of weakness in order to gain the upper hand, lifting oneself from below to above” (p. 116).

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Each emotional expression of the neurotic carries two premises: “A feeling of not having measured up to, of being inferior, and a compulsive [Adler: “hypnotisierendes, zwangsmäßiges”] striving for a goal of godlikeness” (Adler/Stein, 1914k, p. 53). Adler uses the term “real need [Not]10” (Adler/Stein, 1923f, p. 30), the “needs and helplessness of a child” (Adler/Stein, 1923c, p. 19), and adds that the feeling of inferiority also originates in the “vulnerability of the human organism in the face of nature” (Adler/Stein, 1923f, p. 30). In his opinion, being human means “having a feeling of inferiority. Nobody is able to free himself from a feeling of inferiority towards nature, towards the difficulties of life and of living together, and because of mortality” (Adler, 1926k, p. 258). The answer to this existential experience lies in the individual’s processing of the experience. And this answer is sought in the “fixed point outside” (Adler/Stein, 1912a, p. 41) the personality, one of Adler’s postulates. Psychic tendencies combine and form a guiding “fiction”; here Adler is making a reference to Vaihinger (1911). Adler calls this unconscious conception, which protects individuals from the chaos and insecurity of life, a mental orientation on “a specific fixed point outside his own person” (Adler/Stein, 1912a, p. 41). That is the reason why, according to the phenomenological tradition, this outside point can be viewed as an immanent transcendence, an “intentionality focused on the outside without transcending the area of subjectivity” (Witte, 2008, p. 162). This immanent transcendence is an essential feature of the individual as a subject. The upward-striving towards this goal is the driving and organizing force of the creation of the personality. According to Adler, the psyche is both an attack and defence organ (Adler, 1930n, p. 374). None of us can exist without a goal. The fact that Adler understands the individual in his or her finality is the most important characteristic of Individual Psychology. He writes that: “It is not possible for us to think, feel, desire or act without envisioning a goal” (Adler/Stein, 1914h, p. 27). This goal-oriented striving offers a unifying direction to life’s movement and determines the unity of personality. Adler hereby relied on Kant (Adler, 10 The German word “reale Not” (real distress) emphasizes the real trauma.

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1933l, p. 566) and his theory of the “a priori” forms of intuition (Adler/Stein, 1932g, p. 66) as well as on the “stabilization of the unity of the personality […], whose absence would have made psychological analyses inconceivable” (Adler, 1926k, p. 252). Unity is “the entrance to Individual Psychology, its necessary premise” (p. 252). According to Adler, the goal-directed striving gives a uniform direction to the human life-movement and conditions the unity of the personality. “Coherent conduct of this kind can only be understood if one presupposes that the child has found a specific, fixed point outside his own person that he is striving after with the energy of his psychic development” (Adler/Stein, 1912a, p. 41). This goal-setting maintains the unity of the personality in spite of a possible change in symptoms and neurosis. This uniform personality persists, “without being consciously aware of and without being an object of critical perception” (Adler, 1926k, p. 256). Many of Adler’s phrasings deal with this reference point lying outside the personality system: initially it is the goal of the striving for security; it is also called the guiding fiction, the personality ideal, the goal of superiority and godlikeness. In the 1930s, this reference point appears as “the individual’s eternal task” (Adler/Stein, 1931n, p. 21), the distant goal of developing an ideal community “sub specie aeternitatis” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 98). We can experience a homogeneous unity with our own self when we identify with our unconscious individual fictional goal. But this feeling-of-­beingidentical-with-ourselves as identity will be drastically challenged. There is no natural, just a fictional identity.11 In 1931, Adler states that the unconscious”I” is identical with the life style and comprehensible only in its movement or stylizing “so that we confront [Adler added “over and over again”] the individuality, the life style of the person, his I” (Adler/Stein, 1931l, p. 3). This is a radical statement up to this day. “What is frequently labelled the ‘ego’ is nothing more than the style of the individual” (Adler/Stein, 1935e, p. 130). The “I” is neither the sought-after ideal, nor the represented actor 11 Lacan called this image by which the human orients him- or herself, the imaginary “Other”, the “moi”, in contrast to the unconscious “je” (Lacan, 1991, p. 64). For Lacan, it is the innermost and deepest essence of oneself.

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with whom I am trying to identify, but the movement of the life style, that is, “the relationship of a peculiarly stylized individual dealing with the problems of the outside world” (1936j-1, p. 612)12. In contrast to Adler’s holistic approach, other psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic approaches focus more on “the contents and single functions of psychic life (such as perception, memory, cognition, sensitivity, instincts, libido, drives and reflexes etc.)” (p. 612). Modern psychoanalysis adds the terms: self-structure and object-representation, structural deficits and bonding-­styles (Brisch, 2009), for example. The core of psychic functioning nowadays is seen in the configuration of structural capacities (Rudolf, 2006, p. 10), which will be integrated in the organization of the structure of self. This integration is seen as an assembly. Adler points out, in contrast to this, “that we do not progress in our understanding by analyzing facts or adding up given elements” (Adler/Stein, 1931g, p. 172), but by orienting the whole towards the imagined reference point outside the psychic apparatus transcending the human being (Witte, 2010). Developmental psychology often does not ask by which means an individual “Gestalt” emerges out of the joined structural functions. Lichtenberg, Lachmann and Fosshage (2000, p. 61) presume a superordinate motivational centre, which he calls the Self, but he does not elaborate on this thought. Adler sees the Self as a “centre of refuge” (Witte, 2010, p. 68), which promises security and success, and will be shaped by each individual into a concrete fiction. The person will unconsciously be orienting all his or her strivings towards this fiction parallel or contrary to his or her conscious life goals. The goal runs “like a golden thread, like the peculiarity of an artist in his creation through all its expressions and symptoms” (Adler, 1930n, p. 374). The “personality ideal” or goal is only the aiming point of the striving and not its represented concretisation. Adler continued using the term personality ideal only in the years 1913 and 1914. Personality ideal is a synonym of an abstract goal and should not be mistaken for the conscious model or ideal which is concretized in a role, a person or an image with which one can identify oneself. To Adler, concretizing is unconscious. But even if it is conscious, it cannot be defined by its functions. One can reach an understanding 12 1936j–1: This paper is not included in Stein’s edition.

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of such a concretion, of a concrete life style, only by guessing or using our intuition: “We should not consider guessing as something outside scientific thinking. In science, progress occurs through guessing” (Adler/Stein, 1931g, p. 172). Additionally, we see Adler recognising the problems associated with strictly scientific methods as early as 1914: “It appears as if experience and an understanding of human nature are intentionally shut out, and that artistic and creative perceptions, as well as conjecture and intuition, are consciously regarded as invalid” (Adler/Stein, 1914h, p. 26). Two years before the First World War, Alfred Adler interpreted the existence of the individual in his or her Being-In-The-World as the “will to power”. Thereby the neurosis of the individual is embedded in the social power orientation (everything is achievable and realizable, if done with all one’s efforts). Adler had borrowed this term from Friedrich Nietzsche. “Wherever I found a living thing, there I found ‘Will to Power’; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master” (Nietzsche, 1886/1980, p. 147). In 1912, Adler is writing: “Until now we have considered the elevation of the feeling of self-worth, which is always trying to push itself through with particular force, to be the leading force and final goal of the neurosis that develops from constitutional inferiority. Meanwhile we have not failed to notice that this is nothing but an expression of a certain striving and desire, the origins of which are deeply rooted within human nature. The form of expression itself and the deepening of this guiding idea, which might also be described as the will to power (Wille zur Macht – Nietzsche) teaches us that there is a special, compensating force involved whose object it is to end the inner insecurity common to all human beings” (Adler/Stein, 1912a, p. 12). Adler here is emphasizing “the absolute primacy of the Will to Power” (p. 50). Nietzsche and Adler are primarily concerned with the peculiarity of the will’s desire to be mighty, and not so much with social power and superiority. Both authors find this feature precisely in people who lack real power. Witte (2010) describes the psychological characteristic of “The Will to Power” as an “imperative Will to Master” (p. 114). The child, whose primary bodily and emotional (psychic) needs are not fulfilled, will search for a compensation of this deprivation using “psychic

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capabilities” (Adler/Stein, 1912a, p. 2). The effort in using psychic capabilities aims at enhancing the feelings of the personality, the satisfaction of the “I”. “But an effort made in an area outside of the range of the person’s will and effort, for example in love and creativity, is condemned to fail” (Witte, 2010, p. 84). The inner dynamic of the neurosis represents a hopeless striving and attempt at healing fundamental anxieties and feelings of worthlessness. “Without being aware, the neurotic fears something more than his symptoms that the bleak secret of his worthlessness could be revealed” (1933b/1938, pp. 165−166). The neurotic is the human being “who, being allegedly faced with a deep abyss, is afraid that being pushed forward he will fall into the abyss, which means that his worthlessness will be exposed” (pp. 165−166). “But this so much feared fundamental worthlessness is in fact a feature of being, and not a deficiency of one’s abilities. The efforts of striving and willing try to work against intrinsic worthlessness, which for Adler means constitutional inferiority” (Witte, 2010, p. 87). This is not about a daily precaution, but about the striving for a fundamental security, about security as a survival principle. The Will to Power will manifest itself in consciousness only when the power is threatened and will remain unconscious during periods of success. As long as there are no problems, we are self-confident without being aware of it; the Self functions that way. Alfred Adler sees the individual range of powerlessness and power as reflecting the dynamic of human life. Powerlessness and the (existential) neediness of the patients as well as their goal (to overcome this need using certain compensatory strategies) must be taken together, including the feelings linked to these two conditions: on the one hand, the feeling of powerlessness and worthlessness and on the other hand, the feeling of power and control. “The neurotic system, the life style of the neurotic, spans these two positions” (Adler/Stein, 1913a, p. 119). The one is unthinkable without the other and it is pointless to find out about which one came first. But “the hypnotising goal” (p. 119) is the guide; it is the one that attracts all the tendencies of life. According to Adler: “It should be underscored that the dynamic of the inner life […] apply equally to the healthy as well as to the ill” (Adler/Stein, 1914h, p. 30). In 1913 and 1914, he came to see the difference between them

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only gradually as “variants” (Adler/Stein, 1914k, p. 53) of a normal emotional life. Healthy individuals do not cling to the guiding fiction; they will roughly orient themselves using their guiding principle or “guiding fiction” (p. 51) and not dogmatize about the guiding image, which happens in psychosis (Adler/Stein, 1912a, p. 42). Adler would later find a distinction between the healthy and the neurotic in the degree of community feeling. The theme of individuality remains important throughout Adler’s work. He refers to Rudolf Virchow’s cellular pathology, where the cell is seen as an individual becoming a unified whole, “in which all parts work together towards a common goal (Virchow)” (Adler/Stein, 1912a, p. vi). Adler assumes “the unity of the individual” (Adler/Stein, 1914h, p. 26), “once the postulation of the indivisibility of the individual has been uniformly accepted” (Adler/Stein, 1913c, p. 135). In 1923, he describes the way in which the goal or the guiding idea “forms the person’s individuality; it modifies his logic, aesthetics and morality, and infuses him with germane character traits – intelligence, energy and emotions” (Adler/Stein, 1923c, p. 19). For Adler, the role of Individual Psychology is to comprehend “a thousand of variations […] particular erroneous directions” (Adler/Stein, 1932g, p. 67) in order to “guess the style of life, the individual law of movement […]. That style of life is not revealed to us directly” (p. 69), it is not directly given. The following statement shows the impossibility of operationalising the individual, concrete life style. “In each symptom, […], we shall find something else, other than what is observable externally, other than its content, […]. Something unique pertains to each individual […]. We understand that the symptoms meaning the same thing do not exist […]. When two persons do the same thing, it is not the same” (Adler/Stein, 1931m, pp. 10−11). What Adler points out regarding the symptom is valid for all psychic movements; the uniqueness, the individual colouring, can be expressed neither in the outward appearance nor in the content and can hardly be put into words. But this is exactly what Individual Psychology is about. While empirical research tries to comprehend what determines similar reactions among people living under the same conditions, Individual Psychology is more interested in “subjective thought and empathy” (Adler/Stein, 1914h, p. 26). “We must apply the general diagnosis of Individual Psychol-

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ogy, but we cannot allow ourselves to be satisfied with that” (Adler/Stein, 1931m, p. 20); we have to trace the personality and individuality, using a life style analysis. General assertions must be used “only to illuminate the field of vision from where the particular case must be viewed in all its entanglements” (Adler, 1933l, p. 568). For Adler, the psychic dynamic on the whole is compensation. A hopeful, life-affirming view of the human being underlies the concept of compensation. This phenomenon of liveliness is often used in Adler’s work and has remained unaltered in its meaning. The compensatory dynamic represents an unconscious goal-oriented psychic self-activity and is the incentive of each psychic expression and development. After 1908, Adler no longer used the concept of aggression drive. Aggression became the incentive for compensation; later it became compensation itself and finally creative power. Adler states that great achievements are not the result of innate talents, but of compensation, because only “by struggling with difficulties one’s powers are able to grow and will be used for even greater achievements” (Adler, 1924d, p. 228)13. According to Adler, “One of these dodges [of the psyche] is to transfer the goal, or a substitute goal, into the unconscious” (Adler/Stein, 1913h, p. 171). The goal is unconscious and abstract, it is only the orienting point of striving. This is why the abstract goal will be filled with conscious concrete ideas in order to achieve a feeling of “authorship” about one’s own individual life (Strenger, 2005). As long as the concrete fiction reacts flexibly to the ongoing conditions of life, there are no problems. “The apparent antithesis between conscious and unconscious impulses is simply a contrast of means for the ultimate purpose of enhancing the personality” (Adler/Stein, 1913h, p. 172). Adler’s principle is crucial: whether a psychic phenomenon is conscious or unconscious depends on how it can be optimally used by the unconscious personality ideal. “The unconscious is the style of life” (Adler/Stein, 1930j, p. 145). 13 1924d: This paper is a report on a meeting. The quotation is taken from Adler’s introduction to the second topic of the meeting on “Weltanschauung”, which is not included in Stein’s edition.

