What Life Could Mean to You

by Alfred Adler

  We cannot regard the mother, however, as guilty for failures. These is no guilt. Perhaps the mother herself was not trained for cooperation. Perhaps she is suppressed and unhappy in her married life. She is confused and worried by her circumstances; and sometimes she grows hopeless and despairing. There are many disturbances to the development of a good family life. If the mother is sick she may wish to cooperate with the children but feel herself too much handicapped. If she goes to work she is perhaps exhausted when she comes home. If economic conditions are bad, food, clothing and temperature may all be wrong for the child. Moreover, it is not the child's experiences which dictate his actions; it is the conclusions which he draws from his experiences. When we inquire into the story of a problem child, we see difficulties in the relation between himself and his mother; but we can see the same difficulties among other children who have answered them in a better way. We come back here to the fundamental view of Individual Psychology. There are no reasons for the development of character; but a child can make use of experiences for his goal and turn them into reasons. We cannot say, for example, that if a child is badly nourished he will become a criminal. We must see what conclusion he has drawn.

  It is easy to understand that if a woman is dissatisfied with her role as a woman she will incur difficulties and tension. We know the strength of the striving for mother hood. Investigations have made it clear that a mother's tendency to protect her children is stronger than all other tendencies. Among animals, among rats and apes, for instance, the drive for motherhood has been shown to be stronger than the drives of sex or hunger; so that if they must choose between following one drive or another, it is the drive of motherhood which prevails. The foundation of this striving is not sexual; it derives from the goal of cooperation. A mother often feels her child as a part of herself. Through her children she is connected with the whole of life; she feels herself the master of life and death. In every mother we could find, in one degree or another, the feeling that through her children she has accomplished a work of creation. She feels, we might almost say, that she has created as God creates — out of nothing she has brought forth a living being. The striving for motherhood is really one aspect of the human striving for superiority, the human goal of god-likeness. It gives us one of the clearest examples of how this goal can be used for the sake of mankind in the interest of others and with the deepest social feeling.

  A mother, of course, may exaggerate a feeling that her child is a part of herself and press him into the service of her goal of personal superiority. She may try to make the child wholly dependent upon herself and control his life so that he shall always remain bound to her. Let me quote the case of a peasant woman of seventy years of age. Her son, at the age of fifty, was still living with her; and both of them contracted pneumonia at the same time. The mother survived, but the son was taken to the hospital and died. When the mother was told of his death, she replied, “I always knew that I should never bring the boy up safely." She felt responsible for the whole life of her child. She had never tried to make him an equal part of our social life. We can begin to understand what a mistake is involved when a mother does not widen the connection she has made with her child and lead him to cooperate equally with the rest of his environment.

  The relationships of a mother are not simple and even her connection with her children must not be overstressed. This is true for their sake as well as for hers. Where one problem is overstressed all other problems suffer; and even the single problem with which we are occupied cannot be met as well as if we put less weight upon it. A mother is related with her children, with her husband, and with the whole social life around her. These three ties must be given equal attention: all three must be faced calmly and with common sense. If a mother considers only her tie with her children, she will be unable to avoid pampering and spoiling them. She will make it hard for them to develop independence and the ability to cooperate with others. After she has succeeded in connecting the child with herself, her next task is to spread his interest towards his father; and this task will prove almost impossible if she herself is not interested in the father. She must turn the child's interest also to the social life around him; to the other children of the family, to friends, relatives and fellow human beings in general. Her task is thus twofold. She must give the child his first experience of a trustworthy fellow being; and she must then be prepared to spread this trust and friendship until it includes the whole of our human society.

  If the mother is occupied only with interesting the child in herself, later on he will resent all attempts to interest him in others. He will always look for support from his mother and feel hostile to all whom he can regard as competitors for her attention. Any interest she shows in her husband or in the other children of the family will be felt as a deprivation, and the child will develop the view, “My mother belongs to me and to no one else." For the most part modern psychologists have misunderstood the situation. In the Freudian theory of the Oedipus Complex, for example, it is supposed that children have a tendency to fall in love with their mothers and wish to marry them and to hate their fathers and wish to kill them. Such a mistake could never arise if we understood the development of children. The Oedipus Complex could appear only in a child who wished to occupy his mother's whole attention and get rid of everyone else. Such a desire is not sexual. It is a desire to subjugate the mother, to have complete control of her and to make her into a servant. It can occur only with children who have been pampered by their mothers and whose feeling of fellowship has never included the rest of the world. In rare cases it has happened that a boy who had always remained connected only with his mother made her the center also of his attempts to meet the problem of love and marriage; but the meaning of such an attitude would be that he could not conceive of cooperation with anyone but his mother. No other woman could be trusted to be equally subservient. An Oedipus Complex would thus be always an artificial product of mistaken training. We have no need to suppose inherited incestuous instincts, or, indeed, to imagine that such an aberration, in its origin, has anything to do with sexuality.

