by Alfred Adler
Every memory is a memento.
The memories of early childhood are especially useful in showing how long standing is the individual's own peculiar approach to life, and in giving the circumstances in which he first crystallized his life-attitude. For two reasons the earliest memory of all has a very notable place. First, the fundamental estimate of the individual and his situation is contained in it; it is his first totalling-up of appearances, his first more or less complete symbol of himself and the demands made of him. Secondly, it is his subjective starting point, the beginning of the autobiography he has made up for himself. We can often find in it, therefore, the contrast between a position of weakness and inadequacy in which he felt himself and the goal of strength and security which he regards as his ideal. It is indifferent for the purposes of psychology whether the memory which an individual considers as first is really the first event which he can remember — or even whether it is a memory of a real event. Memories are important only for what they are "taken as"; for their interpretation and for their bearing on present and future life.
Here we may take a few instances of first memories and see the “meaning of life" which they solidify. "The coffee pot fell off the table and scalded me." Such is life! We should not be surprised to find that the girl whose autobiography began in this way was pursued by a feeling of helplessness and overestimated the dangers and difficulties of life. We should not be surprised either, if, in her heart, she reproached other people for not taking sufficient care of her. Somebody had been very careless to leave so small a child exposed to such risks! A similar picture of the world is presented in another first memory: "I remember falling out of a baby carriage when I was three years old." With this first memory went a recurrent dream, “The world is coming to an end and I wake up in the middle of the night to find the sky bright red with fire.
The stars all fall and we collide into another planet. But just before the crash I wake up." This student, when asked if he was afraid of anything, answered, “I am afraid that I won't make a success of life”, and it is clear that his first memory and his recurrent dream act as discouragements and confirm him in fearing failure and catastrophe.
A boy of twelve who was brought to the clinic because of enuresis and continual conflicts with his mother gave as his first memory, “Mother thought I was lost and ran into the street shouting for me and very frightened. All the time I was hidden in a cupboard in the house." In this memory we can read an estimate: "Life means — to gain attention by giving trouble. The way to gain security is through deceitfulness. I am overlooked, but I can fool others." His enuresis, also, was a means well adapted to keeping himself the center of worry and attention, and his mother confirmed him in his interpretation of life by her anxiety and nervousness over him. As in the previous examples, this boy had early gained the impression that life in the outside world was full of dangers and he had concluded that he was only safe if others were apprehensive on his behalf. Only in this way could he reassure himself that they were there to protect him if he needed it.
The first memory of a woman of thirty-five was 'as follows: "When I was three years old I went down into the cellar. While I was on the stairs in the dark, a boy cousin, a little older than myself, opened the door and came down after me. I was very frightened of him." It seemed probable from this memory that she had not been accustomed to playing with other children and that she was especially ill at ease with the other sex. A guess that she was an only child proved correct; and she was still, at the age of thirty-five, unmarried.
A higher development of social feeling is shown in the following: "I remember my mother letting me wheel my baby sister in the perambulator." In this instance, however, we might look also for signs of being at ease only with weaker people; and perhaps of dependence upon the mother. It is always best when a new child is born to gain the cooperation of the older children in taking care of it; to interest them in the newcomer and allow them to share the responsibility for its welfare. If their cooperation is gained they will not be tempted to feel the attention given to the baby as a diminution of their own importance.
The desire to be in company is not always a proof of a real interest in others. One girl, when asked for her first memory, replied, “I was playing with my elder sister and two girl friends." Here we can certainly see a child training to be sociable; but we obtain a new insight into her striving when she mentions as her greatest fear, “I am afraid of being left alone." We shall look, therefore, for signs of a lack of independence.
If once the meaning given to life is found and understood, we have the key to the whole personality. It is sometimes stated that human character is unchangeable, but this position can be held only by those who have never found the right key to the situation. As we have already seen, however, no argument or treatment can be successful if it falls short of discovering the original error; and the only possibility of improvement lies in the training for a more cooperative and courageous approach to life. Cooperation is also the only safeguard we have against the development of neurotic tendencies. It is therefore of supreme importance that children should be trained and encouraged in cooperation; should be allowed to find their own way amongst children of their own age, in common tasks and common games. Any block in cooperation will have the most serious results. The spoiled child, for example, who has learned to be interested only in himself, will carry this lack of interest in others to school with him. His lessons will interest him only so far as he thinks he can gain his teacher's favor; he will listen only to what he conceives to be advantageous to himself. As he comes near to adult age, his failure in social feeling will become more and more evidently calamitous. When his error first occurred, he ceased training himself for responsibility and independence; and by now he is painfully ill-equipped for any of life's tests.