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At the beginning of the 1930s, Adler continued to develop his own view of the unconscious, which is different from psychoanalysis: The unconscious life style “concurrently integrates reasoning, feeling, action and desires as well as all character traits, conscious and unconscious. When this ‘conscious’ is taken literally, he, who has not understood that a conscious event can mean ‘its actual opposite’, or that modesty can also signify arrogance (Socrates), will believe he has discovered contrasts between the conscious and the unconscious” (Adler/Stein, 1931n, p. 22). In 1932, Adler formulated ideas about consciousness that we nowadays call “implicit knowing” (Stern, 2004): something given to us, which we are not explicitly aware of. In Adler’s opinion, the unconscious is frequently seen as something that has not been conceptualised, which will suddenly appear as conscious when conceptualised. But “even thought that is not conceptional, which fills every moment of our lives, is conscious in the sense of consciousness because we are aware of it and it never disappears” (Adler/ Stein, 1932g, p. 68). This was why “by determining what is not conscious, the indivisible unity of ‘I’ is not touched” (p. 68). Contrary to Freud, Adler sees a distinctive dynamic conception of the unconscious in the foundation of the life style as incorporation from early childhood. This foundation of life style has never been put into words and is therefore unassailable to criticism or to experience, so that the child will “only in a limited way14 […] understand social relationships” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 99). Accordingly, Oberst and Stewart (2005, p. 20) use the term “tacit knowledge” to describe Adler’s conceptualization of the unconscious. Adler’s problem was Freud’s reduction of the notion “dynamic unconscious” to repression and the reification of the unconscious. This concept of the unconscious has changed a lot since Freud’s time. Neurobiological research (Kandel, 2005; Roth, 2003) and the research by Daniel Stern in reviving Freud’s concept have begun to approach Adler’s ideas. The psychoanalyst Bollas (1987) speaks of the “unthought known” (p. 290). Adler’s principle corresponds to Bion’s idea that it is not about repressing something into the unconscious – as if it were a location – but rather about understanding why

14 Today we would refer to the “implicit relational knowing”.

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“somebody does not recognize something from his inward” (Symington a. Symington, 1996, p. 8). From Adler’s point of view, the quality of the dynamic unconscious can also be attributed to the unrepressed unconscious, because the unconscious reigns over the will and nature of the individual. Instead of “defences”, Adler uses the term “safeguard tendencies”, which emphasizes more one’s own protective activity and force (see Adler/Stein, 1931f, p. 29). The concept of defences is secondary. Primary is the creative power that expresses itself in the life style’s compensatory striving to overcome. From the beginning, the child relates to him- or herself, his or her body and the world. The ability to assess the environment or, as the psychoanalyst Fonagy put it (Fonagy, György, Elliot a. Target, 2002), the mentalization, depends to a great extent on the affective-interactive quality of primary relationships. Whatever the child discovers at the beginning, “aggravated conditions” (Adler/Stein, 1913a, p. 123) even traumatic experiences, about him- or herself (inferior organs) and his or her close environment, are the mental data that are processed by unconscious evaluations (emotions, feeling, actions, traumas, character, and temperament). Also, what the psychoanalyst Gerd Rudolf (2006) calls the structural function is, according to Adler, construction material. Emotional and physical inheritance, as well as influences from the environment, can be conceived “as a supply of bricks with different qualities, used by each individual in his infancy to build his style of life. Resemblances and statistical probabilities can be frequently ascertained and counted upon, but never identical likeness” (Adler/Stein, 1935l, p. 152). Object relation modes, introjections and identifications, and also the degrees of organization of the Self (Arbeitskreis OPD, 2014) represent the construction material for the building of a life style; they are the “secondary guiding lines” (Adler/Stein, 1912a, p. 50), which converge in the “personality ideal” or fictive goal as “the spiritual link” (p. 51), which creates unity. The assessment of a childhood situation (mentalization) and the goal to overcome this situation are two sides of the same coin. As soon as the unconscious goal has been built, the assessment orients itself towards this goal, towards the personality ideal. This means that, whatever the individual experiences later on, will serve this goal and will be accordingly processed

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in a tendentious manner. All impressions that are not needed as a safeguard will be “more or less excluded” (Adler/Stein, 1936l, p. 173)15. In 1913, Adler wrote that “a permanent hostile attitude towards his environment […] is forced on the child” (Adler/Stein, 1913c, p. 136); later on, he mentioned the child’s erroneous “processing or assessment” (1923c, 1924d, 1931m) because of a physically and psychologically conveyed position, from which the child is getting persistent or intensified inferiority feelings. In this position, the child is only concerned with his or her own survival in an egocentric way and is not able to feel what his or her fellow beings are feeling. Nowadays, we would say that the patient was incapable of developing his structural abilities (Rudolf, 2006), or that the development of “mentalization” (Fonagy et al., 2002) is impaired. These traumatic situations or shortcomings have been extensively studied in the last decades by self-psychology (Kohut, 1977), developmental psychology (Dornes, 1999) and psycho-traumatology (Fischer a. Riedesser, 1999). In Adler’s vision, body and psyche are strongly bonded together. Adler states that “organ inferiority responds to psychological influences” (Adler/ Stein, 1934h, p. 114) and that, the other way around, bodily posture may also induce corresponding emotions. Adler calls anxiety “the most significant expression of the feeling of inferiority” (Adler/Stein, 1928j, p. 81). According to him, various psychosomatic moods (see Adler/Stein, 1934h, pp. 116−117) are always present before being recognized; they are mostly unconscious and nameless. “In cases of psychological tension, the entire body begins to vibrate. However, we will observe this tension only when it is more clearly manifested, mostly by inferior organs” (Adler/Stein, 1931m, p. 16). “Perhaps the most apparent character trait in all neurotics is excessive sensitivity. After all, this means that someone feels that he could fall apart if he encounters even the slightest harm, so he must defend himself with every means” (Adler/Stein, 1931l, p. 5).

15 The psychiatrist Ciompi (1997, p. 42) spoke about complexity reduction as a result of our limits of understanding, which in evolutionary terms could be an advantage because these reductions were the ones that made action possible.

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“Each difficulty and decision will become the most terrible menace to the arduously preserved equilibrium” (Adler, 1930n, p. 377). “The insecurity, painfully experienced as it is, will be reduced to the lowest possible, yet apparently causal level and this will be transformed into its crass opposite, into its antithesis, and taken to serve as the fictitious goal, which is then turned into the guiding point of all desires, fantasies and striving” (Adler/Stein, 1912a, p. 54). The “heightened emotionality” (Adler/Stein, 1913a, p. 116) results from the “individual feeling his way into the illness” (Adler/Stein, 1929f, p. 93): The patient identifies him- or herself with a situation that could possibly happen in the future. This process can best be observed “in the case of depression where the person lives as if a disaster has already struck” (Adler/Stein, 1931m, p. 17). A detailed description of how an enhanced inferiority feeling or an inferiority complex “feels like” can be found in “Advantages and Disadvantages of the Feeling of Inferiority” (Adler, 1933l, p. 569). Each emotion, each affect must be seen in context; frequently it is not the emotion that is unconscious, but the perception governing it. Adler assumes that once the goal is achieved, only those emotions will emerge which fit that goal (Adler, 1930n, p. 380). Adler is talking about the awakening of “delusional feelings appropriate to reinforce the life style against challenging logic and social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl]” (Adler/Stein, 1930j, p. 145). This is the reason why Adler mistrusts feelings: “Whenever an individual conceives an idea, he also arouses in himself a series of corresponding feelings and emotions […]. The different psychic functions, thought and feeling, cannot be divorced from one another. For instance, if I think of being in a beautiful city, my mental picture leads to feelings and emotions I might have if I were actually approaching the city, or were already there” (Adler/Stein, 1931f, pp. 35−36). When Adler speaks of feelings, he usually means the kind of feelings and sensations created by the guiding fiction; these are secondary feelings, suited, according to the life style, to the present situation and produced unconsciously. For Adler, it is self-evident that later experiences, not only those from early childhood, contribute to neurosis. In order to look for protection, the tendentious apperception is continuously searching for situations where the feeling of inferiority will appear; this will enhance and “maintain” the increased affectiv-

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ity. “What usually is called a ‘disposition to neurosis’ […] already is a neurosis” (Adler/Stein, 1913a, p. 116); the symptoms will show up only when needed. Adler calls the described dynamic initially a life plan, and, beginning in 1926, life style or law of movement. Without losing its previous meaning, life style, seen in its entirety, gains the meaning of a statement towards life challenges. This additional view is leading towards the fact that Adler no longer recognizes the neurotic life style mainly by its excessive and egoistic goals, but by its anxious retreat and evasion when faced with the solutions of the problems of life. In 1913 and 1914, Adler continued to elaborate on his view and tested it in different areas (insomnia, unconsciousness, dream, melancholia and paranoia). Even if, later on, he merely touched on some concepts (like assessment and arrangement), he would never dismiss them. Only his interest shifted, and he became less preoccupied by the neurotic striving for personal power and superiority. In the 1920s, he worked on a general personality theory. Compensation now proved to be a general principle of human beings. Digression 1: Trauma as a Cause of Neurosis? Adler is concerned with the process of how trauma or a situation of distress is experienced and what it means to the patient. An individual will only become neurotic if the trauma or a situation of distress is the incentive for a striving to become, for example, insensitive in order to safeguard oneself from being traumatized again. This represents an inner psychological process, which is meant to avoid psychological suffering; however, it enhances and perpetuates it. According to Adler, this mistaken processing of early experiences occurs inevitably, almost coercively, emerging from infantile “immaturity” (Adler/Stein, 1923c, p. 20). The life style is mistaken and misguided (Adler/Stein, 1931n, p. 10, and 1929f, p. 90) and the child feels discouraged and unable to cope with life. In 1930, Adler wrote that the “impact of childhood impressions on the rest of one’s life was advanced significantly by Freud’s observations” (Adler/ Stein, 1930j, p. 138). But his sexual theory forced him to overlook non-­sexual impressions: feelings of inferiority, insecurity and incapability. Because of these feelings, the patient’s ability to co-operate can not develop.

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According to Adler, neurosis develops not because the patient has experienced something, but because he or she can not cope with this event due to his or her lack of co-operation. Then he or she transforms a traumatic experience “into a major cause” (1930j, p. 138). A neurosis is produced when a person stabilizes the tension and excitement that arise from a situation in order “to give the appearance of getting through it more successfully” (Adler/ Stein, 1931i, pp. 181−182). “The suffering of the patient is real, often exaggerated, in order to protect the loss of prestige” (Adler, 1936j-1, p. 611). Adler pleads for this as early as 1912 (Adler/Stein, 1912a). The situation of distress must be “exaggerated” in order to be able to protect oneself even from the slightest sign of re-traumatisation. Seen from a distance, this exaggeration appears as neurotic hypersensitivity (Adler, 1930n, p. 379). Adler realized that a trauma in infancy can be an incentive for special cultural and life achievements. Organ inferiority can be an incentive as well. According to Adler, the training of an inferior organ will lead “to new, technically higher, more nuanced movements and artifices; this training will raise attentiveness and interest and will lead at best to a better awareness of how the individual and the environment are connected” (Adler, 1930n, p. 376). The hypersensitivity is the result of an enhanced sensitivity with respect to perception, empathy and all human abilities related in some way to the infantile situation of distress. This enhanced sensitivity is part of the processing and serves as a safeguard at first, but may also be used creatively as a special talent. This process can evoke “the strong, courageous feeling of a great potential” (1930n, p. 376). Adler gives an example: “Children with a vision impediment observe with particular interest perspectives, colours, lines, shadows and symmetries in order to comprehend everything better” (Adler/Stein, 1931m, p. 12). The question is whether Adler has disregarded the real traumatic events of a patient’s childhood in favour of the compensatory dynamic. Such an assessment derives from our present perspective; it has only been in the last 30–50 years that science has engaged in the research of early traumas and developmental disorders (Fischer a. Riedesser, 1999). Adler’s revisions of the “Neurotic Character” show that Adler recognized a real distress, but he eliminated sexual traumas and emphasized the subjective representation (Witte, 1994, p. 31).

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Adler is empathizing with the neurotic psyche mainly in order to overcome neurosis. He empathizes and identifies with the patients in order to help them leave the neurotic development behind and encourage the creative potential of community feeling. Adler believes that “there is always the possibility […] for stimulating a normal development” (Adler/Stein, 1928c, p. 56). This optimistic attitude can also be found in the following thought: An infantile distress will lead to enhanced infantile insecurity and to “a deeper inferiority feeling” (Adler, 1930n, p. 377). Then Adler immediately turns his attention towards overcoming: Therein lies one of “the roots of the enhanced creative power” (p. 376), where the striving for compensation will set in, “which often leads to overcompensation” (p. 377). Digression 2: The Negativity of Neurosis Some of Adler’s statements about neurotic patients have been interpreted as criticism and devaluation because they seem to contradict empathetic understanding. This impression may have been caused by the strong efforts he made to improve education and prevent neurosis, but even more by his focus on the negativity of neurosis itself with its egocentricity, selfishness and self-hate, as well as resentment towards the environment. His findings of this negativity, in no way soothing, but clearly and unambiguously formulated, are of great importance to Adler. One has to distinguish between the negativity of neurosis and the human being who is unconsciously addicted to it. Adler is implicitly implying this distinction and expresses it clearly in 1927: As long as the neurotic is not better prepared, because of a hostile environment, “he is in a sense justified in deviating as long as he is not better qualified” (Adler/Stein, 1927j, p. 42). By this Adler means: Each neurotic attitude or neurotic behaviour is partially justified, seen with the patient’s eyes and based on his or her earlier experience. This view of the life-plan keeps Adler from devaluating “the marked negativism” (Adler/Stein, 1913a, p. 125) of neurotics as being an inappropriate characteristic of the patient or as a personal insult. Adler also applies this critical analytic attitude to himself; because the “god-likeness also plays peculiar tricks with the therapist” (p. 123, footnote 7).

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The more Adler is concerned with the relation between neurotics and the community, the more he concentrates on this aspect of negativity and tries to awaken people’s sensibility to the necessity of developing a community feeling. While reading Adler’s cases, one has to differentiate whether Adler, like a missionary, intends to make these ideas accessible to his colleagues, to parents or educators or whether he is working with patients. The few examples Adler gives as medical reports or what can be identified from his treatments, show his intuitive and empathetic efforts to understand his patients (Eife, 2010). Adler has the vision of a possible prevention of neurosis and works relentlessly on this. “If we could provide […] an environment, more suitable for such individuals, in particular during the formative period, if we could find a suitable method of education for them, then they would no longer be abnormal to us” (Adler/Stein, 1930j, pp. 135−136). And a neurotic development could be prevented. In 1926, Adler uses the expression “unbeneficial behaviour” for the first time. In one of his cases, he describes the way in which his patient’s desire for his mother expresses itself in “the trait of cowardice” (Adler, 1926k, p. 259). What seems to be cowardly, seen from the exterior, is for Adler the patient’s desire for his mother and a lack of courage. Sometimes Adler’s remarks may sound very moral. This may say something about himself as a person, but it does not have any relevance in terms of his thoughts. His desire is to investigate psychological phenomena clear-sightedly and scientifically. In his opinion, the unconscious life style, built on mis-judgments and their unconscious motivations, can only be dissolved by understanding these errors. Yet the “truth” can only be understood, according to him, through further development. In 1928, Adler states that a therapist’s negativity can only be harmful. For him, it is far more important to have “an indestructible optimism” (Adler/ Stein, 1928j, p. 78). In his character descriptions, he describes in detail “all devious practices and arrangements” (Adler/Stein, 1913a, p. 115) and the corresponding emotions, but they are not worth more specific psychological research because, for Adler, these are only nihilistic tendencies for which he does not expect to find any solutions. In his opinion, therapy can only subsist by revealing this

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nihilism and by gaining insight; he still values optimistically the attainment of awareness and of “insight” (p. 123) into the unconscious, misunderstood negativism and into mistaken opinions of life, together with the possibility of “compensation” (p. 115). In the 1920s, Adler also adds encouragement and community feeling. “In other words, we must make up for what was neglected earlier” (Adler/Stein, 1926m, p. 169). 1.2 The General Form of Compensation Adler develops his approach to the neurotic into a personality theory and describes the conditions of human existence in general. Therefore, it is an existential approach. The striving towards a fictional goal is part of a positive concrete life design, which at the same time represents the attempt to overcome unbearable traumatic experiences and deficits and to transform subjective life-movement into a secure steadiness. Starting in 1926, Adler particularly investigates the compensatory dynamic, which he has found and elaborated on in the “Neurotic Character” in every individual. This extension needs an intellectual and conceptual distinction made between forms of striving, which can be normal or abnormal – a distinction that Adler had avoided before. Whereas he was seeing the distinction only in more or less fictional goals spanning from the flexible to the dogmatic, he is now investigating each striving deeper in order to work out the fundamental distinction. But according to Adler, psychological contrasts seen in individual persons represent only variations or flowing transitions of compensation. Using the term “goal of overcoming” instead of “goal of superiority” Adler can express a fictional goal for the normal development. Another differentiation is Adler’s discovery that the striving for power is the distorted side of the striving for perfection. How Adler’s expression “goal of perfection” can be understood from life-philosophy will be discussed later. Adler makes three distinctions between different forms of strivings: the distinction between striving for personal power and striving for perfection, the striving to overcome difficulties in order to gain security, and the striving for completion and perfection.

