by Alfred Adler
We learn that he is the elder of two children, with a younger sister four years old. His mother says that he loves his younger sister and is always good to her. This strains our credulity to the limit; it is impossible that such a boy should love his younger sister. We shall see later on that our skepticism is justified. The mother claims also that the relation between herself and her husband is ideal. This is a great pity for the child. Obviously his parents are not responsible for any of his faults; they must come from his own wicked nature, from fate, or perhaps from some remote ancestor! We often hear of these ideal marriages: such excellent parents and such a horrid child! Teachers, psychologists, lawyers and judges all bear witness to these mishaps. And indeed an "ideal" marriage may be a great difficulty for a boy like this: if he sees that his mother is devoted to his father, it may irritate him. He wants to monopolize his mother's attention and he may resent any show of affection to anyone else. What are we to do, then, if happy marriages are bad for children and unhappy marriages are worse? We must make the child cooperative from the first; we must really take him into the marriage relationship. We must avoid letting him ding to one parent only.
This boy we are considering is a pampered child; he wants to keep his mother's attention and he is training in the direction of causing trouble whenever he feels that he is not given attention enough.
Here again we find confirmation immediately. The mother never punishes the child herself; she waits for the father to come home and punish him. Probably she feels weak; she feels that only a man can order and command; only a man is strong enough to punish. Perhaps she wishes to keep the boy attached to her and is afraid of losing him. In either case she is training the boy away from interest and cooperation with his father; and friction is bound to develop between the two. We hear that the father is devoted to his wife and family, but he hates to come home after the day's work because of the boy. He punishes him very severely and Beats him frequently. The boy has no dislike for his father, we are told. This, again, is impossible; the boy is not feebleminded. He has learned to be very skillful in hiding his feelings.
He loves his sister, but he does not play nicely with her and he often slaps her or kicks her. He sleeps in the dining room on a day bed: his sister sleeps on a cot in her parents' room. Now if we can identify ourselves with this boy, if we can have sympathy with him, this cot in the parents' room will bother us. We are trying to think, feel and see through the boy's mind. He wants to occupy his mother's attention. At night his sister is in so much closer proximity to his mother. He must fight to bring her nearer. The boy's health is very good: his birth was normal and he was breast fed for seven months. When he was first placed on the bottle he vomited; and his vomiting spells continued till he was three years old. In all probability he had an imperfect stomach. He is now well fed and well nourished, but his interest in the stomach has persisted. He considers it a weak point. We can understand a little better now why he threw stones at a pregnant woman. He is very finicky about his food. If he is dis pleased with his meals, his mother gives him money and he goes out and buys what he likes. Nevertheless he goes around to the neighbors and complains that his parents do not give him enough to eat.
This is a trick he has mechanized. It is always the same. His way to recover the feeling of superiority is to slander somebody. We are now in a position to understand a dream he told when he came to the clinic. "I was a cowboy in the West," he said. "They sent me to Mexico and I had to fight my way through to the United States. When one Mexican came against me I kicked him in the stomach." The feeling of the dream is, “I am surrounded by enemies. I must struggle and fight." In America, cowboys are looked on as heroes; he thinks that chasing little girls and kicking people in the stomach is heroic. We saw already that the stomach plays a great role in his life —he takes it as the most vulnerable point. He himself suffered from stomach weakness and his father has a nervous stomach trouble and is always complaining about it. The stomach has been elevated in this family to a position of the highest importance. The boy's aim is to hit people at their weakest point.
His dream and his actions show exactly the same style of life. He is living in a dream; and if we are not able to waken him from it, he will go on living in the same way. He will not only fight his father, his sister, little children and girls especially, but he will want to fight the doctor who tries to stop his fighting. His dream impulse will stimulate him to go on, to be a hero, to conquer others; and unless he can see how he is fooling himself there is no treatment that can help him.
His dream is explained to him at the clinic. He feels he is living in a hostile country and everybody who wants to punish him and hold him back is a Mexican; they are all his enemies. Next time he comes to the clinic we ask him, “What has happened since we saw each other last?” "I've been a bad boy," he answers. “What did you do?” "I chased a little girl." Now this is far more than a confession; it is a boast and an attack. This is a clinic where people are trying to improve him and he insists that he has been a bad boy. He is saying, “Don't hope for any improvement. I will kick you in the stomach." What are we to do with him? He is still dreaming; he is still playing the hero. We must diminish the satisfaction he gets from his role. "Do you believe," we ask him, "that this hero of yours would really chase a little girl? Isn't that a rather bad imitation of heroism? If you are going to be a hero, you should chase a big, strong girl. Or perhaps you shouldn't chase a girl at all." This is one side of the treatment. We must open his eyes and make him less eager to continue his style of life, “spit in his soup," as the proverb says. After this, he will not like this soup of his any longer. The other side is to give him courage to cooperate, to seek significance on the useful side of life. Nobody takes to the useless side of life unless he fears that he will be defeated if he remains on the useful side.