We cannot blame him now for his defects: we can only help him to remedy them when he begins to feel the consequences. We do not expect a child who has never been taught geography to answer an examination paper on the subject with success; and we cannot expect a child who has never been trained in cooperation to answer correctly when tasks which demand training in cooperation are set before him. But every problem of life demands an ability to cooperate for its solution; every task must be mastered within the framework of our human society and in a way which furthers our human welfare. Only the individual who understands that life means contribution will be able to meet his difficulties with courage and with a good chance of success.
If teachers and parents and psychologists understand the mistakes that can be made in giving a meaning to life, and if they do not make the same mistakes themselves, we can be confident that children who have been lacking in social interest will come to have a better feeling for their own capacities and for the opportunities of life. When they meet problems, they will not stop their efforts, look for an easy way out, try to escape or throw the burden on the shoulders of others, make Claims for tender treatment and especial sympathy, feel humiliated and seek to revenge themselves, or ask, "What is the use of life? What do I get from it?" They will say, "We must make our own lives. It is our own task and we are capable of meeting it. We are masters of our own actions. If something new must be done or something old replaced, no one need do it but ourselves" If life is approached in this way, as a cooperation of independent human beings, we can see no limits to the progress of our human association.
II. MIND AND BODY
Men have always debated whether the mind governs the body or the body governs the mind. Philosophers have joined in the controversy and taken one position or the other; they have called themselves idealists or materialists; they have brought up arguments by the thousand; and the question still seems as vexed and unsettled as ever. Perhaps Individual Psychology may give some help towards a solution; for in Individual Psychology we are really confronted with the living interactions of mind and body. Some one — mind and body — is here to be treated; and if our treatment is wrongly based we shall
fail to help him. Our theory must definitely grow from experience; it must definitely stand the test of application. We are living amongst these interactions, and we have the strongest challenge to find the right point of view.
The findings of Individual Psychology remove much of the tension from this problem. It no longer remains a plain " either . . . or." We see that both mind and body are expressions of life: they are parts of the whole of life. And we begin to understand their reciprocal relations in that whole. The life of man is the life of a moving being, and it would not be sufficient for him to develop body alone. A plant is rooted: it stays in one place and cannot move. It would be very surprising, therefore, to discover that a plant had a mind; or at least a mind in any sense which we could comprehend. If a plant could foresee or project consequences, the faculty would be useless to it. What advantage would it be for the plant to think: "Here is someone coming. In a minute he will tread on me, and shall be dead underfoot."? The plant would still be unable to move out of the way.
All moving beings, however, can foresee and reckon up the direction in which to move; and this fact makes it necessary to postulate that they have minds or souls.
"Sense, sure, you have,
Else you could not have motion.” (Hamlet”, Act III, Scene 4)
This foreseeing the direction of movement is the central principle of the mind. As soon as we have recognized it we are in a position to understand how the mind governs the body — it sets the goal for movements. Merely to initiate a random movement from moment to moment would never be enough: there must be a goal for the strivings. Since it is the mind's function to decide a point towards which movement is to be made, it occupies the governing position in life. At the same time, the body influences the, mind; it is the body which must be moved.
The mind can move the body only in accordance with the possibilities which the body possesses and those which it can be trained to develop. If, for example, the mind proposes to move the body to the moon, it will fail unless it discovers a technique suited to the body's limitations. Men are more engaged in movement than any other beings. They do not only move in more ways — as we can see in the complicated movements of their hands — but they are also more capable, by means of their movements, of moving the environment around them. We should expect, therefore, that the ability to foresee would be most highly developed in the human mind, and that men would give the clearest evidence of a purposive striving to improve their whole position with respect to their whole situation.
In every human being, moreover, we can discover behind all partial movements towards partial goals one single inclusive movement.
All our strivings are directed towards a position in which a feeling of security has been achieved, a feeling that all the difficulties of life have been overcome and that we have emerged finally, in relation to the whole situation around us, safe and victorious. With this purpose in view, all movements and expressions must be coordinated and brought into a unity: the mind is compelled to develop as if to achieve a final ideal goal. It is no different with the body; the body also strives to be a unity. It, too, develops towards an ideal goal pre-existent in the germ. If, for example, the skin is broken all the body is busy in making itself whole again. The body, however, is not merely left alone to unfold its potentialities: the mind can help it in its development. The value of exercise and training, and of hygiene in general, have all been proved; and these are all aids for the body supplied by the mind in its striving towards the final goal.