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1.2.1 The Distinction Between Striving for Personal Power and Striving for Perfection

In his articles before the First World War, Adler did not make a distinction between “the goal of perfection, superiority and godlikeness” (Adler/Stein, 1913a, p. 127). In 1924, he notes: “Our aesthetic and ethical rules originated ages ago and serve almost exclusively the personal striving for power. The progress of science and technology usually serves the selfish and the greed of influential groups” (Adler/Stein, 1924g, p. 62). In 1926, Adler differentiates the striving for power from “a dimly imagined goal of perfection” (Adler/Stein, 1926m, p. 162). The striving for personal power, “poisons man’s living-together” (Adler/Stein, 1928m, p. 85). When Adler calls the striving for personal power “one of the concretisations of the striving for perfection” (Adler, 1928m, p. 33216), he is then referring to perfection as being something abstract, without a specific content. In 1931, Adler makes a more detailed distinction between the neurotic striving for personal power or superiority, and the striving for perfection, which is “beneficial to all” (Adler/Stein, 1931l, p. 6); striving for perfection must therefore not in any case be mistaken for an egocentric striving for perfection. During that same year, Adler names the striving for power “the distorted side of striving for perfection” (Adler, 1931n, p. 491)17. 1.2.2 The Striving to Overcome Difficulties in Order to Gain Security

As early as 1913, Adler states that the goal of superiority provides security. Starting in 1926, he emphasizes the need for security more strongly. “The final goal of all inner striving will therefore be: harmony, security, adaptation, and wholeness” (Adler/Stein, 1926m, p. 164), where the child “can expect a fulfilment of his needs” (Adler, 1931n, p. 491). In 1927, he names for the first time “the goal for overcoming” (Adler/ Stein, 1927j, p. 40) difficulties or traumata instead of the striving for superi-

16 1928m: This quotation is taken from a paragraph in the original version, which is missing in Stein’s edition (1928m, p. 87). 17 1931n: The second part of this paper is not included in Stein’s edition.

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ority. Thus, he can formulate the goal-oriented movement also for the normal development. Adler now differentiates between the striving for personal superiority and the factual superiority “over the disturbing uncertainty [Adler: “Chaos”] in life” arising from the human “tendency for security” (Adler/Stein, 1930j, p. 135). “We must always have a goal to conquer, to accomplish for the sake of self-preservation and fulfilment” (Adler/Stein, 1932g, p. 67). 1.2.3 The Striving for Completion and Perfection

Adler uses the term “completion” for the first time in 1928. Completion is desired in order to overcome the individual’s impression of shortcoming, insecurity and weakness. Adler refers to the phenomenon in nature, where “the perfection of the individual is achieved by the brutal victory over the weaker”18 (Adler, 1928m, p. 332). Completion and perfection are not an ethical ideal, but an expression of life and survival. For this reason, the human being unconsciously needs a model in the future. “The fictional guiding ideal of perfection” is, according to Adler, “not concrete enough” (p. 332). This is why the abstract goal takes shape as “taxicab driver, doctor, Don Juan, fellow being, tyrant” (p. 332). According to Adler, each individual is striving for perfection, for a vision of how one’s life can be mastered. And this individual mastering of one’s life, called one’s own style of life by Adler, will succeed if this vision is able to renew itself according to the given circumstances. In 1930, Adler observes the psychological efforts “originating from the distress of life under threat, from enhanced weakness and insecurity of the child on his way to perfection” (Adler, 1930n, p. 376). In 1933, Adler refers to Nietzsche’s Übermensch in relation to the striving for perfection. Every individual has this striving. “It is absolutely unnecessary to indoctrinate people with the idea, so they can develop into superhumans, as the bold efforts of Nietzsche have shown” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 95). Nietzsche’s “Übermensch program” stands, according to the philosopher Sloterdijk (2009), for “vertical tension” in general. By that, he means “the hyperbolical tension […] 18 1928m: This quotation comes from a paragraph in the original version, which is missing in Stein’s edition (1928m, p. 87).

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arising from a claim which is inevitable and not accomplishable” (p. 700). The human being progresses only by orienting him- or herself towards the impossible. Only this orientation will stimulate the human being to develop his potential. Sloterdijk’s “vertical tension” corresponds to Adler’s striving for completion and perfection. But Adler goes one step further. In 1932, he explains how he understands “completion”: Striving towards a goal or objective “can be found everywhere in life. […] Every individual is striving towards completion, striving from lower to higher” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 95). “Everything grows as if it were striving to overcome all imperfections and achieve perfection” (Adler/Stein, 1931, p. 187). This means that striving towards a goal of completion or perfection is immanent to life.

2 Communality “If somebody thinks that our findings about the feeling of inferiority, the striving for power and the compensation of their different forms are the only tasks and accomplishments of Individual Psychology, then he is mistaken” (Adler, 1926k, p. 251). This is how Adler introduced his shift of perspective. He is more and more concerned about the overall context, the life of the individual within human society, nature and the cosmos. Later on, he will also be concerned with the process of life. In 1918, after the First World War, Adler introduced the term “community feeling”; from 1923 to 1926, he was intensively preoccupied with this concept. For him, like the feeling of inferiority, community feeling is innate, but it has to be developed. It is basic and unconscious, and it only secondarily develops conscious attitudes, emotional experiences and behaviours. Before 1918, the precursors of the term “community feeling” were “cultural aggression” in contrast to hostile aggression (Adler/Stein, 1908d, p. 75; ­Bruder-­Bezzel a. Bruder, 2004, p. 28), the orientation towards reality (Adler/Stein, 1912a, p. 42) as well as “the limits set by reality” (p. 126). The years between 1926 and 1933 were a very significant and prolific period for the development of Adler’s theory. In these years, Adler was

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not only more involved in the discouragement his patients felt; he was also engaged intensively in the phenomenon of movement and emotional experience. Based on these preliminary studies, Adler succeeded in the theoretical development of the concept of community feeling. In different articles during the same period, evidence can be found that Adler was developing his philosophy of life in more detail. Adler’s elaboration of his concept of community feeling comes up in lines and forms of movement, which join together or run parallel and which finally dissolve in the totality of life’s movement. Each of these lines will be pursued in the following sections according to the year of their conception. Three developmental lines start in 1926: ȤȤ Adler investigates human life from the point of view of movement; ȤȤ Adler bases community feeling on emotional experience; and ȤȤ A separate developmental line of community feeling shows three main tendencies: (1) community feeling as an expression of the coherence of humanity, (2) community feeling as co-movement and co-feeling, and (3) community feeling as a guiding ideal. At this point, the two lines of the dual dynamic are reunited: community feeling as a value, based on the experience of life will manifest itself in “the striving towards a form of community which has to be achieved as eternal, as if mankind had reached the goal of completeness” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 98), when the development of life will achieve togetherness. 2.1 The Developmental Line of Movement (1926–1933) In 1914, Adler was preoccupied with the idea that “dynamic movements have to be captured with static words and images” (Adler/Stein, 1914h, p. 30) as soon as we start describing movement. Daniel Stern (2004) also noticed this problem in describing the present moment. A phenomenal experience should be separately investigated in order to be able to understand it. In 1926, Adler asks the question: “Is it reliable to say that we all are movement, that our lives are to be seen only as movement?” (Adler, 1926k, p. 253). And then epistemological reflections follow: it would not be possible to understand unless “one first captures the whole and then discovers

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the entire line in the details again”. Each image will become comprehensible only “if we keep the whole in mind, if we keep pulling out the movement line, if we focus on the end of this movement” (p. 252). In 1927, Adler describes a method of reduction: in seeking to detect “the psychological expression in movement, we try to uncover the contents of the psychological impulse19” (Adler/Stein, 1927j, p. 40). What is left allows the form of movement to become more visible. In 1931 and 1933, Adler discusses the problems of this reduction as a therapeutic method, particularly the danger of generalising and of coming to reductionist conclusions. He therefore emphasizes the principle of Individual Psychology, “not to allow our own judgment to be the determinant, but instead, to follow clues left by the child” (Adler/Stein, 1931n, p. 23). “In its understanding of the uniqueness of each individual, Individual Psychology is well enough protected from subordinating itself to the spell of rules and formulas” (Adler, 1933l, p. 568) and therefore pays more attention to “the concrete version” of the goal (Adler/Stein, 1932g, p. 67). With this statement, Adler is also narrowing the validity of his own general statements. They originate from “statistical evaluation and should be used only for bringing more light into the field of vision where an individual case must be seen in all its entanglements” (Adler, 1933l, p. 568). The meaning of a character trait is also understandable only in its movement. “If we wish to understand the meaning of a trait, we must look at it as movement. Every character trait involves a social relationship” (Adler/ Stein, 1932f, p. 54). In 1932, Adler reinforced this concept. “Once we see psychic expression as movement, we approach an understanding of the problem.” “We observe these movements and see them as if in a congealed statue’s form in repose, so to speak” (Adler/Stein, 1931, p. 187). And he will realize the following year that: “The human mind is alas too easily accustomed to translating everything that moves into form, not to observing the flow, but the frozen movement, which has taken on solid form. From the beginning, Individual Psychologists have dissolved in move19 1927j (p. 297) Adler: “indem er den seelischen Ausdruck seines Inhalts entkleidet”. My translation: “to strip off the psychological expression from its content”.

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ment what we perceive as form. As a result, we believe that to live means to develop” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 96). Life is development, movement and orientation; even a so-called structure is only frozen movement, which should become moveable again in therapy. The difference between abnormal and normal therefore lies only in the tightness of the frozen movement, in how flexible this stiffness will dissolve and re-configure. While the developmental line of the movement describes only its abstract form, Adler in the following years characterizes the experience of discouragement, tenderness and community feeling. 2.2 The Developmental Line of Emotional Experience (1923/1926–1933) It was especially in the years from 1926 to 1933 that Adler turned his attention away from his earlier character and behaviour analysis towards the emotional experience of the patient. This seems to be a result of Adler’s personal development, as if he has discovered his own community feeling. Adler’s turning towards the discouragement and feelings of tenderness in his patients let him anchor community feeling in emotional experience. The Developmental Line of Emotional Experience shows three lines: ȤȤ Adler’s orientation towards the emotional experience of the patient – the patient’s discouragement and feelings of tenderness; ȤȤ Adler’s attention on the (immediate) experience of the patient and on his own experience, and ȤȤ The conceptualisation of experience. 2.2.1 Adler’s Orientation Towards the Emotional Experience of the Patient – The Patient's Discouragement and Feelings of Tenderness (1923–1926)

In 1913, Adler’s attention is still directed towards the understanding of the life style by the therapist: “Insight as well as understanding of a life plan can best be gained by artfully reaching deep into that person and by intuitively empathizing with his nature” (Adler/Stein, 1913a, p. 123).

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Starting in 1923, Adler pays more attention to the discouragement of the patient, because “not the illness but the discouragement recidivates!” (Adler/Stein, 1923c, p. 37). “Speaking of the causes of discouragement: They are always unjustified! There are no fully sufficient grounds for discouragement!” (p. 18). “Along with that, discouragement, which is always wrong, sets in. It occurs in various degrees of intensity and with its arranged safeguards further leading to numerous mistakes” (p. 20). These statements are often misunderstood, as if Adler labels distress and traumatic experience as being a fallacy. This topic has been treated before in a separate chapter (digression 1). “One might ask, whether every child can be forced into discouragement. Well, I trust that every educator has the ability to do this to every child, since all mankind tends towards discouragement” (p. 18). Adler’s growing sensibility regarding encouragement had an impact on his therapies. In 1926, Adler sees in the “first feelings of affection [Adler used “tenderness”] of the child […] impulses of innate social feeling”, which should be developed. “The whole development of a child demands an imbedding with circumstances where there is social feeling. Life and health are guaranteed only when there are people who will devote themselves to that person” (Adler/Stein, 1926a, p. 102). During the same year, he also describes an “individually felt impression” (Adler/Stein, 1926m, p. 164), which is dependent on the goal. This expression “individually felt” shows Adler’s growing sensibility for individual feelings and experience. And he emphasizes: “Above all, no child must lose faith in his future” (p. 168). 2.2.2 Adler’s Attention on the (Immediate) Experience of the Patient and on His Own Experience (1927–1931)

While Adler developed his concept of community feeling he noticed that the cognitive understanding of a patient’s life style is of no help. Starting in 1927, Adler turns more and more towards the experiences and needs of his patients. “We must identify [“einfühlen”] step by step with an individual in order to understand him” (Adler/Stein, 1931g, p. 174). The patient has to understand “his useless [“unzweckmäßig”] style of life […] just as well as he understands his anguish” (Adler/Stein, 1927j, p. 41).

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“A real explanation must be so clear that the patient knows and feels his own experience in it instantly” (Adler/Stein, 1929c, p. 49). Adler is speaking here about the feelings of the patient triggered by the therapist’s interpretations during the “Here and Now” of a therapy session. To recognize and to feel one’s own experience in the therapist’s interpretation – this has been seen as being indispensable for a successful interpretation since the end of the 20th century (Williams, 1999; Stern et al., 1998). Adler is trying to gain the patient’s co-operation by taking his or her side, because “every neurotic is partly in the right” (Adler/Stein, 1929c, p. 16)20.The patients often develop a special sensitivity even for tiny mistakes in relationships that remind them of their own traumatic experience. This sensitivity is reactivated in the transference onto the therapist. This empathy achieved by identification “to see with the eyes of another” (Adler/Stein, 1928f, p. 64) can indeed be found only in the 1928 definition of community feeling, but Adler conceptualised this co-movement as early as 1926. This movement implies the fact that the corresponding psychic movements, one’s own impulses and sentiments are called forth, thereby affecting the self-experience of the therapist. The phenomenon of co-­movement can also be seen in Adler’s statement about exploring “the system of a psychological illness along paths followed by the patient himself ” (Adler/Stein, 1914k, p. 53). Adler mentions the “intellectual thought process [“Mitbewegung”]” (Adler/Stein, 1913j, p. 188) as early as 1913, but only the Individual Psychologist Heisterkamp (1996; 2007, p. 309) picked up the expression “co-movement”, because Adlerian therapy is always emotional co-movement. Adler’s own developmental path regarding co-movement can be well illustrated. In 1924, the first step is taken in a revision of his article about obsessional neurosis: “A prerequisite has to be found in accordance with which the patient’s behaviour makes sense. If this prerequisite is valid, the patient will always make that his point of departure without understanding its significance” (Adler/Stein, 1918b, p. 109, footnote 4).