A girl of twenty-four years old, living alone and doing secretarial work, complains that her boss makes life in tolerable for her by his bullying manner. She feels that she is not able to make friends and keep them. Experience would lead us to believe that if an individual cannot keep friends it is because he wishes to dominate others; he is really interested only in himself and his goal is to show his personal superiority. Probably her boss is the same sort of person. They both wish to rule others. When two such people meet, there are bound to be difficulties. The girl is the youngest of seven children, the pet of the family. She was nicknamed "Tom" because she always wanted to be a boy. This increases our suspicion that she has identified her goal of superiority with personal domination; to be masculine, she thinks, is to be the master, to control others and not to be controlled herself. She is pretty, but she thinks that people only like her because of her pleasant face and she is afraid of being disfigured or hurt. Pretty girls find it easier in our time to impress and control others; and this fact she under stands quite well. She wants to be a boy, however, and to dominate in a masculine way: in consequence she is not elated by her prettiness.
Her earliest memory is of being frightened by a man; and she confesses that she is still frightened of being attacked by burglars and maniacs. It might appear odd that a girl who wanted to be masculine should be afraid of burglars and maniacs; but it is not really so strange. It is her feeling of weakness which dictates her goal. She wants to be in circumstances where she can rule and subjugate and she would like to exclude all other situations. Burglars and maniacs cannot be controlled and she would like to extinguish them all. She wishes to be masculine in an easy way and to keep extenuating circumstances for herself if she fails. With this very wide-spread dissatisfaction with the feminine role, the " Masculine Protest”, as I have called it, there always go feelings of tension —" I am a man fighting against the disadvantage of being a woman.”
Let us see whether we can trace the same feelings in her dreams. Frequently she dreams of being left alone. She was a spoiled child: her dream means, “I must be watched. It isn't safe to leave me alone. Others could attack and subjugate me." Anoth
er dream she frequently experiences is that she has lost her purse. "Take care," she is saying "you are in danger of losing something." She does not want to lose anything at all; in especial, she does not want to lose power of controlling others; but she chooses one thing in life, the loss of a purse, to stand for the whole. We have another illustration of how dreams reinforce the style of life by creating feelings. She has not lost her purse, but she dreams she has lost it, and the feeling remains behind. A longer dream helps us still more to see her attitude. "I had gone to a swimming pool where there were a lot of people,” she says. Somebody noticed that I was standing on the heads of the people there. I felt that someone screamed to see me and I was in great danger of falling down." If I were a sculptor, I should carve her in just this way, standing on the heads of others, using others as her pedestal. This is her style of life; these are the feelings she likes to arouse. She sees her position, however, as precarious, and she thinks that others should realize her danger too.
Others should watch her and be careful, so that she can continue to stand on their heads. Swimming in the water she is not safe. This is the whole story of her life. She has fixed as her goal, “To be a man in spite of being a girl." She is very ambitious, as most youngest children are; but she wants to seem superior, rather than to achieve adequacy to her situation, and she is pursued all the time by the fear of defeat. If we are to help her, we must find the way to reconcile her to her feminine role, to take away her fear and over-valuation of the other sex, and to make her feel friendly and equal among her fellow beings.
A girl whose younger brother had been killed in an accident when she was thirteen gave as her earliest recollection: “When my brother was a baby and was learning to walk, he grabbed hold of a chair to pull himself up and the chair fell on him." Here is another accident and we can see that she is deeply impressed by the dangers of the world. "My most frequent dream," she related, “is very queer. I am usually walking along the streets where there is a hole that I do not see. Walking along, I fall into the hole. It is filled with water, and as I touch the water I wake with a jump, with my heart beating terribly fast." We shall not find the dream as strange as she finds it herself; but if she is to continue to alarm herself with it, she must think it mysterious and fail to understand it. The dream says to her, “Be cautious. There are dangers about that you know nothing of." It tells us more than this, however. You cannot fall if you are down. If she is in danger of falling, she must imagine that she is above the others. As in the last example, she is saying, “I am superior, but I must always take care not to fall."
In another case we will see if we can find the same style of life at work in a first memory and a dream. A. girl tells us, “I remember being very much interested in seeing an apartment house being built." We can guess that she is cooperative. A small girl cannot be expected to take part in building a house, but she can Show her liking to share in the tasks of others by her interest. "I was a little child, and I was standing by a very tall window, and the panes of glass are as clear to me as if it were yesterday."