From the first days of life, uninterruptedly till the end, this partnership of growth and development continues. Body and mind are cooperating as indivisible parts of one whole. The mind is like a motor, dragging with it all the potentialities which it can discover in the body, helping to bring the body into a position of safety and superiority to all difficulties. In every movement of the body, in every expression and symptom, we can see the impress of the mind's purpose. A man moves. There is meaning in his movement. He moves his eyes, his tongue, the muscles of his face. His face has an expression, a meaning. It is mind that puts meaning there. Now we can begin to see what psychology, or the science of mind, really deals with. The province of psychology is to explore the meaning involved in all the expressions of an individual, to find the key to his goal, and to compare it with the goals of others. In striving for the final goal of security, the mind is always faced with the necessity of making the goal concrete; of calculating "security” lies in this particular point; it is reached by going in this particular direction." Here, of course, the chance of a mistake occurs; but without a quite definite goal and direction-setting there could be no movement at all. If I lift my hand, there must be a goal for the movement already in my mind. The direction which the mind chooses may be, in reality, disastrous; but it is chosen because the mind conceives it mistakenly as the most advantageous. All psychological mistakes are thus mistakes in choosing the direction of movement. The goal of security is common to all human beings; but some of them mistake the direction in which security lies and their concrete movements lead them astray.
If we see an expression or symptom and fail to recognize the meaning behind it, the best way to understand it is, first of all, to reduce it in outline to a bare movement. Let us take, for example, the expression of stealing. To steal is to remove property from another person to oneself. Let us now examine the goal of the movement: the goal is to enrich oneself, and to feel more secure by possessing more. The point at which the movement sets out is therefore a feeling of being poor and deprived.
The next step is to find out in what circumstances the individual is placed and in what conditions he feels deprived. Finally we can see whether he is taking the right way to change these circumstances and overcome his feeling of being deprived; whether the movement is in the right direction, or whether he has mistaken the method of securing what he desires. We need not criticize his final goal; but we may be able to point out that he has chosen a mistaken way in making it concrete. The changes which the human rate has made in its environment we call our culture; and our culture is the result of all the movements which the minds of men have initiated for their bodies. Our work is inspired by our minds. The development of our bodies is directed and aided by our minds. In the end we shall not be able to find a single human expression which is not filled with the purposiveness of the mind.
It is by no means desirable, however, that the mind should overstress its own part. If we are to overcome difficulties, bodily fitness is necessary. The mind is engaged, therefore, in governing the environment in such a way that the body can be defended — so that it can be protected from sickness, disease and death, from damage, accidents and failures of function. This is the purpose served by our ability to feel pleasure and pain, to create phantasies and to identify ourselves with good and bad situations. The feelings put the body in shape to meet a situation with a definite type of response. Phantasies and identifications are methods of foreseeing; but they are also more: they stir up the feelings in accordance with which the body will act. In this way the feelings of an individual bear the impress of the meaning he gives to life and of the goal he has set for his strivings. To a great extent, though they rule his body, they do not depend on his body: they will always depend primarily on his goal and his consequent style of life.
Clearly enough, it is not the style of life alone that governs an individual. His attitudes do not create his symptoms without further help. For action they must be reinforced by feelings. What is new in the outlook of Individual Psychology is our observation that the feelings are never in contradiction to the style of life. Where there is a goal, the feelings always adapt themselves to its attainment. We are no longer, therefore, in the realm of physiology or biology; the rise of feelings cannot be explained by chemical theory and cannot be predicted by chemical examination. In Individual Psychology we must presuppose the physiological processes, but we are more interested in the psychological goal. It is not so much our concern that anxie
ty influences the sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves. We look, rather, for the purpose and end of anxiety.
With this approach anxiety cannot be taken as rising from the suppression of sexuality, or as being left behind as the result of disastrous birth-experiences. Such explanations are beside the mark. We know that a child who is accustomed to be accompanied, helped and supported by its mother may find anxiety — whatever its source — a very efficient weapon for controlling its mother. We are not satisfied with a physical description of anger; our experience has shown us that anger is a device to dominate a person or a situation. We can take it for granted that every bodily and mental expression must be based on inherited material; but our attention is directed to the use which is made of this material in striving to achieve a definite goal.
This, it seems, is the only real psychological approach. In every individual we see that feelings have grown and developed in the direction and to the degree which were essential to the attainment of his goal. His anxiety or courage, cheerfulness or sadness, have always agreed with his style of life: their proportionate strength and dominance has been exactly what we could expect. A man who accomplishes his goal of superiority by sadness cannot be gay and satisfied with his accomplishments. He can only be happy when he is miserable. We can notice also that feelings appear and disappear at need. A patient suffering from agoraphobia loses the feeling of anxiety when he is at home or when he is dominating another person. All neurotic patients exclude every part of life in which they do not feel strong enough to be the conqueror.
The emotional tone is as fixed as the style of life. The coward, for example, is always a coward, even though he is arrogant with weaker people or seems courageous when he is shielded by others. He may fix three locks on his door, protect himself with police dogs and mantraps and insist that he is full of courage. Nobody will be able to prove his feeling of anxiety; but the cowardice of his character is shown sufficiently by the trouble he has taken to protect himself.