20 Another quotation confirms this interpretation: The patient “is in a sense justified in deviating as long as he is not better qualified” (Adler/Stein, 1927j, p. 42).

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This step was about the (intellectual) comprehension of the patient’s behaviour. The next step consists of deducing comprehension from the meaning of suffering: “In such cases, once we start questioning the circumstances under which suffering makes sense or whether it is justified, then to a certain degree we gain some insight” (Adler/Stein, 1927f, p. 18). Both thoughts can be seen as precursors of “empathy”. More and more, Adler sees the world “with the eyes of another […]” and, additionally, he sees himself confronted with his own experience. Also in 1926, he wrote: “We will soon find the right context (of the life style) if we are asking ourselves: which would have been the circumstances under which I would have lied as a child? For instance, if I see myself in front of a threatening situation which I cannot measure up to, then, under certain circumstances, I would also see myself compelled to reach for the safeguard of the lie” (Adler, 1926k, p. 263). Adler made this reference to his own experience several times. He says to his patients: “I can heal you […] only with the truth that I have struggled to attain myself ” (Adler/Stein, 1928j, p. 79). And once again, in 1930: “We consider a case resolved and dare to speak of healing only when we can understand the reason the patient chose this form of erroneous acting; also, we admit that given the same circumstances, we might have adopted the same neurotic style of life” (Adler/Stein, 1930j, p. 140). 2.2.3 The Conceptualization of Experience (1926–1933)

Starting in 1926, Adler theoretically deals with the function of experience and its conceptualization in general. He questions the benefit of experiences and therefore their validity. Adler (1926k) asks: “Why are experiences of such little use, why does not any human being become wiser by using his experience?”, and his answer is: “Because the already settled unity of the personality will tendentiously bias all events and will return to each situation as long as the experiences emerging from it fit the patient’s life plan best” (p. 263). The same year, he formulates even more tersely: “The same experience will never affect two people in exactly the same way, and experience makes sense only to the point permitted by the style of life” (Adler/Stein, 1926m, p. 165). And yet, we only have our feelings and experiences, even if, according to Adler, “our ability to conceptualize requires a compulsion to exclude”

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(Adler/Stein, 1930j, p. 137). On the one hand, our experiences substantiate our theoretical assumptions and, on the other hand, our theories must prove themselves, in our own experience, as being subjectively “true”. Anyway, while building the final goal and its concretisation, experience can allow a convergence with reality, in spite of “the possibility of the child to be mistaken. […] Experience can […] produce so much wisdom as to help the individual to reshape his actions, to resume his goal in a manifestation appropriate to reality” (Adler, 1930n, p. 378). In 1931, Adler evaluates the function of experience further and comes to the conclusion that the patient “can make use of nothing else but what he derives from his (earlier) experience. It is impossible to proceed other than by applying earlier experience” (Adler/Stein, 1931m, p. 16). In 1932, Adler once again refers to the fact that “an outlook on life” will be “gained through experience. Once an individual must have had this experience” (Adler, 1932l, p. 54421). An early manifestation of emotions represents a direct immediate experience emerging in the “Here and Now” of the therapy session, even if “the material of his life-experience […] lies in the past” (Adler/Stein, 1931f, p. 27). The question is, how an immediately felt event is being processed inside the experience. In 1931, Adler examines the processing of experiences and how they can be reflected scientifically. Symptoms, like phobia, anxiety and obsessions, “present various aspects of direct experiences. However, they become a science only when we succeed in relating our experiences to some deeper lying commonality that can no longer be perceived directly, but that exists only as an idea, or as a unifying principle” (Adler/Stein, 1931l, p. 2). According to Adler, science is not “the sum of empirical facts derived in a laboratory or by direct observation. Science means much more. It means to have discovered a clarifying principle for the connection and relationship of actual experiences that allows for the classification of all direct experiences without raising contradictions” (Adler/Stein, 1931n, p. 22). In 1933, Adler emphasizes the fact that: “Every new idea lies beyond immediate experiences. Immediate experiences never create anything new. 21 In a small paragraph in the original version, which is missing in Adler/Stein (1932l, p. 82), Adler speaks about the role of experience.

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Creative thinking, when combined with immediate experiences, does create something new” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 98). This summarizing idea or “unifying principle” (Adler/Stein, 1931l, p. 2) represents Adler’s teleological view. 2.3 The Developmental Line of Community Feeling (1923–1933) A precursor of community feeling in Adler’s early articles is the need for tenderness, “a strong desire of the child for affection [“Zärtlichkeit”] (Adler/ Stein, 1908d, p. 75). Tenderness and the need for tenderness are briefly mentioned in 1913 and 1920 in the revision of “Individual Psychology: its Presumptions and Results” (Adler/Stein, 1914h, pp. 26–36). “Out of the social feeling [Gemeinschaftsgefühl] develop tenderness, neighbourliness, friendship, and love. The striving for power, seeking to force itself on the social feeling [Gemeinschaftsgefühl], unfolds disguised, secretly and with stealth” (Adler/Stein, 1914h, p. 32). In 1926, Adler speaks about a characteristic of our male-dominated culture which postulates “that every impulse of affection is accompanied by something like shame and the impression that one might be weakened and be reduced in worth for expressing it” (Adler/Stein, 1926a, p. 101). Adler’s own efforts to grasp the concept of community feeling are characterized by his intuitive knowledge of the greatness of this concept, but also by the possibility of misusing it. In 1933, when Hitler became the German Reich Chancellor, he calls this misuse dangerous (Adler, 1933b). “The fact that the road that leads to community feeling has not yet been clarified could be used in order to endorse and enforce collective forms of perception and life styles by hiding under the idea of rescuing the current community or even a future one” (p. 72). And he emphasised: “The absolute truth […] is inaccessible to human capabilities, beyond its grasp” (Adler, 1933b, p. 161). Adler’s theoretical efforts around the concept of community feeling would be replaced more and more in his last years by his (missionary) striving to implement in practice what he had theoretically recognised since the First World War as being crucial, and to persuade as many people as possible of it. The developmental line of community feeling shows three lines:

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ȤȤ Community feeling as an expression of the coherence of humanity, ȤȤ Community feeling as co-movement and co-feeling with the patient’s experience, and ȤȤ Community feeling as a guiding ideal. 2.3.1 Community Feeling as an Expression of the Coherence of Humanity (1926–1933)

In the 1920s, Adler worked on the different interrelations of the individual. “For a good reason, Individual Psychology avoids studying the individual in isolation (Adler/Stein, 1924g, p. 63). For Adler, community feeling means a connection between individuals and between them and nature, earth and the cosmos. According to Adler, culture is “created from the coherence of humanity […]; the impact of this coherence is best described by the idea of community feeling” (Adler, 1926k, p. 257; italicized G. E.). The expression of coherence gives every individual the possibility to enter “this stream of life that he either advances or retards” (Adler/Stein, 1924g, p. 64). Adler’s way of phrasing this represents an attempt “to strip off the psychological expression from its content” (Adler, 1927j, p. 297, transl. G. E.), a method, which Adler named one year later, but already used in this phrasing. Community feeling creates the connections, and at the same time, is being created by these connections. At the beginning of the 1930s, Adler hoped for a body-mind foundation of community feeling in evolutionary development: It should be anchored in human life just like “breathing” is (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 99). However, he is more interested in ontology than in biology. He watches the psychosomatic reality of the human being, the way in which body and soul are oriented towards the final goal, the way in which mood, feelings and the physical and psychic tensions of an infant join, organize and gather in the goal. From the point of view of developmental psychology, Adler speaks about the pre-verbal phase and, from a philosophical perspective, about the existence of the human being. This is how he is able to create an ontological or psychosomatic foundation for the concept of community feeling. The development of the sensory organs, as well as that of reasoning depends on the interest that connects the individual with other people. This interest can be seen in the individual’s views. Adler (Adler/Stein, 1931g)

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states that: “The way we expect looking to be must be animated. Animation means to be interested in the environment, the world” (p. 171). “If someone does not show this, we talk about a lifeless look” (p. 171). An “emotional tension” results in the fact that “the whole body is vibrating” (Adler, 1932l, p. 54822); “the inferior organs react to it, indicating its presence” (p. 548). According to Adler, “for every one of us, we could construct a situation which would put us in a similar tension” (Adler/Stein, 1934h, p. 117). This tension also could “affect those who are greatly concerned with rules, formulas, and ideas intellectually. In other cases […], the emotional sphere of psychic life is set into motion” (Adler/Stein, 1931, p. 191) and results for instance in anxiety. For Adler, functions of the body can represent an expression of the striving to overcome, but also of community feeling. “Thus, all functions of our organs are correctly developed only if they are not detrimental to social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl]” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 99). “Everything we find worthwhile in life is a product of this social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl]. The new-born child only finds what others have added to life, the contribution of our forefathers” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 98). The development of language needs, according to Adler, “the connectedness with fellow beings” (Adler/Stein, 1926m, p. 166). Language development will be flawed from the beginning, if “the impulse grown from the togetherness of all human beings” (Adler, 1926k, p. 258) is missing. This means that language precedes speaking. In a similar way, community feeling precedes all neurotic stiffness. Adler expressed a similar thought more precisely: “This social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl] […] is much more the theme (Grundmelodie) we have in all forms of expression. […] When we listen, the basic theme (Grundmelodie) again is this communal feeling in the degree of connectedness, in the manner in which we speak to each other and make contact” (Adler/Stein, 1932f, p. 53). Adler wants to prove that the survival of [hu]mankind within evolution is ensured only if the rule of the stronger individual does not dominate and that connectedness between people is not disclaimed. The question that arises, is how to reconcile the survival strategies of humanity with the uncer22 The quotation is taken from a paragraph in the original version, which is missing in Adler/­ Stein, 1932l, p. 85.

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tainties facing this earth […], “how to deal with climate, etc.” (1931g, p. 170). Adler feels confident that there must be a harmonious way and that it has something to do with “truth”, even if we do not know what the truth is. “If science has any meaning, it occurs only if a breakthrough to truth has been presented. In the same way, we are engaged in a scientific approach to solve this most important problem, to discover truth” (p. 173). 2.3.2 Community Feeling as Co-Movement and Co-Feeling with the Patient’s Experience (1928–1929)

The understanding of community feeling as co-movement and co-feeling starts with Adler’s orientation towards the patient’s discouragement and need for tenderness in 1923. Thus, he bases community feeling on emotional experience. In 1928, he defines community feeling as a form of life. “When we say it is a feeling, we are certainly justified in doing so. But it is more than this; it is a form of life (Lebensform) […] This is not to be understood as a superficial life form, as if it were merely the expression of a mechanically acquired form of life. It is much more” (Adler/Stein, 1928f, p. 64). This means that community feeling should not be conceived only from a distanced reflective position. Community feeling must be lived and experienced in order to be able to feel how it is to be connected with others and to belong. Community feeling as an experience of mutual relationship means an authentic feeling of concern, an inner relation to the environment, a “feeling at home” (p. 65) on this earth, “to be at one with the universe” (Adler, 1928f, p. 319)23, and “to be embedded in everything that humans become and in all that they do” (Adler/Stein, 1931n, p. 21). “A real explanation must be so clear that the patient knows and feels his own experience in it instantly” (Adler/Stein, 1929c, p. 49). In other words, one had to develop community feeling also towards oneself and approve one’s own life. Adler calls it the “bonding with our life, affirmation and reconciliation with our life” (Adler/Stein, 1908b, p. 68). When one has become reconciled with oneself and one’s life, then community feeling will be trans23 The quotation is taken from a paragraph in the original version, which is missing in Adler/­ Stein, 1928f, p. 68.

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ferred also to others through co-movement and co-living. The therapeutic work must also be characterised by a “corresponding devotion to the patient’s needs” (Adler/Stein, 1929c, p. 48). In Adler’s following well-known definition of community feeling, the emotional co-movement is beautifully expressed: “To see with the eyes of another, to hear with the ears of another, to feel with the heart of another” (Adler/Stein, 1928f, p. 64). Adler continues: “This gift coincides in part with another which we call identification or empathy” (p. 64). To underline this empathy, Adler takes as an example the patient’s unconscious choice of symptoms: “We must come so far that we are able to say: if I were in the same situation, if I had the same mistaken attitude towards life, […] then I would suffer from about the same symptoms. Only then, after such an identification, could we claim to truly understand a person, and comprehend his selection of symptoms” (Adler/ Stein, 1931m, p. 10). “The ability to identify must be trained. This can be done only if a person grows up in connection with others and feels himself a part of the whole. He must sense that not only the comforts of life belong to him, but also its discomforts. This feeling at home is directly a part of social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl]. […] Thus, there arises in him a quite specific form of life in which he does not regard adversities as an injustice inflicted upon him” (Adler/Stein, 1928f, p. 65). “Letting him [the individual] grow up as if in enemy country” (Adler/ Stein, 1934g, p. 113), then his or her whole life will only be focused on security and on the enhancement of the ability to safeguard what had already been secured. In this way, the so-called neurotic life-movement can be understood as the desperate attempt of an individual, given his or her childhood experience, to live and to be allegedly able to rely on one’s own willpower and to do so without love and community feeling. “What is crucial”, according to the philosopher Levinas (1989), is the fact “that from a certain point onward, we are no longer able to do so; and this is where the subject loses his true mastery as a subject” (pp. 47−48). “Probably there is a breaking point for each one of us, a situation so difficult and intolerable that our capability for co-operation is flawed. Some people are so vulnerable that they are unable to fulfil their life tasks” (Adler, 1933l, p. 568).

