What Life Could Mean to You

by Alfred Adler

  In one case the mother of a child prophesied: "I am sure that one day you will strangle me." When he was seventeen he strangled his aunt. A prophecy and a challenge act in the same way. I am not concerned with the consequences. I have to die in any case. I am nothing, no one will have anything to do with me. The girl I want shrinks from me.

  He wanted to allure this girl, but he had no grand clothes and no money. He looked on the girl as a piece of property. This was his solution of the problems of love and marriage. It is all the same. I will procure my salvation or my ruin. I will say here, though I wish I had more space for an explanation, that all these people like violent contradiction or antitheses. They are like children. It must be everything or nothing. "Starvation or gallows”; "Salvation or ruin."

  Everything is planned for Thursday. The victim is chosen. I am awaiting my opportunity. When it comes it will be something that not everybody can do.

  He is a hero to himself: "It is dreadful, and not everybody could do it." He took a knife and killed a man by surprise. Not everybody could do it!

  As the shepherd drives his sheep, the stomach drives man to the darkest crime. Possibly I shall not see another day, but I do not care. The worst thing is to be tormented by hunger. I am embittered by an incurable illness. The last annoyance will come when they sit in judgment on me. A man must pay for his sins, but it is a better death than by starvation. If I die of hunger, no one will take notice of me. But now how many people will be there! and perhaps someone will be sorry for me. What I have resolved I shall have done. No man has ever been afraid as I have been afraid this night.

  So he is not a hero after all, as he believes himself to be! Under cross-examination he said, “Although I did not hit on a vital part I have committed murder. I know I am destined for the hangman: but the man had such wonderful clothes and I knew I should never have clothes like them." He no longer says that the stomach is his reason; it is the clothes now that have become a fixed idea. "I did not know what I was doing," he pleaded. This you will always find, in one way or another. Sometimes criminals drink before their crimes, in order to be irresponsible. All this proves how hard they must struggle to break through the wall of social interest. In every description of a criminal career I believe I could show all the points I have brought out.

  We are now really faced with the problem, what shall we do? What shall we do if I am right, and we can always find in the criminal career the striving for a fictitious personal superiority in an individual who is lacking in social interest and has not been trained in cooperation? With the criminal, as with the neurotic, we can do absolutely nothing, unless we can succeed in winning him for cooperation. I cannot stress this point too strongly: everything is secured if we can win the interest of the criminal for human welfare, if we can win his interest for other human beings, if we can train him for cooperation, if we can set him on the way towards solving the problems of life by cooperative means. If we fail to do this, we can do nothing. The task is not quite as simple as it looks. We cannot win him by making things easy for him, any more than by making them hard for him. We cannot win him by pointing out that he is wrong and arguing with him. His mind is made up. He has been seeing the world in this way for years. If we are to change him we must find the roots of his pattern. We must discover where his failures first began and the circumstances which provoked them. The main features of his personality had already been decided by the time he was four or five years old: by that time he had already made those mistakes in his estimate of himself and of the world which we see displayed in his criminal career; and it is these primitive mistakes which we must understand and correct. We must look for the first development of his attitude.

