What Life Could Mean to You

by Alfred Adler

  He went to school until he was fourteen. Afterwards his father sent him to an agricultural school, so that he should be able to help him on a farm which he was planning to buy. The boy got along fairly well at the school, but decided that he did not wish to be a farmer. It was his father who got him the position in the brokerage firm. It is rather surprising that he stuck the work out for eight years; but he gives as his reason that he wanted to do as much as possible for his mother.

  As a child he was untidy and timid, afraid of the dark and of being left alone. When we hear of an untidy child, we must always look for someone who tidies up for him. When we hear of a child who is afraid of the dark and does not like to be left alone, we must always look for someone whose attention he can attract and who will con sole him.

  With this youth, it was his mother. He had not found it easy to make friends, but he felt sociable enough among strangers. He had never been in love; he was not interested in love and never wished to get married. He looked on the marriage of his parents as unhappy; and this helps us to understand why he excluded marriage for himself. His father still brings pressure on him to continue in brokerage.

  He himself would like to go in for advertising, but he is convinced that his family would not give him the money to prepare for this career. At every point we can see that the purpose of his actions is to antagonize his father. While he was in the brokerage firm, it did not occur to him, although he was self-supporting, to use his money to learn advertising.

  He thinks of it only now, as a new demand on his father.

  His first memory clearly reveals the protest of a pampered child against a strict father. He remembers how he worked in his father's restaurant. He liked cleaning the dishes and changing them from one table to another. The way he meddled with them angered his father, who slapped him before the customers. He uses his early experience as a proof that his father is an enemy and his whole life has been a fight against him. He has still no real wish to work. He would be completely satisfied if he could hurt his father.

  His ideas of suicide are easy to explain. Every suicide is a reproach; and by thinking of suicide he is saying, “My father is guilty for everything." His dissatisfaction in his occupation is also directed against his father. Every plan that the father proposes, the son rejects; but he is a pampered child and he cannot be independent in his career. He does not really wish to work; he wishes to play; but he still preserves some cooperation with his mother. But how does his fight with his father help to explain his insomnia?

  If he is sleepless, next day he is ill equipped for working. His father is waiting for him to work, but the boy is tired and unable to work. Of course, he could say, “I don't want to work, and I won't be forced." But there is his concern for his mother and the bad financial circumstances of the family. If he just refuses to work, his family will think he is quite hopeless and refuse to support him. He must have an alibi; and this he gains by the apparently uninvited misfortune,— sleeplessness.

  At first he says that he never dreams; but later he re members a dream which often recurs. He dreams that somebody is throwing a ball against the wall and -the ball always bounces away. This seems a trivial dream. Can we find a connection between the dream and his style of life? We ask him, “What happened then? What did you feel when the ball bounced away?” He tells us, “Whenever it bounces away I wake up."

  Now he has revealed the whole structure of his sleeplessness. He uses the dream as an alarm clock to waken him up. He imagines that everybody wishes to push him forward, to drive him and to compel him to do things that he does not wish to do. He dreams that somebody is throwing a ball against the wall. At this point he always wakes up. In consequence he is tired next day; and when he is tired he cannot work. His father is very anxious for him to work; and so, by this roundabout method, he has defeated his father. If we were to look only at his fight with his father, we should think him very intelligent to discover such weapons. His style of life, however, is not very satisfactory, either for him or for others, and we must help him to change it.

  When I explain his dream, he stops dreaming; but he tells me he still wakes up sometimes in the night. He has no longer the courage to continue with his dream, because he sees its purpose can be found out; but he still tires himself for the next day. What can we do to help him? The only possible way would be to reconcile him with his father. So long as all his interest goes towards irritating and defeating his father, nothing will come right. I begin, as we must always begin, by admitting that there is justification for the patient's attitude. “Your father seems to be completely wrong”, I say. "It is very unwise of him to try to use his authority and to boss you the whole time. Perhaps he is a sick man and should be treated. But what can you do? You cannot expect to change him. Suppose it rains; what can you do? You can take an umbrella or a taxi; but it is no use to try to fight the rain or overpower it. At present you are spending your time fighting the rain. You believe that this is strength. You believe that you are getting the better of it. But your victories damage yourself more than any one." I show him the coherence of all his expressions — his uncertainty over his career, his thoughts of suicide, his running away from home, his sleeplessness; and I show him how in all of them he is punishing himself to punish his father.

  I give him also a piece of advice: "When you go to sleep tonight, imagine that you want to waken yourself up from time to time, so that you can be tired to-morrow. Imagine that to-morrow you are too tired to go to work and your father explodes into a fit of temper." I want him to face the truth. His main interest is to annoy and hurt his father. As long as we fail to stop this fight, treatment will be useless. He is a pampered child. We can all see it; and now he can see it himself.

  The situation closely resembles the so-called Oedipus Complex.

