What Life Could Mean to You

by Alfred Adler

  After that, I didn't wish to play the piano anymore." Here, too, we can see that she trained to put a great distance between herself and men; and her sexual development was in accordance with the goal of protecting herself against love. She felt that to be in love was a weakness. Here I must say that many people feel weak if they are in love; and to a certain degree they are right. If we are in love we must be tender, and our interest in another human being leaves us open to disturbance. It is only the individual whose goal of superiority is, “I must never be weak, I must never be exposed”, who will avoid the mutual dependence of love.

  Such people train away from love and are ill-prepared for it. Often you will find that if they feel in danger of falling in love, they turn the situation to ridicule. They laugh and make jokes and tease the person from whom they feel in danger. In this way they try to get rid of their feeling of weakness.

  This girl, too, felt weak when she considered love and marriage; and in consequence she was impressed much more strongly than she needed to be when men made love to her in her jobs. She could see no way out but to nun away. While she was still confronted with these problems, her mother and father both died and her court almost came to an end. She managed' to find relatives to come and look after her; but her position was not nearly so satisfactory. After a while her relatives would become very much bored with her and would stop paying her all the attention she felt she needed. She scolded them and told them how dangerous it was for her to be left alone; and in this way she staved off the tragedy of being left to her own devices. I am convinced that if her family had given up bothering about her altogether, she would have gone mad. The only way to accomplish her goal of superiority was to force her family to support her and allow her to exclude all the problems of life.

  She kept in her own mind the image, “I do not belong to this planet, but to another planet, where I am a princess. This poor earth does not understand me and acknowledge my importance." One step further would have led her to in sanity; but so long as she had some small resources of her own and could still obtain relatives or family friends to take care of her, there was no call for the final step.

  Here is another case where both the inferiority complex and the superiority complex can be clearly recognized. A girl of sixteen was sent to me, who had been stealing since she was six or seven and staying out at night with boys since she was twelve. When she was two years old her parents had divorced after a long and bitter personal struggle. She was taken by her mother to live with her in her grandmother's home; and her grandmother, as so often happens, gave herself over to pampering the child. She had been born when the struggle between her parents was at its height and her mother had not welcomed her arrival. She had never liked her daughter and a tension existed between them. When the girl came to see me I talked with her in a friendly way. She told me, “I don't like taking things or running about with boys; but I've got to show my mother that she can't handle me." "You do it for a revenge?" I asked her. "I suppose so," she answered. She wanted to prove herself stronger than her mother; but she had this goal only because she felt weaker. She felt her mother disliked her and she suffered from an inferiority complex. The only way she could think of to assert her superiority was to cause trouble. When children commit thefts or other delinquencies, it is usually for revenge.

  A girl of fifteen disappeared for eight days. When she was found she was taken to the Children's Court; and there she told a tale of having been kidnapped by a man who had bound her and kept her locked in a room for eight days. No one believed her. The doctor spoke very intimately with her and urged her to confess the truth. She was so angry with him for not accepting her story that she slapped him in the face. When I saw her, I asked her what she wanted to be, and gave the impression that I was interested only in her own fate and in what I could do to help her. When I asked her for a dream, she laughed and told me the following dream, “I was in a speak-easy. When I went out, I met my mother. Soon my father came, and I asked my mother to hide me, so that he should not see me." She was afraid of her father and she was fighting him. He used to punish her; and because she was afraid of punishment she was compelled to lie. If ever we hear of a case of lying, we must look for a severe parent. A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous. On the other hand, we can see that this girl had some cooperation with her mother. She now told me that someone had enticed her to a speak-easy, and she had spent the eight days there. She was frightened of confessing because of her father; but at the same time her procedure had been dictated by the desire to get the better of him. She felt subjugated by him; and she could feel the conqueror only by hurting him.

  How may people who have mistaken the way to superiority be helped? It is not so difficult if we recognize that the striving for superiority is common to all men. We can then put ourselves in their position and sympathize with their struggles. The only mistake they make is that their strivings are on the useless side of life. It is the striving for superiority which is behind every human creation and it is the source of all contributions which are made to our culture. The whole of human life proceeds along this great line of action — from below above, from minus to plus, from defeat to victory. The only individuals who can really meet and master the problems of life, however, are those who show in their striving a tendency to enrich all others, who go ahead in such a way that others benefit also. If we approach people in the right way, we shall not find them hard to convince. All human judgments of value and success are founded, in the end, upon cooperation; this is the great shared commonplace of the human race. All that we ask of conduct, of ideals, of goals, of actions and traits of character, is that they should serve towards our human cooperation. We shall never find a man who is completely devoid of social feeling. The neurotic and the criminal also know this open secret; we can see their knowledge in the pains they take to justify their style of life or to throw responsibility elsewhere. They have lost courage, however, to proceed on the useful side of life. An inferiority complex tells them, “Success in cooperation is not for you."