  When a child whose mother has bound him only to herself is placed in a situation where he is no longer connected with her, trouble always begins. When he goes to school, for example, or plays with children in the park, his goal will always be to remain connected with his mother. Whenever he is separated from her he will resent it. He wishes always to drag his mother along with him, to occupy her thoughts and to make her attentive to him. There are many means which he can use. He may become a mother's darling, always weak and affectionate and craving for sympathy. He may weep or fall sick at any reverse, to show how much he needs to be looked after. On the other hand, he may have outbursts of temper; he may be dis obedient or fight with his mother in order to be noticed. Among problem children we find thousands of varieties of spoiled children, struggling for the attention of their mothers and resisting every demand from their environment.

  A child quickly becomes experienced in finding out the means by which he can best succeed in occupying attention. Pampered children are often afraid of being left alone and especially of being left alone in the dark. It is not the dark itself of which they are afraid; but they utilize fear in the attempt to bring their mothers closer to them. One such pampered child always cried in the dark. One night, when his mother came in response to his cries, she asked him, “Why are you afraid?” "Because it is so dark," he answered. But his mother had now seen the purpose of his behavior. "And after I have come," she said, “is it less dark?” The darkness itself is unimportant and his fear of darkness meant only that he disliked being separated from his mother. If such a child is separated from his mother, all his emotions, all his strength and all his mental powers are engaged in preparing a situation in which his mother has to approach him and be connected with him again. He will strive to bring her nearby screaming, by calling out, by being unable to sleep or by making a nuisance of himself in some other way. One means which
has always attracted the attention of educators and psychologists is fear. In Individual Psychology we no longer concern ourselves with finding out causes of fear, but rather with identifying its purpose. All pampered children suffer from fear: it is by means of their fears that they can attract attention and they build up this emotion into their style of life. They make use of it to secure their goal of regaining connection with the mother. A child that is timid is a child that has been pampered and wants to be pampered again.

  Sometimes these pampered children have nightmares and cry out in their sleep. This is a well-known Symptom; but so long as sleep was thought to be a contradiction of waking it was impossible to understand. This was a mistake, however; sleep and waking are not contradictions but varieties. In his dreams a child behaves in much the same way as during the day. His goal of changing the situation to his advantage influences his whole body and mind; and after some training and experience he finds out the most successful means to approach his goal.

  Even in his sleep thoughts, pictures and memories come into his mind which are appropriate to his purposes. A pampered child, after a few experiences, discovers that if he is to connect himself again with his mother, thoughts which terrify him will be of great service. Even when they grow up, pampered children often keep their anxiety dreams. To be afraid in dreams was a well-tested device for gaining attention which has now become mechanized into a habit.

  This use of anxiety is so obvious that we should be very surprised to hear of a pampered child who never made trouble during the night. The repertory of tricks to attract attention is very large. Some children will find the bed clothes uncomfortable or call for glasses of water. Others will be afraid of burglars or wild animals. Some are unable to go to sleep unless their parents sit by their bed sides. Some dream; some fall out of bed and some wet the bed. One pampered child whom I treated seemed to give no trouble at all at night. Her mother said that she slept soundly without dreaming or waking up and caused no trouble at all. It was only during the day that she made trouble. This was very surprising.

  I suggested all the symptoms which could nerve to attract the attention of the mother and draw her closer; this girl showed none of them. At last the explanation occurred to me. "Where does she sleep?” I asked her mother. "In my bed," she replied.

  Sickness is often a refuge for pampered children; for when they are sick they are pampered more than ever. It often happens that such a child begins to show himself a problem child sometime after an illness and it appears at first that it is the illness that made him a problem child. The fact is, however, that when he is well again he re members the fuss that was made over him when he was ill. The mother can no longer pamper him as he was pampered then; and he takes his revenge by becoming a problem. Sometimes a child who notices how another child, through being sick, became the center of attention, will wish to fall sick himself and will even kiss the sick child in the hope of catching his disease.

  One girl had been in a hospital for four years and had been very much spoiled by the doctors and nurses. At first, when she returned home, she was spoiled by her parents; but after a few weeks their attention decreased. If ever she was denied something she wanted, she would put her finger in her mouth and say, “I have been in hospital." She reminded others she had been sick and she tried to continue the favorable situation in which she had found herself. We can find the same behavior in adults, who often like to speak of their diseases or the operations which they have undergone. On the other hand, it sometimes occurs that a child who has been a problem to his parents recovers after an illness and no longer bothers them.