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In 1928, Adler maintained that: “General and personal suffering are always connected with the fact that today we have constructed our guiding ideal still too little in accordance with social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl] and too much in accordance with personal power” (Adler/Stein, 1928m/2004b, p. 84). “Whatever appears as unusual, infirm, or abnormal is caused by the lack of social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl]” (Adler/Stein, 1929f, p. 94). Furthermore: “The typical, aggressive ideal of our time is still the isolated hero for whom fellowmen are objects. It is this psychological structure which has made the First World War palatable to people […]. We need the conscious preparation and advancement of a mighty social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl] and the complete demolition of greed and power in the individual and in peoples. What we all lack and for which we struggle relentlessly are new methods to raise the social sense [Gemeinsinn], the new word” (Adler/ Stein, 1928m, p. 87). “However, that would not even come close to an absolutely correct answer ‘to the problems of mankind’ since, with regard to finding an answer, we unfortunately must impute flaws to human judgment” (Adler/Stein, 1927j, p. 36). 2.3.3 Community Feeling as a Guiding Ideal

This expression as a guiding ideal can be found in the article “Origin of the Striving for Superiority and Social Interest” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, pp. 95–100). This line of movement has been prepared in “The Psychology of Power” (Adler/Stein, 1928m, pp. 84–87) and “Individual Psychology and Psychoanalysis” (Adler/Stein, 1931n, pp. 21–24). “Community feeling requires another ideal” (Adler, 1928m, p. 33524). Rather than isolated heroism, it requires “the goal of humanity” (Adler, 1931n, p. 489). In 1933, Adler calls his idea of community feeling “a guiding ideal, an orientating goal, a goal of an ideal society [Vollkommenheit]”. “Our concept of social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl] as the ultimate development of mankind has to contain the goal of an ideal society, because it is a situation

24 In Adler/Stein 1928m, p. 87, this sentence is missing.

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where we imagine all life problems solved, all relationships improved, a goal that goes in a beneficial direction” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 98). Adler also proposes the following description: “Social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl] means much more. Specifically, it means to feel with all concerned sub specie aeternitatis, striving towards a form of community, which has to be conceived as eternal, as if mankind had reached the goal of completeness, […] the last fulfilment of evolution” (p. 98). However: “It never has anything to do with a presently existing group or society, or with political or religious concepts” (p. 98). Adler is talking about adjustment to future survival (1933b/1938, p. 270), which could also contradict an adjustment to the present social and cultural situation. Community feeling as a “guiding ideal” in terms of morals can easily take the connotation of a super-ego demand. Countering such demand Adler postulates: “These [ethical and aesthetical views] are only pitiful arrangements, cults, religious or fanciful historically limited abstractions of this human togetherness” (Adler/Stein 1918h, p. 134) “that we experience daily, hourly, as truth incorporated in ourselves during our life” (1918h, p. 117)25. Adler rejects the reduction of his theses to ethics or morals; he probably did not want to be seen as being unscientific. He does not speak “of a moral ideal, or a religious perception, but expresses his argument in the sense of a scientific observation of the psychological life of a human being” (Adler/ Stein, 1932g, p. 69). Community feeling is also a value; however, “science does not always ask about this value, but it is included in the general dynamic of science” (Adler, 1931g, p. 43426). The term “community feeling” had fallen into disrepute after the Second World War, especially because of its improper use during the period of the National Socialism regime. Free self-development and personal fulfilment (Strenger, 2005) was increasingly emphasised; in contrast, the idea of values, co-operation (Spitzer, 2007), social responsibility (Bauer, 2006) and resonating relationships (Rosa, 2018) have been revived in scientific articles only in recent years. 25 In Adler/Stein, 1918h, p. 134, the last part of the sentence is missing: “die wir täglich, stündlich als Wahrheit erfahren, die im Laufe des Lebens körperlich in uns eingegangen ist”. 26 In Adler/Stein, 1931g, p. 173, this sentence is missing.

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Since Adler introduced the term “community feeling”, his theory as a whole acquired a psychological value. Adler’s understanding of community feeling in 1933 is not at all a pure spiritual, idealistic concept. This is because he is holding on to the idea of anchoring community feeling onto the body until the end of his life, as well as on founding it on the body-mind experience and in the configuration through the individual construction of meaning. Even shortly before his death, Adler was reinforcing his concept that: “Social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl] demonstrated throughout life, is rooted in the germ cell. But it is rooted as a potential, not as an actual ability. Like all innate human potential, social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl] develops in accordance with the individual’s self-consistent style of life. The child forms his style of life out of his creative power, i. e., from the way he perceives the world and what appears to him as success” (Adler/Stein, 1937g, p. 214). Adler’s interest in the position of the human being inside the community gave him the possibility to deal thoroughly with “three questions arising from life and community” (Adler, 1926k, p. 256). He also used the following terms: life-tasks, life-challenges or questions of humanity. “The sufferings of mankind and of the individual are the result of failed attempts at resolutions […], [of] a disturbance in absolutely logical human relationships and their consequences” (Adler/Stein, 1923f, p. 31). “The defective style of life lacking in social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl] would always break down before the pressing problems that arise which require just that missing measure of social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl]” (Adler/Stein, 1929f, p. 90). In the context of life-tasks, Adler differentiates useful and useless behaviour. A behaviour would be useless if an individual is orbiting only around him- or herself, without facing the challenges of life. Such behaviour would be the result of a mistakenly built-in life style, of errors “for which the child must not be held responsible, because no educator ever clarified these errors. Nobody thinks one should punish the mistakes and bad habits of children and engage with them in a fight” (Adler, 1926k, p. 256). Mistaken and misguided solutions are never private matters but rather questions of the community and they infringe upon the “absolute truth” (Adler, 1930n, p. 374).

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But Adler is also emphasising “that only an objective exploration or events themselves” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 99) and “the ones who come after us” (Adler, 1926k, p. 256) would be able to decide if an action had an impact on the community’s welfare. If these mistaken attitudes were conceived only as educational flaws, then Adler’s Individual Psychology would not be an in-depth psychology, but rather pedagogy. The patient is, according to Adler, trapped in his or her tendentious perception; he or she does not know or does not understand his or her motives. The patient’s avoidance tendencies and the socially destructive and exploitative attitudes are secondary. The primary goal is to overcome life’s insecurity, the experience of being at the mercy of traumatizing relationships and the constitutional and social inferiority (given or sensed) as well as to compensate for a disadvantage. “A neurotic symptom is produced whenever a person attempts to evade the problems of life because he feels fundamentally unable to solve them in a manner compatible with his striving for superiority” (Adler/Stein, 1931f, p. 26), due to a prevailing mood, which is either anxiety or can be traced back to anxiety, since “anxiety is one of the most distinct manifestations of the sense of inferiority” (Adler/Stein, 1931f, p. 26). In 1931 and 1932, Adler would speak several times about “the degree of social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl]” (1931f, 1931n, 1932h), which defines the difference between life styles. He is not referring to something objectively measurable. “This problem that we must solve is not mathematical but artistic.” It would be an artistic task to find out “at what point a person is no longer able to generate social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl]” (Adler/ Stein, 1932g, p. 69).

3 The Junction of the Dual Lines: Compensation and Communality For the junction of the dual lines Adler coined the term “dual dynamic”. Both aspects of the dual dynamic, the compensatory striving force and community feeling reunite in the phenomenon of life (Eife, 2008). The striving force aims at the compensation and advancement of life because, according to Adler, life is movement and development. Since life

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always needs to be comprehended as co-living and is never isolated, attachment and inner movement also belong to the immanent tendencies of life. They represent aspects of Adler’s community feeling. This chapter includes the following topics: ȤȤ The unconscious life style as the Ego, ȤȤ The immanent characteristics of life, and ȤȤ The configuration of life force in the dual dynamic. 3.1 The Unconscious Life Style as the Ego Adler describes individuality and life style in “The Neurotic Character” (Adler/Stein, 1912a, p. 41) without referring to an ego. In the revision of his book in 1919, Adler uses the term “Ichbildung” in a footnote. In 1920, 1926 and again in 1930, Adler uses the term “Ichfindung” without expanding on this topic. Starting in 1926, the term “ego” appears several times in relation to the “you”, without Adler giving any definition. Adler is only able to conceptualize the ego in the late 1920s. The difficulty in finding a definition for the ego lies in the fact that Adler’s concept of ego has no structure; it represents movement and therefore cannot be touched or grasped. Three lines point to Adler’s definition of the ego: ȤȤ Gestalt perception, ȤȤ Creative power, and ȤȤ The notion of movement. 3.1.1 Gestalt Perception

Adler elaborates on the “Gestalt” perception between 1926 and 1931. It is necessary to keep an eye on the whole in order to recognize an individual “Gestalt”. Each part derives importance, value and meaning only from the context. It is not possible to deliver a judgment if one does not “first capture […] the whole and then discover […] the entire line in the details” (Adler, 1926k, p. 252). Adler’s point of view is oriented towards the understanding “of the whole” of the person from a subjective point of view and towards the “unconscious” self-understanding of the individual with regard to his or her intentionality. The whole is therefore not to be understood as “Gestalt” that can be seen

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from a distance, but as an inner movement which, from the beginning, is related to one’s fellow human beings and which builds its shape and dynamic within this relatedness. Using a lot of metaphors from the artistic imagery, Adler compares the activity of Individual Psychology with the work of artists. But he uses art not only metaphorically. Adler calls art “the leader of humanity […] influencing all our feelings, our humanity” (Adler, 1926k, p. 268), also in therapy; Adler even states that any given activity shows some kind of relation to art. Thus, art’s development is the development of the community. Adler sees the individual simultaneously “as an artist and artwork” (Adler, 1930a/1976a, p. 7) because he or she is also partly the creator of his or her personality. The form or the whole is found not only by relating all notes to the melody, but rather by recognizing in the melody “the original driving attitude, for example in Bach, his life style” (Adler/Stein, 1930j, p. 139). 3.1.2 Creative Power

Creative power is mentioned for the first time in 1926 as a “compensatory movement, the deepest meaning of human life” (Adler/Stein, 1926m, p. 164). In 1931, Adler makes a difference between free creative power and the one determined by the life style (Adler/Stein, 1931n). Four years later, he refers to creative power as being identical with the ego. The ego “grows into life which we later recognize as a creative power” (Adler/Stein, 1932g, p. 68). The latter “is identical with the life-force itself ” (p. 67), a force which constitutes unity, “which translates into movement towards the overcoming of an obstacle all the influences upon him and all his potentialities” (Adler/Stein, 1931, p. 188). The creative power implements a consistent feeling of oneself through goal orientation. The wish for efficacy, experience and authorship (Lichtenberg et al., 2000, p. 186; Strenger, 2005) has its roots here. The psychoanalyst Grotstein (1997) states that the individual “from his birth is reshaping the things that happen to him into personal subjective experiences, by creating these events on his own and then introducing these personal experiences as an original creation in his fantasized inner world” (p. 414).

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3.1.3 Concept of Movement

Especially in the years 1931–1933 Adler took up his concept of movement again. He dissolves character structure into movement and finds inside “the melody of the whole ‘I’, the personality with its thousand-fold ramifications” (Adler/Stein, 1931l, p. 1), “so that we confront the individuality, the life style of the person, his ‘I’” (p. 2). Adler saw the final tendency of “the primordial germ” in the organic, in just the same way as he would see a potential final tendency in the mind. He calls it a “spiritual primeval process” (Adler, 1931n, p. 492). “The first stage of the germ cell is a person’s ‘I’, a totality, a personality, given all the potentialities for human development” (Adler/Stein, 1931n, p. 21). The “necessity to build an ‘I’” (Adler, 1931n, p. 495), to construct a life style originates in the evolutionary tendency of the primordial cell. In 1932, he finds expressions for the ego that characterizes its form of movement, that is, a “congealed movement” (Adler/Stein, 1932h, p. 73) or a “frozen movement” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 96). Adler’s concept of the ego is the stylising of the ego’s own life-movement, whose lasting forms can be defined as frozen movements. The life style as the ego lives its individual style of movement within the richness of all possible styles of life-movement. And this “I” (ego), this life style can act against its own life, unconsciously in destructive tendencies or consciously in suicide, paradoxically in order to save itself from a threatening feeling of worthlessness. Acting against one’s own life may lead to the misunderstanding that there is a death drive (Klein, 1944/1975, p. 301) and a life drive; but Adler does not see the human being as being governed by drives. For him, a human being is governed by his or her unconscious and conscious will, which is always a being able to will. What Adler calls “ego” can be flowing or frozen movement, life style, individuality, creative power and life force. A more explicit definition would mean questioning these different concepts from an intellectual distance and not following Adler’s thinking and his phenomenological descriptions. The activity of a creative power does not allow a final state in the sense of a stable ego structure or self-structure, because this would mean a stiffening of living. But what does Adler understand under this creative power or life force that defines individual life unconsciously, without the knowledge of

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consciousness? Adler is speaking about tendencies in which all forms and structures dissolve. 3.2 The Immanent Characteristics of Life Speaking to an audience of medical doctors Adler confirms that “Individual Psychology is philosophy” (1932h, p. 72). At the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, Adler is more and more interested in the phenomenon of life, a tendency that will be understandable from the point of view of the philosophy of life. From this perspective, the ego dissipates in community feeling, which now is to be understood as spontaneous life itself. Community feeling can not be wanted and developed by one’s own will; it is pre-existent and present from the beginning. Although sometimes submerged by traumatic experiences, it can be revealed and thrive. According to Adler, the self-enhancement of life and community spirit can not be suppressed because they are immanent to life. In the following quotations, Adler labels something immanent to life itself, something that can be lived, suffered and experienced. In doing so, striving will not be seen as an activity of the will, but as “the immanent striving for an ideal final form” (Adler/Stein, 1929f, p. 94). This striving and the community feeling “are the deepest motivating forces of a person’s inner life” (p. 94). In Adler’s writings three tendencies can be distinguished: ȤȤ Living with “an orientation towards more”, ȤȤ Life as attachment and receptiveness, and ȤȤ Life as inner movement and fulfillment. 3.2.1 Living with “an Orientation Towards More”

Life is, according to Adler, “a movement” with an “orientation towards more, towards supplementation, reinforcement, force, power which […] seems to offer security without totally undermining the situation of insecurity” (Adler, 1926k, p. 253). Individual life has “a tendency to overcome, especially because of the urging feelings of a tension due to an incompletion” (Adler, 1933l, p. 567). This tendency “communicates with each single impulse, happens non-verbally and with no concepts attached, and involves the whole

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individual creative power of a human being” (p. 567), “the creative power that is identical with the life force itself ” (Adler/Stein, 1932g, p. 67). Adler also calls this tendency a striving for a “goal of perfection, security and completion” (Adler, 1933l, p. 566). This striving is “innate as something that belongs to life, a striving, an urge, a development, something without which we simply cannot visualize life” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 96). “Everything grows ‘as if ’ it were striving to overcome all imperfections and achieve perfection” (Adler/Stein, 1931, p. 187). “Individual Psychology claims special credit for showing a connection and how this force, called ‘life’ develops in every individual” (Adler/ Stein, 1933i, p. 96). The direction in which life “leads and moves […] is a matter of origin, which is connected with the source of life” (p. 96). It is “a becoming, never a being” (Adler/Stein, 1931m, p. 11). In the quotations mentioned, Adler is speaking about life itself, which wants to develop and to be enhanced. From the phenomenological point of view, we can therefore understand perfection or completion as the full self-development and self-enhancement of life, which will never come to an end. 3.2.2 Life as Attachment and Receptiveness

The individual participates in the collective even before the beginning of one’s own development. Therein lies once again evidence for a receptive attitude of human beings towards life that may lead to a feeling of “gratitude” (Klein, 1937/1975, p. 113). Individual Psychology sees “the human being […] inseparably linked to the existence of others, just as he is linked to cosmic facts and to the demands of this earth” (Adler/Stein, 1924g, p. 63). Adler even notes “the degree of an individual’s merging with the demands of life, fellow human beings and the universe” (Adler, 1920a, p. 15). Adler speaks about the “openness, truthfulness, interest in others, in country and in humanity – all these attitudes reflect the extent of that person’s readiness to connect […]. Our senses, the eyes, the ears, and the sense of touch all work towards connectiveness. The sense that is often missing is the willingness to establish a social contact, the readiness to accept” (Adler/ Stein, 1929f, p. 88).