  They have turned away from the real problems of life and are engaged in shadow-fighting to reassure themselves of their strength.

  In our human division of labor there is room for a great variety of concrete goals. Perhaps, as we have seen, every goal may involve some small degree of mistakenness; and we could always find something to criticize. To one child, superiority will seem to lie in mathematical knowledge, to another in art, to a third in physical strength. The child with digestive inferiority may come to think that the problems confronting him are mainly problems of nutrition. His interest may turn towards food, since in this way he conceives that he can better his situation. In con sequence he may become an expert cook or a professor of dietetics. In all these special goals we can see, together with a real compensation, some exclusion of possibilities, some training towards self-limitation. We can understand, for example, that a philosopher must really from time to time exile himself from society to think and to write his books. But the mistake involved is never great if a high degree of social feeling is bound up with the goal of superiority. Our cooperation has need of many different excellences.

  IV. EARLY MEMORIES

  Since the struggle to reach a position of vantage is the key to the whole personality, we shall meet it at every point of the individual's psychic life. To recognize this fact gives us two great aids in our task of understanding an individual style of life. First, we can begin wherever we choose: every expression will lead us in the same direction — towards the one motive, the one melody, around which the personality is built. Secondly, we are provided with a vast store of material. Every word, thought, feeling or gesture contributes to our understanding. Any mistake we might make in considering one expression too hastily can be checked and corrected by a thousand other expressions. We cannot finally decide the meaning of one expression until we can see its part in the whole; but every expression is saying the same thing, every expr
ession is urging us towards the solution. We are like archaeologists who find fragments of earthenware, tools, the ruined walls of buildings, broken monuments, and leaves of papyrus; and from these fragments proceed to infer the life of a whole City which has perished. But we are dealing, not with something which has perished, but with the interorganized aspects of a human being, a living personality which can set before us continuous new manifestations of its own meaning. It is not an easy task to understand a human being.

  Individual Psychology is perhaps the most difficult of all psychologies to learn and to practice. We must listen always for the whole. We must be skeptical until the key becomes self-evident. We must gather hints from a multitude of small signs — from the way a man enters a room, the way he greets us and shakes hands, the way he smiles, the way he walks. On one point we may go astray, but others are always forthcoming to correct or confirm us. Treatment itself is an exercise in cooperation and a test of cooperation. We can succeed only if we are genuinely interested in the other. We must be able to see with his eyes and listen with his ears. He must contribute his part to our common understanding. We must work out his attitudes and his difficulties together. Even if we felt we had understood him, we should have no witness that we were right unless he also understood. A tact less truth can never be the whole truth; it shows that our understanding was not sufficient. It is perhaps from a miscomprehension of this point that other schools have derived the concept of "negative and positive transferences”, factors which are never met with in Individual Psychological treatment. To spoil a patient who is accustomed to be spoiled may be an easy way to gain his affections; but his desire for domination will be apparent underneath. If we slight him and overlook him, we may easily incur his enmity: he may break off the treatment, or he may continue it in the hope of justifying himself and making us repent. We shall not be able to help him either by spoiling him or by slighting him: we must show him the interest of one man towards a fellow man. No interest could be truer or more objective. We must cooperate with him in finding his mistakes, both for his own benefit and for the welfare of others. With this aim in view we shall never run the risk of exciting "transferences”, of posing as authorities, or of putting him in a position of dependence and irresponsibility.

  Among all psychic expressions, some of the most revealing are the individual's memories. His memories are the reminders he carries about with him of his own limits and of the meaning of circumstances. There are no chance memories ": out of the incalculable number of impressions which meet an individual, he chooses to re member only those which he feels, however darkly, to have a bearing on his situation.

  Thus his memories represent his "Story of My Life”; a story he repeats to himself to warn him or comfort him, to keep him concentrated on his goal, to prepare him, by means of past experiences, to meet the future with an already tested style of action. The use of memories to stabilize a mood can be plainly seen in everyday behavior. If a man suffers a defeat and is discouraged by it, he recalls previous in stances of defeat. If he is melancholy, all his memories are melancholy. When he is cheerful and courageous, he selects quite other memories; the incidents he recalls are pleasant, they confirm his optimism. In the same way, if he feels himself confronted with a problem, he will summon up memories which help to prepare the mood in which he will meet it. Memories thus serve much the same purpose as dreams. Many men, when they have decisions to make, will dream of examinations which they have successfully passed.