If she notices that it is tall, she must have a contrast in her mind between tall and small. She means, “The window was big, and I was little." I should not be surprised to hear that she is undersized, and it is this that interests her so much in comparative sizes. Her mentioning that she remembers it so clearly is a sort of boast. Now let us tell her dream. "Several other people were riding with me in a car." She is cooperative, as we thought; she likes to be with others. "We drove until we stopped in front of a wood. Everyone got out and ran into the woods. Most of them were larger than I." Again she notices the difference of size. "But I managed to arrive in time to get into the elevator, and it went down into a mine-working about ten feet deep. If we stepped out, the air would poison us, we thought." She pictures a danger now. Most people are afraid of some dangers; mankind is not very courageous. "We stepped out perfectly safe." You see the optimistic view. If an individual is cooperative, he is always courageous and optimistic. "We stayed there a minute, then came up again and ran quickly to the car." I am convinced that this girl is always cooperative, but she has the impression that she must be larger and taller. We shall find some tension here, as if she was standing on tiptoe; but it will be offset by her liking for others and her interest in common achievements.
VI. FAMILY INFLUENCES
From the moment of birth a baby seeks to connect himself with his mother. This is the purpose of his movements. For many months his mother plays overwhelmingly the most important role in his life: he is almost completely dependent upon her. It is in this situation that the ability to cooperate first develops. The mother gives her baby the first contact with another human being, the first interest in someone other than himself. She is his first bridge to social life; and a baby who could make no connection at all with his mother, or with some other human being who took her place, would inevitably perish.
This connection is so intimate and far reaching that we are never able, in later years, to point to any characteristic as the effect of heredity. Every tendency which might have been inherited has been adapted, trained, educated and made over again by the mother. Her skill, or lack of skill, has influenced all the child's potentialities. We mean nothing else by a mother's skill than her ability to cooperate with her child and to win the child to cooperate with herself. This ability is not to be taught by rules. New situations arise every day. There are thousands of points in which she must apply her insight and understanding to the child's needs. She can be skillful only if she is interested in her child and occupied in winning his affection and securing his welfare.
In all her activities we can see her attitude. Whenever she takes the baby up, carries him, speaks to him, bathes him or feeds him, she has opportunities to connect him with herself. If she is not trained in her tasks or not interested in them, she will be clumsy and the baby will resist. If she has never learned how to bathe a child, he will find bathing an unpleasant experience. Instead of making a connection with her, he will try to get rid of her. She must be skillful in the way she puts her baby to bed, in all her movements and in the noises she makes. She must be skillful in watching him or in leaving him alone. She must consider his whole environment — fresh air, the temperature of the room, nutrition, sleeping times, physical habits and cleanliness. On every occasion she is providing an opportunity for the child to like her or dislike her, to cooperate or reject cooperation.
There is no mystical power in the skill of motherhood. All skill is the result of long interest and training. The preparation for motherhood begins very early in life. The first steps can be seen in a girl's attitude to younger children, her interest in babies and in her future tasks. It is never advisable to educate boys and girls as if they had precisely the same tasks ahead of them. If we are to have skillful mothers, girls must be educated for mother hood and educated in such a way that they like the prospect of being a mother, consider it a creative activity, and are not disappointed by their role when they face it in later life.
Unfortunately it happens frequently in our culture that the part of a woman in motherhood is regarded as having only a minor value. If boys are preferred to girls, if their role is taken to be superior, it is natural for girls to dislike their future tasks. No one can be content with a subordinate position. When such girls marry and face the prospect of having children of their own, in one way or another they show their resistance. They are not willing and prepared to have children; they do not look forward to it; they do not feel it as a creative and interesting activity. This is perhaps the greatest problem of our society and little effort is made to meet it. The whole of human society is bound up with the attitude of women to motherhood. Almost everywhere the woman's part in life is undervalued and treated as secondary. Even in child hood we find boys looking at housekeeping as if it were a job for servants; as if their dignity demanded that they should never lift a hand to help in the housework. Housekeeping and home-making are too often regarded, not
as contributions open to women, but as drudgery relegated to them. If a woman can really see housekeeping as an art in which she can be interested and through which she can lighten and enrich the lives of her fellows, she can make it a task equal to any other in the world. If, on the other hand, it is thought of as work too mean for a man, need we wonder when women resist their tasks, revolt against them, and set out to prove —what should be obvious from the first— that women are the equals of men and no less entitled to consideration and to the opportunity to develop their capacities? It is true that capacities can be developed only through social feeling; but social feeling will lead them in the right way, without any extraneous limits and restrictions placed on their development.
Where the woman's part is undervalued, the whole harmony of married life is destroyed. No woman who considers that to be interested in children is an inferior task can train herself for the skill, care, understanding and sympathy that are so necessary if children are to be given a favorable position in the beginning of their lives. A woman who is dissatisfied with her role has a goal in life which prevents her from making the best connection with her children. Her goal does not run in the same way as their goals; she is often occupied in proving her personal superiority; and for this purpose the children can be only a bother and distraction. If we trace back the cases of failure in life, we almost always discover that the mother did not fulfill her functions properly: she did not give the child a favorable start. If the mothers fail, if they are dissatisfied with their tasks and lack interest in them, the whole of mankind is endangered.