  We have already seen that imperfect organs are an additional burden to a child; but we have seen also that they are not sufficient to explain bad traits of character. We can doubt, therefore, whether the removal of the organic difficulty has, in .itself, anything to do with the change. One boy, the second boy in the family, gave much trouble by lying, stealing, playing truant, and being cruel and disobedient. His teacher did not know what to do with him and urged that he should be put in a reformatory. At this time the boy fell ill. He suffered from tuberculosis of the hip and for half a year he was lying in plaster of Paris. When he recuperated he became the best boy of the family. We cannot believe that his illness had had such an effect on him; and it soon came out very clearly that the change was due to a recognition of his previous mistakes. He had always thought that his parents preferred his brother and had always felt himself slighted. During his illness he found himself the center of attention, taken care of and helped by everybody; and he was intelligent enough to get rid of the idea that he was always neglected.

  It is ridiculous to imagine that the best way to remedy the mistakes that mothers often make would be to take all children from the care of their mothers and hand them over to nurses or to institutions. Whenever we try to find a substitute for a mother, we are looking for someone who will play a mother's part — who will interest the child in herself just as a mother does. It is much easier to train the child's own mother. Children who grow up in orphan asylums often Show a lack of interest in others: there was no one who could make the personal bridge between the child and his fellow beings. Sometimes an experiment has been made with children in institutions who were not developing very well. A nurse or a sister has been found to give the child her individual care; or he has been placed with a family where the mother could look after him as well as her own children. The result has always been a great improvement if the foster-mothers were well chosen. The best means of bringing up such children is to find a substitute for a mother and father and for a family life; and all we should be doing if we took children from their parents would be hunting around for other people who could fulfill the tasks of parents. The importance of a mother's affection and interest can be seen also from the fact that so many failures come from among orphans, illegitimate or unwanted children and the children of broken marriages. It is notorious that the part of a stepmother is very difficult, and the children often fight against her. The problem is not insoluble and I have seen it met with good success; but too often the woman does not understand the situation. Perhaps, when the mother died, the children turned towards the father and were pampered by him. Now they feel deprived of his attention and attack their stepmother. She feels that she must fight back and the children have now a real grievance. She has challenged them and they fight more than ever. A fight with a child is always a losing fight: he can never be beaten or won to cooperation by fighting. In these struggles the weakest always carries the day. Something is demanded of him which he refuses to give; something which can never be gained by such means. An incalculable amount of tension and useless effort would be spared in this world if we realized that cooperation and love can never be won by force.

  The part of the father in family life is equally important with the mother's part. At first his relationship with the child is less intimate and it is later on that his influence has its effect. We have already described some of the dangers if a mother is unable to spread the child's interest towards his father. The child suffers a serious block in the development of his social feeling. Where the marriage is unhappy, the situation is full of danger for the child. His mother may feel herself unable to include the father in the family life; she may wish to keep the child entirely to herself. Perhaps both parents use the child as a pawn in their personal warfare. Each wishes to attach the child to himself; to be more loved than the partner. If children find dissension between their parents, they are very skillful in playing them off against each other. Thus a competition may arise to see who can govern the child better or spoil him more. It is impossible to train a child in cooperation with such an atmosphere around him. The first cooperation among other people which he experiences is the cooperation of his parents; and if their cooperation is poor, they cannot hope to teach him to be cooperative himself.

  Moreover, it is from the marriage of their parents that children gain their first idea of marriage and the partne
rship of the sexes. The children of unhappy marriages, unless their first impression is corrected, will grow up with a pessimistic view of marriage. Even when they are adults they will feel that marriage is bound to turn out badly. They will attempt to avoid the other sex or they will be sure that they will fail in their approach. A child is thus very gravely handicapped if the marriage of his parents is not a cooperative part of social life, a product of social life, and a preparation for social life. The meaning of marriage is that it should be a partnership of two people for their mutual welfare, for the welfare of their children, and for the welfare of society; and if it fails in any of these respects it is not in coherence with the demands of life.

  Since marriage is a partnership, no one member should be supreme. This point needs much closer consideration than we are accustomed to give it. In the whole conduct of the family life there is no call for the use of authority; and it is unfortunate if one member is especially prominent or considered more than the others. If the father is high-tempered and tries to dominate the rest of the family, the boys will get a false view of what is expected from a man. The girls will suffer still more. In later life they will picture men as tyrants. Marriage will seem to them a kind of subjugation and slavery. Sometimes they will seek to secure themselves against the other sex by perversion. If the mother is dominating and nags the other members, the position is reversed. The girls will probably imitate her and become sharp and critical themselves.