  They see their decision as a test, and try to re-create the mood in which they succeeded before. What holds true of the variations of mood within an individual style of life, holds true also of the structure and Balance of his moods in general. A melancholiac could not remain melancholiac if he remembered his good moments and his successes. He must say to himself, “All my life I was unfortunate”; and select only those events which he can interpret as instances of his unhappy fate. Memories can never run counter to the style of life. If an individual's goal of superiority demands that he should feel, “Other people always humiliate me”, he will choose for remembrance incidents which he can interpret as humiliations. In so far as his style of life alters, his memories also will alter; he will remember different incidents, or he will put a different interpretation on the incidents he remembers.

  Early recollections have especial significance. To begin with, they show the style of life in its origins and in, its simplest expressions. We can judge from them whether the child was pampered or neglected; how far he was training for cooperation with others; with whom he preferred to cooperate; what problems confronted him, and how he struggled against them. In the early recollections of a child who suffered from difficulties in seeing and who trained himself to look more closely, we shall find impressions of a visual nature. His recollections will begin, “I looked around me . . .", or he will describe colors and shapes. A child who had difficulties of movement, who wanted to walk or run or jump, will show these interests in his recollections. Events remembered from childhood must be very near to the main interest of the individual; and if we know his main interest we know his goal and his style of life. It is this fact which makes early recollections of such value in vocational guidance. We can find, moreover, the child's relations towards his mother, his father and the other members of the family.

  It is comparatively indifferent whether the memories are accurate or inaccurate; what is of most value about them is that they represent the individual's judgment, “Even in childhood, I was such and such a person”, or, “Even in childhood, I found the world like this."

  Most illuminating of all is the way he begins his story, the earliest incident he can recall. The first memory will show the individual's fundamental view of life; his first satisfactory crystallization of his attitude. It offers us an opportunity to see at one glance what he has taken as the starting point for his development. I would never investigate a personality without asking for the first memory. Sometimes people do not answer, or profess that they do not know which event came first; but this itself is revealing. We can gather that they do not wish to discuss their fundamental meaning, and that they are not prepared for cooperation. In the main people are perfectly willing to discuss their first memories. They take them as mere facts, and do not realize the meaning hidden in them. Scarcely any one understands a first memory; and most people are therefore able to confess their purpose in life, their relationship to others and their view of the environment in a perfectly neutral and unembarrassed manner through their first memories. Another point of interest in first memories is that their compression and simplicity allows us to use them for mass investigations. We can ask a school class to write their earliest recollections; and, if we know how to interpret them, we have an extremely valuable picture of each child.

  Let me, for the sake of illustration, give a few first memories and attempt to interpret them. I know nothing else of the individuals than the memories they tell — not even whether they, are children or adults. The meaning we find in their first memories would have to be checked by other expressions of their personality; but we can use them as they stand for our training, and for sharpening our ability to guess. We shall know what might be true, and we shall be able to compare one memory with another. In especial we shall be able to see whether the individual is training towards cooperation or against it, whether he is courageous or discouraged, whether he wishes to be supported and watched, or to be self-reliant and independent; whether he is prepared to give or anxious only to receive.

  1. " Since my sister..." It is important to notice which people in the environment occur in first memories. When a sister occurs, we can be pretty sure that the individual has felt greatly under her influence. The sister has thrown a shadow over the other child's development. Generally we find a rivalry between the two, as if they were competing in a race; and we can understand that such a rivalry offers additional difficulties in development. A child cannot extend his interest to others as well when he is occup
ied with rivalry as when he can cooperate on terms of friendship. We shall not jump to conclusions, however: perhaps the two children were good friends.

  “Since my sister and I were the youngest in the family, I was not permitted to attend until she (the younger) was old enough to go." Now the rivalry becomes evident. My sister has hindered me! She was younger, but I was forced to wait for her. She narrowed my possibilities! If this is really the meaning of the memory, we should expect this girl or boy to feel, “It is the greatest danger in my life when someone restricts me and prevents my free development." Probably the writer is a girl. It seems less likely that a boy would be held back till a younger sister is ready to go to school.

  “Accordingly we began on the same day." We should not call this the best kind of education for a girl in her position. It might well give her- the impression that, because she is the older, she must stay behind. In any case, we see that this particular girl has interpreted it in this sense. She feels that she is slighted in favor of her sister. She will accuse some one of this neglect; and probably it will be her mother. We should not be surprised if she leaned more towards her father, and tried to make herself his favorite.