  This youth is occupied in damaging his father; and he is very much attached to his mother. It is not a sexual affair, however. His mother has pampered him and his father has been unsympathetic. He has suffered from a mistaken training and a mistaken interpretation of his position. Heredity plays no part in his trouble. He has not derived it as an instinct from savages who killed and consumed the head man of the tribe. He has created it himself out of his own experiences. Attitudes like this could be provoked anew with every child. We need only give the child a mother to pamper it, as this mother did; and a father who is harsh, as this father was. If the child revolts against its father, and fails to proceed independently in solving the problems before it, we can understand how easy it was to adopt such a style of life.

  V. DREAMS

  Almost every human being dreams, but those who understand their dreams are very few. This state of affairs might well seem astonishing. Here is a general activity of the human mind. Men have always been interested in dreams and have always been puzzled to know what they meant. Many people feel that their dreams have a deep significance: they feel them as queer and momentous. We can find this interest expressed from the earliest ages of mankind. Yet, on the whole, men have still no conception of what they are doing when they dream, or why they dream at all. As far as I know, there are only two theories of dream-interpretation which attempt to be comprehensive and scientific.

  The two schools which claim to understand and interpret dreams are the Freudian school of psychoanalysis and the school of Individual Psychology. Of these two, perhaps only the Individual Psychologists would claim that their explanation was wholly in agreement with common sense.

  Previous attempts to understand dreams were not, of course, scientific, but they deserve consideration. At least they will reveal how men have regarded their dreams, what their attitude towards dreaming has been. Since dreams are a part of the mind's creative activity, if we find out what men have expected from dreams we shall come very close to seeing the purpose of dreams. Right at the beginning of our investigation we found a striking fact. It seems always to have been taken granted that dreams had some bearing on the future. People often felt that in dream
s some master spirit, some god or ancestor, would take possession of their minds and influence them. They used their dreams to obtain guidance when they were in difficulties. Ancient dream books offered to explain what a dream meant for the future fortunes of the man who dreamed it. Primitive peoples looked for omens and prophecies in their dreams. The Greeks and the Egyptians went to their temples in the hope of obtaining a sacred dream that would influence their future lives.

  Such dreams were looked on as curative, as removing physical or mental difficulties. The American Indians, by purification, fasting and sweat baths, took great pains to induce dreams, and based their conduct on the interpretation they gave them. In the Old Testament dreams are always interpreted as revealing something of future events. Even to-day there are individuals who insist that they have had dreams which later came true. They believe that in dreams they are clairvoyant, and that the dream, somehow or other, can reach over into the future and prophesy what is going to occur.

  From a scientific standpoint, such views seem ridiculous to us. From the time when I first attempted to solve the problem of dreams, it seemed clear to me that a man who is dreaming is in a worse position to foretell the future than a man who is awake and in more complete possession of his faculties. It seemed clear that dreams would be found, not more intelligent and prophetic than everyday thinking, but more confused and confusing. Yet we must take note of this tradition of mankind, that dreams are somehow connected with the future and perhaps we shall find it, in some sense, not entirely false. If we look on it in true perspective, it may provide us with the very key which has been missing. We can see already that men have regarded dreams as offering a solution to their problems. We may conclude that the individual's purpose in dreaming is to seek guidance for the future, to seek a solution for his problems. This is very far from commit ting us to a prophetic view of dreams. We have still to consider what sort of a solution he seeks and where he hopes to get it from. It still seems evident that any solution offered by a dream would be worse than a solution arrived at by common-sense thinking, with the whole situation before us. Indeed, it is not too much to say that in dreaming an individual is hoping to solve his problems in his sleep.

  In the Freudian view we find a real effort to treat the dream as having a meaning which can be scientifically understood. In several points, however, the Freudian interpretation has taken the dream out of the region of science. It supposes, for example, a gap between the work of the mind during the day and its work during the night. "Conscious" and "unconscious" are placed in contra diction to each other, and the dream is given its own special laws contradictory to the laws of everyday thinking. Wherever we see such contradictions, we must conclude an unscientific attitude of mind. In the thinking of primitive peoples and of ancient philosophers, we always meet this desire to put concepts in strong antithesis, to treat them as contradictions. The antithetic attitude can be illustrated very clearly among neurotics. People often believe that left and right are contradictions, that man and woman, hot and cold, light and heavy, strong and weak are contradictions. From a scientific standpoint, they are not contradictions, but varieties. They are degrees of a scale, arranged in accordance with their approximation to some ideal fiction. In the same way, good and bad, normal and abnormal, are not contradictions but varieties. Any theory which treats sleep and waking, dream thoughts and day thoughts, as contradictions is bound to be unscientific.

  Another point of difficulty in the original Freudian view is that dreams were referred to a sexual background. This, too, separated them from the ordinary strivings and activities of men. If it were true, dreams would have a meaning as an expression not of the whole personality, but only of a part of the personality. The Freudians themselves found a sexual interpretation of dreams insufficient, and Freud suggested that we could also see in dreams the expression of an unconscious desire to die.