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And also: “From need and community stem the impulses to form language, intellect and logic, ethics and aesthetics, which are the accomplishments of a social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl]. These can flourish only under a developed social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl]” (Adler/Stein, 1923f, p. 30). 3.2.3 Life as inner Movement and Fulfillment

During the daily functioning the inner movement of life (community feeling) is mostly hidden behind a rigid striving for superiority and security. Pulled out of the daily routine, we feel our liveliness and the connection to our fellow human beings again. The inner movement of life can be experienced during moments of pain or during moments of joy and love. “The search of the individual is imbued with the unfathomable will of the masses; it is a minuscule part of the driving force of mankind” (Adler/Stein, 1924g, p. 64), a “precondition that must be met in every way just as the will to live, actually life itself, must tacitly be accepted” (p. 63). Both of Adler’s expressions “imbued” and “tacitly accepted” in regard to one’s life point towards a primordial receptivity, a letting-go. Adler sees “the broad stream of social feeling [Gemeinschaftsgefühl] poured forth in the form of devotion and kindness” (Adler/Stein, 1926a, p. 111), which immediately unite all human beings. “These relationships cannot be formed arbitrarily, but must be left to their own designs. An understanding of such matters has not yet matured because the individual is capable of deceiving himself about these processes in his own soul” (p. 111). For the first time, Adler stresses here that community feeling can not be shaped by one’s will; it must be allowed to emerge. Again, Adler emphasizes “the devotion of love to the individual or the community” (Adler, 1928m, p. 335)27. Adler’s expressions of the “stream of life” (Adler/Stein, 1924g, p. 64), the “psychological movement, which flows through everything”28 (Adler/Stein, 1927j, p. 39), “that living stream of psychological activity” (Adler/Stein, 1931l, p. 1), label a feeling of life, of moods which are flowing through us, if we are 27 This quotation taken from a paragraph written by Armin T. Wegner at the end of Adler’s paper, is not included in Stein’s edition. 28 Adler: “seelischer Bewegung (die alles ist) alles durchfließt”. My translation: spiritual movement (which is everything, which flows through everything) (1927j, p. 39).

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open to them. This spontaneous basic feeling of life arises in “the present moment”, a concept by Daniel Stern (2004) that stands for moments of encounter (Eife, 2004) and is tangible at that moment. This moment has nothing to do with the physical time of the “Now” (Witte, 2010, p. 51), because, in the individual experience, it can last a very long time or pass by briefly or unnoticed. The human being finds “the highest fulfilment and confirmation of his nature” (Adler/Stein, 1928m, p. 84) in the complete development of his or her own life. Charles Taylor (2007, p. 6) talks about the ”place of fulfilment” that can be filled in an immanent or transcendent way. According to Adler, “the main movement line is going towards fulfilment […] and [is] always connected to the community and their traditional concerns: humanity, work and love” (Adler, 1930n, p. 375). “In the deepest sense […] a feeling for the logic of human co-existence is the social feeling [Gemeinschaftsgefühl]” (Adler/Stein, 1926a, p. 102). Community feeling as the feeling for this logic represents the expression of “humanity” (Adler, 1930n, p. 378) and of empathy towards oneself and others affected by life, by “the desire to participate” (Adler/Stein, 1932h, p. 73). For Adler, all these areas, the inner movement or momentarily felt experience, life as attachment and enhancement, reunite in the phenomenon of life; these traits are part of life’s nature. 3.3 The Configuration of Life Force in the Dual Dynamic Adler “wants to understand in which direction life leads and moves […] how this force, called ‘life’, develops in every individual” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 96). Having investigated the immanent characteristics of life as the deepest layers of community feeling both tendencies of life-movement can now be described as the two expressions of the life force. Life force can appear as a dual dynamic, but still remains the same creative power that can operate egocentrically and/or humanely. What stimulates this dual dynamic? Creative power works within a deep unconscious will for an unconscious purpose. From the very beginning, the individual is arranging him- or herself in the world “wordless and notionless” (Adler, 1933l, p. 567) in order to be able to live and survive. According to Heidegger (1927/1977, p. 258), Dasein (existence) is concerned in all of its

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areas with its “ability-to-be” (translation by William Blattner). According to the philosophical theory of life phenomenology by Michel Henry (1992), individual life wants to be able to live “self-evidently” (Funke a. Kühn, 2005), a basic fact that seems logical as long as life has been granted to you. But when the “embedding” of a child in a community failed because of a lack of community feeling on the part of the primary caregivers, then faith in this self-­evident life is disturbed and it seems necessary to remember one’s own willpower and to secure survival by one’s own power. This is an unconscious process. This duality can be found in every phenomenon. The development of one’s own potential can be an expression of life enhancement and, at the same moment, an expression of a fiction as an “attempt to obtain control over one’s life” (Funke a. Kühn, 2005, p. 35). In some of Adler’s quotations we find a reference to life having been given to us, a reference to a primarily receiving mode of human life, like in the following quotation: a “precondition that must be met in every way just as the will to live, actually life itself, must tacitly be accepted” (Adler/Stein, 1924g, p. 63). According to Michel Henry’s philosophical theory of the phenomenology of life, life’s tendency to self-actualization is at first not intentional; but it will soon become a goal-oriented striving towards a fiction of security, because “a life without production of fictions cannot be imagined” (as cited in Kühn, 1988, p. 220). And “fictions are […] not thinkable without a preceding life-affection” (Funke a. Kühn, 2005, p. 34). Yet, according to the philosopher Rolf Kühn, we fall ill if we want something “which contradicts the inner will of life itself ” (Kühn a. Stachura, 2005, p. 53). The duality of phenomena can also be found in physical functions; they can express the striving for overcoming and/or community feeling. “Whatever appears as unusual, infirm, or abnormal is caused by the lack of social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl]” (Adler/Stein, 1929f, p. 94). “Thus, all functions of our organs are correctly developed only if they are not detrimental to social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl]” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 99). When Raskolnikow “ascends the stairs to murder an old worthless usurer, he feels his heart palpitating” (Adler/Stein, 1928m, p. 87)29. Adler suggests 29 See also Adler/Stein, 1918c/2003b, p. 117 and 1918h/2003b, p. 135.

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that Raskolnikow’s heartbeat is in fact a psychosomatic reaction of community feeling. He would elaborate on this again in 1931, 1932 and 1933. Since the dual dynamic is present in every phenomenon, both interpretations are possible: Raskolnikow’s heart beating can be seen either as a kick and/or as expression of community feeling, one of them being in the foreground. The experience of community feeling would have stopped his action, made him turn around and he would have let go of his fictional goal (to become like Napoleon by murdering the old usurer). It is irrelevant which impulse the human being is aware of; community feeling as an original feeling of connectedness is present in every life-movement. In the individual experience this feeling can be painfully impaired and every neurotic life style tries to safeguard against the feeling of aloneness and isolation. In the following quotations, Adler underlines once more the differences between the overcoming of life problems in the sense of a personal striving for power and/or in the sense of communality. In 1931, he emphasizes “that we err when we think that a part of that living stream of psychological activity [seelischen Geschehens] is a solid part of the whole, something fixed and immutable” (Adler/Stein, 1931l, p. 1). What is called chronic neurosis is, according to Adler, only a distortion of vivid mental activity. It also is impossible to extract community feeling “as if it were separate from the total image of the individual; it is much more the theme [Grundmelodie] we have in all forms of expression” (Adler/Stein, 1932f, p. 53). The human being can find the direction of community feeling “in the stream of evolution” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 99); he or she can also drift away. Adler ultimately fears the extinction of humanity; this consequence would be “a hard law, even gruesome” (p. 99). Adler speaks about the “stream of life, that he either advances or retards” (Adler/Stein, 1924g, p. 64). Adler differentiates a “psychological movement, which hardens here into will” (Adler/Stein, 1927j, p. 41) from the flow of life. “In suicide, vital force defiantly annuls the vital instinct” (Adler/Stein, 1928m, p. 86). The concrete “will” can therefore act against life. This “concrete” will is not the conscious will, and if it is conscious, then it is not understood in its entirety. “Some call this un-understood context the unconscious” (Adler, 1936j-1, p. 614). Adler does not see the unconscious as

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an area of its own. He only sees flowing transitions of life-movement, which, according to the fictive goal, can become more or less conscious. Adler’s concept of the ego is the unconscious life style. He excludes the development of consciousness, but not entirely, because the awareness of the life style, the conscious knowledge of a previously unconscious psychological entanglement may cause a transformation of our unconscious will as well. “We may fight against the working of social feelings (Gemeinschaftsgefühle) in us, but we cannot smother them” (Adler/Stein, 1928m, p. 86). We orient ourselves towards common sense unless our unconscious will (life style) and maybe also our conscious will are somehow “defiantly” cutting themselves off from life. A patient with compulsion neurosis lives from community feeling, even if it is hidden and unconscious. A patient with a severe psychic disorder would die if he or she were not unconsciously supported by a remainder of their experienced (marginal) community feeling. Community feelings can be fought against or dissociated; then, according to Adler, they must be revived in therapy (see chapter 4). The dual dynamic can also be found in the demands which life put on us. In 1927, Adler “assume[s] a typical final goal for everyone […], which is that he owns the responsibility for his life’s tasks” (Adler/Stein, 1927f, p. 18). When Adler speaks about “life’s tasks” (p. 18), challenges or the “demands of life” (Adler/Stein, 1929f, p. 88) he not only means social challenges but also an ontological dimension of human existence. The individual life wants to be lived with all its possibilities and boundaries. But present and maybe permanent “barriers in the reality of the community” (Adler/Stein, 1931n, p. 21) and the experience of these barriers lead to the striving for security, to the construction of a life style, that is, to the self-creation of the ego. In the experience of these situations “lies the power to adapt and overcome” (p. 21). Adler does not mean a better cultural adaptation, but “an active adaptation to the cosmic demands” (Adler, 1933b, p. 157) or “to the absolute truth” (p. 161). If we bring the idea of transcendence back into our present life, into all that life has to offer (as Witte’s “Ciszendenz”30 implies), then only the accep30 “Transcendere means crossing over. In order to show the opposite movement, the coming over, one can think of ciscendere” (Witte, 2010, S. 107).

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tance of life, a surrender to life will be left, in order to overcome and shape creatively what has been given to us. If the human development is favourable, then there is enough room to shape one’s life creatively, even if, according to Adler, the ego (as creative power and life style) will always be bound to one’s own life plan. In this case, the need for independent acting and for self-determination is satisfied in accordance with the community. Here, we are dealing with a successful integration of an affective connection to the world, whose intimidating potential will be offset by the community feeling of fellow human beings. The life style or the ego “creates itself […]. We can see this ‘self ’ only ‘in relation to’, because it [the ego] is always responding” (Adler/Stein, 1932h, p. 73; Antoch, 2006). In times of distress, the life style can express itself as a frozen movement. Great obstacles or the experience of a trauma can make life become unbearable; then, the only possible option seems to be the child’s inner withdrawal until a state of shock (or the play-dead reflex) is reached in order to preserve the living potential, the “true Self ” (Winnicott). Thus, the life style or the ego can be “distorted” (Adler, 1931n, p. 491) by egocentric neurotic intentions, while the child may still be functioning on the surface. An early discouragement makes it almost impossible to see one’s own potential. This discouragement will manifest itself explicitly with its “ego-­ relatedness, its suffering in the case of unfulfilled wishes and with its inflamed emotions” (Adler, 1936j-1, p. 609). All of these reactions are creative drafts or life styles made under difficult or unbearable conditions. The frozen movement interferes with the active exchange between human beings and also interrupts access to one self. The ego or the life style will be frozen in its own inferiority- superiority-dialectic until the error is understood. According to Adler, healing is not possible “as long as the individual does not understand the error in his life concept” (Adler, 1937g, p. 206)31. “The conviction held by the physician regarding the uniqueness and exclusivity of the neurosis and the direction it is taking must be so firm that he can truthfully predict to his patients their disturbing arrangements and constructions, identify and explain them. He should persist in doing

31 1937g: This paper is not included in Stein’s edition.

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this until the patient, shaken by what he has learned, gives his neurosis up” (Adler/Stein, 1913a, p. 125). But what happens at the moment when the patient is shaken when, according to Adler, he or she lets his or her neurotic striving go? Adler apparently did not intend to do detailed research on this moment, which represents the “vertex of reversion” (Witte, 2010, p. 123), a reverse of life-movement from self-will or stubbornness towards co-movement. The living community feeling lightens up in the “Here and Now” moment when the stiffness dissolves. It is tangible in a “moment of meeting” (Stern, 2004; Eife, 2004). Ultimately, these phenomena referred to as “life” or “community feeling” remain unrecognisable and unfathomable and can only be sensed through their impact. “The whole value and meaning of Individual Psychology are contained in these two aspects and their solution. […] This knowledge cannot be directly understood or found through an analysis of visible symptoms and facts” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 95). Some of these insights reveal themselves only in an inner subjective certainty, an inherent “consistency” of the personal truth experience (Dürr, 2003, p. 34). The psychoanalyst Bion (1970/1993) chose the sign “O” (for origin) for this unknown and unrecognisable being. He noticed that “the analyst can know what the patient says, does and appears to be, but cannot know the O, of which the patient is an evolution: He can only ‘be’ it” (p. 27). “It (O) stands for the absolute truth in and of any object [individual]; it is assumed that this cannot be known by any human being; it can be known about, its presence can be recognised and felt, but it cannot be known. It is possible to be at one with it” (p. 30).

4 Treatment Instructions Only two of Adler’s articles dealt with therapeutic treatment: the chapter “Psychological Treatment for Neurosis” in the article “Individual-Psychological Treatment of Neurosis” (Adler/Stein, 1913a, pp. 115–129) and the article “The Technique of Treatment” (Adler/Stein, 1932l, pp. 80–94). Other

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important treatment instructions were scattered in papers between 1926 and 1933 and are hard to find. Therefore, they are collected in the next chapter, while only a few items from the above-mentioned two articles, rarely discussed before, will be selected. Adler’s basic concepts suggest a therapeutic approach that today stands for itself within the psychoanalytic and therapeutic orientations. Adler’s method is meant to enable the therapist to bring the life-movement of the patients into one perspective and to make its unifying bond visible. The focus of this method lies on goal-oriented compensatory strategies and on the development of community feeling. The psychodynamic perspective interprets every single phenomenon as the patient’s steps from a state of neediness to his or her idea of perfection. Thus, the misguided life-movement of the patient is reactivated in therapy and can be modified or “healed” provided that the patient experiences empathy and community feeling in the therapeutic relationship. Thus, the healing process can be understood as an existential experience of a conversion. In their experience, the patients are often oscillating between the two poles of the inferiority-compensatory-dynamic: firstly, between the feeling of powerlessness and worthlessness and secondly, that of power and control. These are two opposing aspects within the patients: the powerful tendencies serve to protect oneself from the experience of one’s own neediness and powerlessness. On the one hand, these strong tendencies can be incredibly negative, destructive and aggressive and may seem to be justified (in self-experience) as a protection against the fictive offender; on the other hand, weakness experienced for example as victimization can be emphasized and powerfully expanded. These powerful tendencies help the patient feel that he or she is no longer at the mercy of the world and can react to it by acting powerfully. Depending on the severity of the threatening experience, the safeguards will become more extreme and the patient will cut him- or herself off completely from life and fellow beings. For a long time, his or her only concern is his or her safeguards. If the safeguards loosen up gradually, the patient can re-establish contact with other fellow beings. Sympathy and concern for others indicate a developing community feeling (see “depressive position” by M. Klein; Witte, 2002, p. 119).