  Later on, he turns everything which he experiences into a justification for his attitude; and if his experiences do not quite fit into his scheme he broods on them and licks them into shape until they are more amenable. If a man has the attitude, “Other people misuse me and humiliate me," he will find plenty of evidence to confirm him. He will be looking for such evidence and evidence on the other side will not be noticed. The criminal is interested only in himself and his own point of view. He has his own way of looking and listening and we can often see that he pays no attention to things which do not agree with his own interpretation of life. We cannot convince him, therefore, unless we can get behind all his interpretations, all his training in his own point of view; and discover the way in which his attitude first began. This is one reason why corporal punishment is ineffective. The criminal sees it as a confirmation that society is hostile and impossible to cooperate with. Something of the same sort happened to him, perhaps, at school. He was not trained to cooperate and so he did his work badly, or misbehaved in. class. He was reproached and punished. Now is that going to encourage him in cooperation? He feel only that the situation is still more hopeless. He feels that people are against him. Which of us would cultivate a liking for a place where we expected to be reproached and punished? The child loses his remainder of confidence. He is not interested in school tasks, or in his teachers, or in his schoolmates. He begins to play truant and to hide himself away where he cannot be discovered. In these places he finds other boys who have had the same experience and have taken the same road. They understand him; they do not reproach him; on the contrary they flatter him, play on his ambitions, and give him the hope of making his mark on the useless side of life. Of course, since he is not interested in the social demands of life, he takes them for his friends and society in general for his enemies. These people like him and he feels better among them. It is in this way that thousands of children join criminal gangs; and if in later life we treat them in the same fashion, they will find only new testimony that we are their enemies and only criminals are their friends.

  There is no cause at all why such a child should be defeated by the tasks of life. We should never allow him to lose hope and we could stop it very easily if we organized our schools so that such children were given confidence and courage. We shall deal more fully with this proposal later: we are using this example at present to show how a criminal will interpret punishment only as a sign that society is against him, as he always thought.

  Corporal punishment is ineffective for other reasons, also. Many criminals are not very fond of their lives. Some of them at certain moments of their lives are very near suicide. Corporal punishment does not terrify them. They can be so intoxicated by their desire to outdo the police that it does not even hurt them. This is part of their whole response to what they regard as a challenge. If attendants are harsh, or if they are severely treated, they are put on their mettle to resist. This increases again their feeling of being cleverer than the police. As we have seen, they interpret everything in this fashion. They see their contact with society as a sort of continuous warfare, in which they are trying to gain the victory; and if we take it in the same way ourselves we are only playing into their hands. Even the electric chair can act as a challenge in this sense. The criminal conceives himself as playing against odds; and the higher the penalty, the greater is his desire to show his superior cunning. It is easy to prove that many criminals think of their crimes only in this way. A criminal who is condemned to be electrocuted will often spend his time considering how he might have avoided detection: "If only I had not left my spectacles behind!" Our only remedy is to find out the block to cooperation which the criminal suffered in childhood. Here Individual Psychology has opened up for us the whole dark territory. We can see much clearer. By the age of five years a child's psyche is a unit: the threads of his personality have been drawn together. Heredity and environment contribute something to his development; but we are not so much concerned with what a child brings into the world, or with the experiences he encounters, as with the way he utilizes them, how he turns them to account and what he effects with them. It is all the more necessary that we should understand this point, since we really do not know anything of inherited abilities or disabilities. All we need consider is the possibi
lities of his situation, and the degree in which he has made full use of them.

  The extenuating circumstance for all criminals is that they have a certain degree of cooperation, but not sufficient for the demands of our social life; and on this point the first responsibility rests with the mother. She must understand how to enlarge the bonds of this interest; how to spread the interest in herself until it becomes an interest in other people. She must behave in such a way that the child can be interested in the whole of mankind and his own whole future life. But perhaps the mother does not want the child to be interested in any one else.

  Perhaps she is unhappy in her marriage: the two parents do not agree: they are considering divorce, or they are jealous of each other. Perhaps, therefore, the mother wishes to keep the child all to herself, spoils him and pampers him and will not let him be independent of her. It is quite obvious how limited the development of cooperation will be in such circumstances. Interest in other children is also very important for the development of social interest. Sometimes if one child is the mother's favorite, the other children are not very much inclined to include him in their friendship and interest. When this circumstance is misunderstood, it can serve as the starting point of a criminal career. If there is one boy of outstanding gifts in a family, the boy next to him is often a problem child. The second son, for example, is more amiable and charming, and his older brother feels deprived of affection. It is easy for such a child to deceive himself and intoxicate himself with the feeling that he is neglected. He looks for evidence to prove that his reproach is true. His behavior becomes worse; he is treated with more severity; he finds a confirmation for his belief that he is thwarted and put in a back seat. Because he feels deprived, he begins to steal; he is found out and punished and now he has still more testimony that he is not loved and that other people are his enemies.