  Perhaps we can find a sense in which this is true. Dreams, as we have noticed, are an attempt to reach an easy solution for problems, and they reveal the individual's failure of courage. The Freudian term, however, is highly metaphoric, and it does not bring us any closer to finding how the whole personality is reflected in dreams. Once again, the dream life seems rigorously separated from the daytime life. In the Freudian attempts, we are given many interesting and valuable hints. Especially useful, for example, is the hint that it is not the dream itself which is important, but the underlying thoughts of the dream. In Individual Psychology we arrive at a somewhat similar conclusion. What is missing from psychoanalysis is the very first requisite for a science of psychology — a recognition of the coherence of the personality and of the unity of the individual in all his expressions.

  This lack can be observed in the Freudian answer to the crucial question of dream interpretation, “What is the purpose of dreams? What do we dream for at all?” The psychoanalyst answers, “To satisfy the individual's unfulfilled desires." But this view would by no means ex plain everything. Where is the satisfaction if the dream is lost, if the individual forgets it or cannot understand it? All mankind is dreaming and scarcely any one understands his dreams. What pleasure can we get from dreaming? If the dream life is separated from the day life, and the satisfaction given by a dream takes place in a life of its own, we can perhaps understand the purpose of dreams for the dreamer.

  But now we have lost the coherence of the personality. Dreams have now no purpose for the waking man. From a scientific point of view, the dreamer and the waking man are the same individual, and the purpose of dreams must be applicable to this one coherent personality. It is true that in one type of human being, we could connect the striving for wish-fulfillment in dreams with the whole personality. This type is the pampered child, the individual who always is asking, “How can I get gratification? What does life offer me?” Such an individual might look for gratification in his dreams, just as he does in all his other expressions. And, indeed, if we look closely we shall find that the Freudian theory is the consistent psychology of the pampered child, who feels that his instincts must never be denied, who looks on it as unfair that other people should exist, who asks always, “Why should I love my neighbor? Does my neighbor love me?” Psychoanalysis starts with the premises of a pampered child, and works out these premises in the most thoroughgoing detail. But the striving for gratification is only one of the million varieties of the striving for superiority; and we cannot take it as the central motive of all expressions of personality. If we really discover the purpose of dreams, moreover, we must also be helped to see what purpose it serves to forget dreams or not to understand them.

  This was the most vexing problem before me when I started, some quarter of a century ago, to try to find the meaning of dreams. I could see that the dream is not a contradiction to waking life; it must always be in the same line as other movements and expressions of life. If, during the day, we are occupied with striving towards the goal of superiority, we must be occupied with the same problem at night. Everyone must dream as if he had a task to fulfill in dreaming, as if he had to strive towards superiority also in his dreams. The dream must be a product of the style of life, and it must help to build up and enforce the style of life.

  One consideration helps immediately to make clear the purpose of dreams. We dream, and in the morning we generally forget our dreams. Nothing is left. But is this true? Is nothing left at all? Something remains — we are left with the feelings our dreams have aroused. None of the pictures persist: no understanding of the dream is left: only the feelings which remain behind. The purpose of dreams must be in the feelings they arouse. The dream is only the means, the instrument, ta stir up feelings. The goal of the dream is the feelings it leaves behind.

  The feelings an individual creates must always be in conformity with his style of life. The difference between dream thought and day thought is not absolute; there is no rigid division between the two. To put the difference in a few words, in dreaming more relations with reality are excluded. There is no
break with reality. When we sleep we are still in contact with reality. If we are disturbed with problems, our sleep is disturbed also. The fact that, during our sleep, we can make the adjustments which prevent us from falling out of bed shows that connections with reality are still present. A mother can sleep through the loudest noises in the street and yet waken at the slightest movement of her child. Even in sleep we remain in Couch with the world outside us. In sleep, however, sense perceptions, though not absent, are diminished and our contact with reality is lessened. When we dream we are alone. Demands of society are not so urgently present with us. In our dream thought we are not stimulated to reckon so honestly with the situation around us.

  Our sleep can be undisturbed only if we are free from tension and sure of the solution of our problems. One disturbance of calm and tranquil sleep is dreaming. We can conclude that we dream only if we are not sure of the solution of our problems, only if reality is pressing in on us even in our sleep and offering us difficulties. This is the task of the dream: to meet the difficulties with which we are confronted and to provide a solution. Now we can begin to see in what way our minds will attack problems in our sleep. Since we are not dealing with the whole situation, the problems will appear easier, and the solution offered will demand as little as possible adaptation from our own side. The purpose of the dream will be to support and back the style of life, to arouse the feelings suited to it. But why does the style of life need support? What can attack it? It can only be attacked by reality and common sense. The purpose of dreams, therefore, is to support the style of life against the demands of common sense. This gives us an interesting insight. If an individual is confronted by a problem which he does not wish to solve along the lines of common sense, he can confirm his attitude by the feelings which are aroused in his dreams.