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A therapeutic treatment “requires a strictly individualized procedure and, therefore, is not suitable for generalizations” (Adler/Stein, 1914h, p. 29). This is the reason why an additional systematization is inappropriate. “When we apply the basic principle of Individual Psychology, not to use any formula, […] but instead, to follow clues left by the child, then we can do justice to the childhood construction of the ‘psychological constitution’ (life style)” (Adler/Stein, 1931n, p. 23). General statements originate from “statistical evaluation and should be used only for bringing more light into the field of vision where an individual case must be seen in all its entanglements” (Adler, 1933l, p. 568). While the scientific path goes from the diagnosis of a disorder to the development of an autonomous Self, from the single item to the whole, Adler’s thinking is reversed: he proposes starting from the intuitively perceived whole and analysing it cognitively. Viewing the whole does not allow a simultaneous focus on details. It is like using a camera: if we want to focus on details, we leave the overview out. Focussing on details is an important area of competence in other psychoanalytic orientations. This is why it is necessary to study the research results of other orientations, including neurobiology. However, their significance must be seen in terms of the overall view of the personality (life style). We can focus on the primary pathogenic object-relations, which have been intensively evaluated, for example by Kernberg (1988), or we can focus on mentalization, projective identification and enactment (Feldman, 1997). Of course, we can also focus on the pathogenic form of binding that was predominant in primary relationships. This is the field of attachment theory (Brisch, 2009). All this can be integrated into Adler’s abstract model as important concretisations. “Individual Psychology has made a new science out of interpreting the oldest childhood memories and dreams” (Adler/Stein, 1930j, p. 145). Both are models or illustrations of the “life style” and reveal the inner sensitivity at the moment of narration. These narrative structures organize all new life experiences in the sense of the individual life style. Childhood memories do not represent past experiences; they are “present experiences” (Heisterkamp, 2002) of past moments.

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4.1 Treatment Instructions from the “Individual Psychological Treatment of Neurosis” (1913a) This article contains important and decisive principles for Adler’s therapeutic approach: the analysis of life style, which, for Adler, is diagnosis and therapeutic approach at the same time. With each new piece of information, the therapist must be prepared to revisit his or her former hypotheses (interpretation of the life style) and, if necessary, to discard them. As Adler put it: “If the other information does not agree with our guess, we have to be tough and critical enough with ourselves to look for another explanation” (Adler/Stein, 1931e, p. 115). This view is implicitly included in the 1913 article, when Adler let the patient take the initiative; in 1931, this view is formulated explicitly. For Adler, life style analysis is the “most important aspect of therapy” (Adler/Stein, 1913a, p. 123). Each statement of the patient in the “Here and Now” will be understood as a manifestation of the aggravated original situation and its overcoming. Therapy is understood as a process of relating. From the beginning, Adler expects positive as well as negative transference, which globally mean ways of relatedness, acting out of self- and object-representations. During therapy, early relationship experiences of the patient are transferred onto the therapist. Adler calls the discovery of transference “one of Freud’s masterpieces”32 (Adler, 1911d, p. 222). Later, while breaking with Freud, he would no longer use the word “transference”; however, he did not deny the phenomenon, but rather described it in his own words. Adler warns therapists against developing a healing or redeeming fiction. He emphasizes the equal status of patient and therapist, and states that “throughout this process, it is advisable to let the patient take the initiative” (Adler/Stein, 1913a, p. 124), because “the consummation of the task of changing the nature of the patient can only be accomplished by him and by him alone” (p. 126). “As soon as he discovers his life line, there is nothing that I could have said or added that he, as the sufferer, does not already know” (p. 126). 32 (Adler, 1911d, p. 222). This appraisal of Freud in the original version of the paper was deleted in 1920 and is therefore missing in Stein’s edition.

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4.2 Treatment Instructions Between 1926 and 1931 In 1913, the most important aspect of therapy for Adler was to “uncover the neurotic system or life plan” (Adler/Stein, 1913a, p. 123) together with the cognitive understanding of the patient. Between 1926 and 1931, Adler’s instructions changed. In 1926, he wrote: “No child must lose faith in his future” (Adler/Stein, 1926m, pp. 168–169) and continues: “We are working with children who don’t believe in themselves” (Adler, 1926k, p. 262). “Most importantly, their confidence must be gained in order to help them achieve a place in the community. In other words, we must make up for what was neglected earlier” (Adler/Stein, 1926m, pp. 168−169). These thoughts are important for Adler and he repeats them several times. In 1927, Adler states that the therapist fulfills the “maternal function” (Adler/Stein, 1929c, p. 14) in order to awaken a community feeling in the patient. The awakening of community feeling of the patient in the therapeutic relation is a reflection of the mother-infant-relationship. According to Adler, the “awakening of love” (Adler, 1927u, p. 305) represents the mother’s first function. This means, community feeling as connectedness and “a feeling of togetherness” (Adler, 1926k, p. 258) must be lived and experienced in the therapeutic relationship. This also means, the patient has to be “won over” (Adler, 1927u, p. 305)33 and “we must identify step by step with an individual in order to understand him” (Adler/Stein, 1931g, p. 174). The psychotherapist belatedly assumes the maternal function and “he must work with a corresponding devotion to the patient’s needs” (Adler/ Stein, 1929c, p. 48). And Adler continues: “Perhaps every child must experience a certain amount of pampering at the beginning of his life” (Adler/ Stein, 1931m, p. 13). Evidently in therapy “nothing has been gained by pampering him. That would repeat the same situation he has known from previous experiences. However, without initial pampering and warmth, he will not be ready for treatment” (p. 19). The “second function of the mother” is, according to Adler, “generating in him a social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl] directed towards helping oth33 1927u: This paper is not included in Stein’s edition.

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ers” (Adler/Stein, 1927j, p. 41) and transferring “the awakened community feeling onto others” (Adler, 1927u, p. 305). “These two functions, the awakening of love and the transfer of love onto others, are basically the functions which constitute a mother’s nature. If these motherly functions have failed in the first four or five years, it is necessary to turn to Individual Psychology, to its education and treatment in order to compensate for the loss” (p. 305). These remarks remind on Hurry (2002) that the therapist has to be available as “an object promoting development”, but Adler is also going a little further and recommends identification. As usual, Adler does not mean partial identification and compassion or empathy into a situation of distress; for him, identification rather is the attempt to become and be the other while moving along with the patient towards the neurotic goal. But, according to Adler, there is also no guarantee “because no one can project himself wholly into the situation or life of another” (Adler/Stein, 1936l, p. 175). Adler’s position sounds as if he is accepting his “not-knowing” (Eife, 2005). Adler is trying to “awaken in the patient a community feeling towards his own (Adler’s) person” (Adler, 1927u, p. 305). This phenomenon can be called positive transference, if we use this term from the point of view of Adler’s understanding of life style. In 1937, a statement shows that Adler interprets the effect of ­community feeling in therapy like a turnaround of movement. “As was said before, community feeling does not increase any longer after three to four years of life. During the whole life it remains in the same quality and quantity, unless the individual understands the mistake in his life concept” (Adler, 1937b, p. 206).34 This means that such an error in one’s life concept needs a fundamental correction of the life-movement. Adler sees the premises for a treatment in the therapist’s community feeling. “The first rule in treatment is to win the patient; the second for the psychologist is never to worry about his own success; if he does so, he forfeits it” (Adler/Stein, 1929c, p. 48). The psychotherapist must give up all thoughts of him- or herself and all feelings of superiority that would only satisfy his or her own narcissistic needs. Adler tries to remain calm even in difficult

34 This article is not included in Stein’s edition.

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situations “because I have always maintained that I must not follow my private objectives”35 (Adler/Stein, 1928j, p. 78). In the 1932 article “The Technique of Treatment”, Adler reveals the dimension of his therapeutic patience: “There are some patients who talk a lot […]. We must tolerate this. I even have had patients who talked uninterruptedly for three hours. Sometimes we can succeed in saying something as well. If the patient shows no sign of stopping after an hour, the psychiatrist can try and slip in while the patient pauses for breath and say ‘now you’ve told me so much I must stop and think it all over’” (Adler/Stein, 1932l, p. 81).

35 Stein’s “not follow my private objectives” translates: “meine Sache auf nichts zu stellen” which also means to trust in the creative power of patient and therapist.

Prospect: The Relational Dimension of Individual Psychology36

In this chapter I would like to elaborate on the relational dimension of Individual Psychology and demonstrate Adler’s contributions and additionally include further contributions from relational psychoanalysis or from the theory of intersubjectivity. Adler (1936l) wanted “to become acquainted with the neurotic personality by looking into its unsuccessful relationship with the outside world” (p. 170). For a long time, this social aspect of Adler’s theory served as an argument to label Individual Psychology as a superficial and not a depth psychology. In the last decades, this view has changed as a result of the investigation of the interactive processes between infant and mother and of the relational turn in psychoanalysis (Altmeyer a. Thomä, 2006; Mitchell a. Aron, 1999). Thus, the social references are now more in the focus. The interpersonal theory, the object relation theory and the self psychology have prepared the relational turn and are winning more and more recognition worldwide. The founder of relational psychoanalysis, Stephen Mitchell (1997), assumes that every clinician can work intersubjectively regardless of his or her theoretical preferences. In his opinion, everybody works intersubjectively, even if he or she does not know this or does not want to know this. The relational dimension of Individual Psychology aims at a more comprehensive reflection of the intersubjectivity and subjectivity of patient and therapist and their impact on the mutual reactions within the therapeutic process.

36 In this chapter Adler’s concepts are seen from another perspective resulting in some inevitable repetitions.

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1 The Generation of Experience According to Mitchell (1995), “the self is created from meanings assigned to experience; one cannot begin to understand a life, a person, without an appreciation of those experiences and what they provide in terms of possibilities and constraints” (p. 257). “Considering the earliest psychic development, we recognize the errors in the development of cooperation and community feeling” (Adler, 1933l, p. 567). Adler stated that the client “can make use of nothing else but what he derives from his (earlier) experience”; and “it is impossible to proceed other than by applying earlier experience” (Adler/Stein, 1931m, p. 16). An early recollection in therapy is an immediate experience, arising in the here and now of the therapeutic session. Adler continues: “A real explanation must be so clear that the patient knows and feels his own experience in it instantly” (Adler/Stein, 1929c, p. 49). In the term “immediate experience”, immediate means not mediated by words, concepts or meanings. And this is the problem: as long as the experience is immediate, it cannot be conceptualized; as soon as the experience can be expressed in words and is conceptualized, it is no longer immediate. The question is what the difference between the verbal experience and the original experience is. This question refers to the transition from the unconscious lived experience to the awareness and processing of the experience. The specialist in infant development Daniel Stern (2004) conceptualized the “immediate experience” and called it the “present moment” (pp. 23−24). He defined the state of “being-present” as a kind of existential affect. The immediate experience is not the verbal narration of an experience. The original and lived experience has not been interpreted; it provides the raw material for a subsequent verbal recounting. The felt experience of the present moment is all I am aware of, while living in the moment. Subjectively, the actual psychological content appears to slide unnoticed into awareness or sometimes to jump into awareness without our knowing. The present moment is often hard to grasp because we usually jump out of an ongoing experience quickly, in order to gain an objective position, or grasp the perspective of a third person. We try to hold onto what we have just experienced by capturing it in words or images. These efforts of instan-

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taneous retrospection try to objectify the experience. And from this distant position we can ask: “Can’t it be explained by this or that?” So far, this is Daniel Stern’s description of the present moment. I would add that immediate experience is the experience of life as movement. The psychoanalyst Donna Orange (1995) summarizes her ways of thinking about experiencing. For her, the term “experience” includes two aspects: “All experience is given and made. […] Both the given and the made are necessary to constitute experience from any perspective. We cannot usually know the exact contribution of each element, nor can we usually distinguish them neatly from one another. […] This mixed conception of experience requires our ability to tolerate ambiguity” (p. 86). In psychoanalytic literature, symbolizing is often described as being a successful step to maturity. In contrast, Ogden (1992) as well as Mitchell emphasize the reciprocal effect of the different modes of experience and both agree that all of these modes are lifelong and often emerge together in the analytic process. According to Mitchell (2000), “intense emotional experiences […] are being processed on different levels, or in different modes, simultaneously” (p. 111). According to Individual Psychology, the content of any experience is inferiority feeling (as the incentive for the goal-oriented striving) and community feeling (as fulfillment). Both experiences represent the ongoing implicit relational knowing in infancy, throughout life and also in therapy, when patient and therapist get to know each other. In Adler’s writings three modes of experience can be distinguished: – The mind-body-processing, – Co-movement and affect attunement, and – The experience of wholeness. 1.1 The Mind-Body-Processing of Experience The development of the first experiences is dependent on the mind-body-processing of environmental stimuli in fetal life and after birth. Adler (Adler/ Stein, 1931m) mentioned vibrations, tensions and anxiety which are inherent to life: “In cases of psychological tension, the entire body begins to vibrate. However, we will observe this tension only when it is more clearly mani-

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fested, mostly by inferior organs” (p. 16). According to Adler (1934h), “for every one of us, we could construct a situation which would put us in a similar tension” (p. 117). This tension also could “affect those who are greatly concerned with rules, formulas, and ideas intellectually. With others, […] the emotional sphere of psychic life is set into motion” (Adler/Stein, 1931i, p. 191) resulting for instance in anxiety. Such basal affects and “traumata are not experienced as events in life but as life defining” (Bollas, 1987, p. 111). These basic feelings or basic moods, how one’s own life is felt while being-with-the-other, have a specific quality of feeling which is hard to verbalize. Often these feelings are included in a scene, in a childhood memory, emerging in therapy like a metaphor for this quality of feeling. This verbalization is always an approximation of a deeply unconscious mental state and it is connected with the feeling of the first self-activity and processing. These feelings solidify and a transition from the unconscious to the first awareness may occur “in the limited way the child understands social relationships” (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 99). Out of this “limited way” of understanding how it is to be with the other, innate community feeling grows and also a compensatory striving to improve or at least to secure the relationship to the caregiver begins. Every positive relational experience helps to create and promote community feeling. For Adler, the deepest layers of community feeling are a feeling of connectedness, a “feeling at home” (Adler/Stein, 1928f, p. 65) on this earth, “being in harmony with the universe” (p. 65) and being “embedded in everything that humans become and in all that they do” (Adler/Stein, 1931n, p. 21). All these aspects of community feeling have an impact on the physical and psychic structure of the infant. “The whole development of a child demands an imbedding with circumstances where there is social feeling [Gemeinschaftsgefühl]. Life and health are guaranteed only when there are people who will devote themselves to that person” (Adler/Stein, 1926a, p. 102). In the beginning of the 1930s, Adler hoped that, in the course of evolution, community feeling would be anchored in human life in the same way as “breathing” is (Adler/Stein, 1933i, p. 99). The psychoanalyst Fairbairn uses a similar image. According to Mitchell (2000) “it was Fairbairn’s most

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far-reaching contribution to be among the first to intuit that the establishment and maintenance of relationships with others is as fundamental to the nature of the human organism as breathing oxygen” (p. 107). 1.2 The Experience of Co-Movement and Affect Attunement Co-movement can be an attuning with the affects of the other, synchronizing the breath, pointing to the same object or imitating gestures. According to Stern (as cited by Beebe, 2005, pp. 43–48), affect attunement means to participate, to share without altering, to maintain the thread of feeling connected. Breyer (2011) pleads for a language of attentiveness, “a sensual perceptive language, in order to understand the relation to the other and the various social relations” (p. 160). According to Ogden (1995), the autistic-contiguous mode provides “the sensory ground” (p. 45) for experiences. In 1928, Adler’s definition of community feeling was: “To see with the eyes of another, to hear with the ears of another, to feel with the heart of another” (Adler/Stein, 1928f, p. 64). Adler’s phrasing emphasizes that his second mode of experience includes all the transitions, from “being the other one” in an all-embracing wholeness to the position of two independent and separate individuals involved in symbolic co-movement in therapy. “We must enter and participate in the emotional life we and our patients create together in the intersubjective field. This draining work requires a depth and intensity of involvement […] to be emotionally available” (Orange, 1995, p. 98). “Entering the emotional life”, as Orange writes, points to the experience of being-the-other one. The “creation of a common emotional life” shows the transition to a more separate experience that synchronizes with the movement of the patient and attunes with his or her affects. For Adler, the therapist “is the belated assumption of the maternal function, and he must work with a corresponding devotion to the patient’s needs” (Adler/Stein, 1929c, p. 48). Mitchell and Orange also emphasize the devotion to the patient. Mitchell (2000) sees “surrender of the analyst to a deep emotional engagement with the patient as a precondition to effective treatment” (p. 128). Orange (1995) assumes that “all understanding is ultimately self-understanding. We can understand another only through the perspective of our

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personal organized subjectivity” (p. 15). Adler’s following statements seem to follow Orange’s proposition exactly: His understanding of his own subjectivity helps Adler to understand his patient: “For instance, if I see myself in front of a threatening situation which I cannot measure up to, then, under certain circumstances, I would also see myself compelled to reach for the safeguard of the lie” (Adler, 1926k, p. 263). In the relational dimension of Individual Psychology this self experience is transformed into an intersubjective and “contextual understanding” (Orange, Atwood a. Stolorow, 1997). 1.3 The Experience of Wholeness “We can conceptualize the personality only inductively by passing from specific manifestations to the higher idea of the whole. This unity [Ganzheit] of the personality is not easy to describe and cannot be expressed in one statement” (Adler/Stein, 1932f, p. 54). Mitchell as well as Adler use the metaphor of art. “We shall be able to understand the selection of symptoms only when we regard it as an art form. We must […] observe with awe how every person is an artist in his life” (Adler/Stein, 1931m, p. 10). “We have to get to know and to understand the lines and ways in the realm of the human soul, the developed melodies of the individual, which sound like a symphony produced by a composer. In this sense every human being is an artist, since he has created something out of innate elements and possibilities. His psychic image therefore is a unity” (Adler, 1926k, p. 251). In all these phenomena we look for “the same basic melody, the same psychological sound pattern, the totality that is woven through the entire psychological fabric” (Adler/Stein, 1931n, p. 24). Mitchell (1995) mentions Nietzsche and Rank. Both of them “suggested that the processes underlying the patterns which make up a human life are more usefully compared to the creation of a work of art, and the artistic metaphor allows a more balanced and complex vision” (p. 255). “The work of art is not solely the product of its materials and forms; the artist also contributes” (p. 257). The wholeness of experience can only develop further, if the development of symbolization has been successful. If this process fails, patients often expe-

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rience thoughts and feelings as a matter of facts. Also, according to Ogden (1992), there is no interpreting subject that can mediate between so-called facts and one’s own experience. Patients experience thoughts and feelings not as their own creation but as forces or phenomena that they cannot control. This mental state can cause terrible anxieties. In the course of successful symbolization, a holistic or mystic view of human life or an artistic mode of experience can develop. In this wholeness of experience, thoughts and feelings are also experienced not as one’s own creation, but as forces or uncontrollable phenomena. Yet this does not arouse anxieties, since there is sufficient faith in one’s own capability to return to the separate state, even when borders between subjects are momentarily blurred. In the deepest layers of the soul, affective states are often transpersonal and interpersonal, independently of who is the one feeling something. “So, in an important sense, this feeling they have in relation to each other is ‘in the air’; it is not simply in either or both of them; it has a transpersonal quality and operates in the field that they comprise together […] in shared affect across permeable boundaries” (Mitchell, 2000, p. 68). “Powerful emotional experiences are registered in a fashion in which what I am feeling and what you are feeling are not sorted out independently, but rather form a unity, the totality of which I experience as me” (Mitchell, 2000, p. 62). Gadamer (1960/1990) gives an example for such an experience: “We say that we conduct a conversation, but the more genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. Thus, a genuine conversation is never the one that we wanted to conduct. Rather it is generally more correct to say that we fall into a conversation or even that we become involved in it. The way one word follows another, with the conversation taking its own twists and reaching its own conclusion, may well be conducted in some way, but the partners conversing are far less the leaders of it than the led. No one knows in advance what will ‘come out’ of a conversation. Understanding or its failure is like an event that happens to us. […] All this shows that a conversation has a spirit of its own and that the language in which it is conducted bears its own truth within it – i. e. that it allows something to ‘emerge’ which henceforth exists” (p. 385, also cited in Orange, 1995, p. 85).

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2 The Intersubjective Development of the Life Style The generation of the life style and the development of community feeling occur in a body-mind-domain beneath the threshold of consciousness. In contrast to the cognitive explicit conception, the implicit knowing is dominant in this preverbal domain that was investigated especially by Daniel Stern (2004, p. 112). Implicit knowing is non-symbolic, nonverbal, procedural and unconscious in the respect that it is not reflected consciously. The greatest part of our knowledge about being-together-with-others remain implicit. Geißler (2014) speaks of “sensorimotorical organizational structures” (p. 417) instead of representation, since the elements of implicit knowing are immediately experienced. According to Küchenhoff (2015), the body representation is also an interactive experience. Stern (as cited by Beebe, 2005) calls the first nonverbal representations of an infant “schema-of-being-with-another”. “They are interactive experiences, […] constructed from within how the infant feels inside himself in the presence of the other one” (p. 81). The neurotic life style accumulates and concentrates the inferiority feelings, “invariably imagined or felt to be reinforced for safeguarding reasons” (Adler/Stein, 1912a, p. 45). Individual Psychology places the findings about infancy in a dynamic coherence (life style). From the compensatory striving of the patient we can deduce how the patient as an infant experienced and interpreted the atmosphere in the family and the presumable inner-psychic problems of the caregivers. Then we ask the question: What is the patient’s life all about? According to Dornes (1998), the first representations “are not symbolic. They are no fantasies, but real, not virtual/fictitious worlds […]. But what happens, when they are reconstructed or developed further into fantasies starting from one to one and a half year of age?” (p. 334). For Mertens (2005), these developing unconscious fantasies are “affective-cognitive constructions” (S. 294). For Adler, they contain a life style design and a fictitious idea, how the child wants to be, in order to be able to live with the primary caregivers (Eife, 2016).

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3 The Interaction of Life Styles and the Meeting of Therapist and Patient In the therapeutic situation two subjects or two life styles make contact: the life style of the therapist and the life style of the patient. According to Mitchell (1997), this contact can be like a clash of both worlds of experience, until slowly, “partially, through the analyst’s subjectivity, […] the patient’s dissociated present and past come alive” (pp. 152−153). The relational turn sees the analyst as participant in the analytic process. The same is true for Adler (see Antoch, 1981 and 1994). Psychic health cannot be achieved by a correction of psychic disorders, but by the awakening of community feeling of the patient in the therapeutic relationship. Adler emphasizes that “throughout this process, it is advisable to let the patient take the initiative” (Adler/ Stein, 1913a, p. 124), because “the consummation of the task of changing the nature of the patient can only be accomplished by him and by him alone” (p. 126). “As soon as he discovers his life line, there is nothing that I could have said or added that he, as the sufferer, does not already know” (p. 126). These citations show that Adler does not use his authority in therapy. “General statements should only be used for illumination of the field of vision where the single case must be viewed in all its entanglements” (Adler, 1933l, p. 568). In Adler’s statement “the field of vision” appears as a wide open space similar to the “psychic field” as described by Ferro (2012). According to Mitchell (1997), “the analyst, despite his best intentions, is likely to become entangled in the very same web he is trying to get the patient to explore” (p. 46). Enactments are seen as a chance to better understand the common process, provided they are later analysed with responsibility and discipline. “Neither restraint nor expressiveness, in themselves, are useful as guides to the management of analytic feelings. Both restraint and spontaneity can be either thoughtful or thoughtless. It is a central feature of the analyst’s craft to struggle with these distinctions, to make what seems to be the best choices at the time, and continually to reconsider past judgments and their sequelae, in order to expand and enrich the context in which current choices are made” (Mitchell, 2000, p. 146).

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Adler maintains the same. The therapist must be ready to question his former hypothesis (interpretation of the life style) with every new information and if necessary, to discard it. In Adler’s words: “If the other information does not agree with our guess, we have to be tough and critical enough with ourselves to look for another explanation” (Adler/Stein, 1931e, p. 115). “Interpretations themselves are increasingly regarded not as alternatives to, or solutions for, enactments, but as forms of enactments themselves, or as relationship-transforming ‘performatives’” (Mitchell, 1997, p. 182). According to Mitchell, neutrality and distance of the analyst are also actions within the interaction of therapist and patient. In the analysis of transference and countertransference – today we better speak of the transference of the therapist, first real aspects and possible disturbances of the therapist-patient-relation are looked at before early childhood scenes and life style patterns are interpreted (Eife, 2006). The individual psychological analyst has to ask himself, for example, “from which perspective he actually presents a threatening father for his patient” (Ferro, 2012, p. 100). This clarification and the understanding of the own involvement will slowly and subtly induce a transformation in the therapist. Research results on the atmosphere, gestures, synchronized breathing and body posture (Heisterkamp, 2002; Geißler a. Heisterkamp, 2007) sharpen and expand our perception and interpretation of the interaction. “Psychological moods” influencing the body (Adler/Stein, 1934h, p. 119) or “embodied memories” (Leuzinger-Bohleber a. Pfeifer, 2013, p. 41) “recognize (not cognitively, but in the body) in the Here and Now of a new interactive situation the analogies to former situations by sensomotorical coordinations” (p. 20). These analogies are part of the Adlerian narrative, that is, the concrete life style pattern. In my opinion, all the signs we receive from body and mind in the therapeutic interaction help us to intuitively guess and to some degree understand the deepest layers of the patient’s experience. Empathy and the feeling of connectedness, two essential aspects of community feeling, find their organic substratum in the (system of) mirror neurons. They are activated when we inwardly perform the goal-oriented movement of the other individual and are deeply moved or touched in the same manner as he or she is (Iacoboni, 2009, p. 86). Adler (Adler/Stein, 1928f) explicates this phenomenon in an image, “when, in playing pool or bowling,

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the player follows the ball with his eyes and makes the movement which he hopes the ball will make” (p. 65). According to Mitchell, meaning is created by both participants and negotiated between them. “The central locus of analytic change is in the analyst’s struggle to find a new way to participate, both within his own experience and then with the patient” (Mitchell, 1997, p. 52). Chris Jaenicke described impressively, how his own problems, his dealing with aggression had influenced the process of a therapy. “One cannot touch anybody without getting touched oneself, and just as little can one attend a transformation process without being transformed oneself ” (Jaenicke, 2010, p. 170). The therapeutic interaction is transformed into a meeting of therapist and patient, when the paranoid tendencies (paranoid-schizoid position by Melanie Klein, 1937/1975) in the therapeutic relationship dissipate and when community feeling discloses itself. A meeting involves the “being” and presence of both participants; their concern about themselves and their intentional striving for recognition moves into the background. Sometimes only moments appear to be free of the goal-oriented striving and to be full of community feeling (Eife, 2016, chapter 12). The therapeutic situation can be described as a “dynamic field” (Baranger a. Baranger, 2009) that implies not only the inner dynamic of patient and therapist, but also innumerable influences from the professional, familial and cultural areas. Benjamin and Ogden describe the therapeutic situation in a similar manner. According to Benjamin, “community in the third” (2006, p. 77) or, according to Ogden, a Gestalt, the “analytic third” (1999, p. 463) is continuously created. The analytic third is a third subject with its own life. “The analytic third is a creation of the analyst and analysand, and at the same time the analyst and analysand (qua analyst and analysand) are created by the analytic third; there is no analyst, no analysand, and no analysis in the absence of the third” (Ogden, 1999, p. 483). In my opinion, the experience of the “dynamic field”, the “analytic third” or “community in the third” is, according to Adler’s holistic view, the expression of the genuine connectedness in the meeting of patient and therapist, but through these metaphors it receives its own realm of experience.

References

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Orange, D. M. (1995). Emotional Understanding. Studies in Psychoanalytic Epistemology. New York a. London: Guilford Press. Orange, D. M., Atwood, G. E., Stolorow, R. D. (1997). Working Intersubjectively. Contextualism in Psychoanalytic Practice. New Jersey: The Analytic Press. Rosa, H. (2018). Resonanz. Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Wissenschaftliche Sonderausgabe. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Roth, G. (2003). Fühlen, Denken und Handeln. Wie das Gehirn unser Verhalten steuert. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Rudolf, G. (2006). Strukturbezogene Psychotherapie. Leitfaden zur psychodynamischen Therapie struktureller Störungen (2. Aufl.). Stuttgart: Schattauer. Sloterdijk, p. (2009). Du musst dein Leben ändern. Über Anthropotechnik. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Spitzer, M. (2007). Vom Sinn des Lebens. Wege statt Werke. Stuttgart: Schattauer. Stern, D. N. (1991). The Interpersonal World of the Infant. A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York, NY: Basic Books. Stern, D. N. (2004). The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. New York: Norton. Stern, D. N., Sander, L. W., Nahum, J. P., Harrison, A. M., Lyons-Ruth, K., Morgan, A. C., Bruschweiler-Stern, N., Tronick, E. Z. (1998). Non-Interpretive Mechanisms in Psychoanalytic Therapy. The “Something More” than Interpretation. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 79 (5), 903–921. Strenger, C. (2005). The Designed Self. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Identities. In The Designed Self. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Studies, Vol. 27. London: The Analytic Press. Symington, J., Symington, N. (1996). The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion. London: Routledge. Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Vaihinger, H. (1911). Die Philosophie des Als-Ob. System der theoretischen, praktischen und religiösen Fiktionen der Menschheit auf Grund eines idealistischen Positivismus. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard. Williams, p. (1999). Internet Discussion Review: Non-interpretive Mechanisms in Psychoanalytic Therapy by Stern et al. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 80, 197–210. Witte, K. H. (1994). Alfred Adler als Redaktor seiner Falldarstellungen. Zeitschrift für Individualpsychologie, 19, 20–37. Witte, K. H. (2002). Eine ciszendentale Interpretation der Individualpsychologie Alfred Adlers. In R. Brunner (Hrsg.), Die Suche nach dem Sinn des Lebens. Transpersonale Aspekte der Individualpsychologie (S. 95–126). München: Reinhardt. Witte, K. H. (2008). Das Individuelle in der Individualpsychologie Alfred Adlers. In R. Kühn, K. H. Witte (Hrsg.), Methode und Subjektivität (S. 137–147). München: Karl Alber. Witte, K. H. (2010). Zwischen Psychoanalyse und Mystik. Psychologisch-phänomenologische Analysen. München: Karl Alber.