  When parents complain of bad times and bad circumstances before their children, they can conduce to a block in the development of social interest. The same thing can happen if they are always making accusations about their relatives or neighbors, always criticizing others and showing bad feeling and prejudice. It would be no wonder if the children grew up with a distorted view of what their fellow men were like; nor should we be surprised if in the end they turned against their parents too. Wherever the social interest is blocked, only an egoistic attitude is left. The child feels: " Why should I do anything for other people?”; and, as he cannot solve the problems of life in this frame of mind, he is bound to hesitate and Look for an evasion and an easy way out. He finds it too difficult to struggle and he does not feel concerned if he hurts others. It is a warfare; and everything is fair in war!

  Let me give you a few examples in which you can trace the development of the criminal pattern. In one family, the second son was a problem child; as far as we could see, he was quite healthy and had no hereditary disabilities. The oldest boy was the favorite, and the younger brother was always trying to catch him up in his achievements, as if he were running a race and trying to beat his pacemaker. His social interest was not developed — he depended very much on his mother and he wanted to get all he could out of her. He had a difficult task in trying to rival his older brother; his brother was at the top of his class in school and he himself was at the bottom. His desire to rule and dominate was very clearly shown. He used to give orders to an old maidservant in the house, march her around the room and drill her like a soldier. The maidservant was fond of him and she let him play at being a general even when he was twenty years of age. He was always worried and overimpressed by the things he had to accomplish; and at die same time he never accomplished anything. He could always get money from his mother when he was in a difficulty, though he was reproached and criticized for his conduct. Suddenly he married and increased all his difficulties. All he cared for, however, was that he had married before his elder brother; and he looked on this as a great triumph. This is witness that his estimate of himself was really very low — he wanted to be a conqueror in such ridiculous things. He was not at all well prepared for marriage and he and his wife always quarreled. When his mother could no longer afford to help him as much as she had done before, he ordered pianos and sold them without paying for them. This was what brought him to prison. In this history we can observe the roots in early childhood of his later career. He grew up overshadowed by an older brother, like a little tree overshadowed by a bigger one. He gathered the impression that he was slighted and neglected in comparison with his good natured older brother.

  Another example I will give is of a girl of twelve, very ambitious and spoiled by both her parents. She had a younger sister of whom she was very jealous and her rivalry showed itself both at home and at school. She was always trying to find instances in which her younger sister was preferred, obtained more candy or more money. One day she stole money from the pockets of her schoolmates, was found out and punished. Fortunately I was able to explain the whole situation to her and free her from the opinion that she could not compete with her younger sister. At the same time, I explained the circumstances to her family and they contrived to stop the rivalry and to avoid giving the impression that the younger sister was preferred. This happened twenty years ago. The girl is now a very honest woman, married, with a child of her own, and she has made no great mistakes in her life since that time.

  We have already considered the situations in which the development of children is especially endangered; but I should like to recall them briefly at this point. We must emphasize them, since, if the findings of Individual Psychology are right, it is only by recognizing the effect of such situations on the criminal's outlook that we can really help him to cooperative activity. The three main types of children with special difficulties are: first, children with imperfect organs; secondly, pampered children; and thirdly, neglected children. Children with imperfect organs feel deprived of their birthright by nature, and, unless their interest in others is specially trained, they are apt to be more than usually preoccupied with themselves. They look for opportunities of ruling others, and I have seen a case where such a boy, feeling humiliated because a girl rejected his advances, persuaded a younger and more stupid boy to kill her. Pampered children remain anchored to the parents who spoil them — they cannot spread their interest to the rest of the world. No child is wholly neglected or it could not live through the first months of infancy; but we find children we may call neglected among orphans, illegitimate children, unwanted children, ugly and deformed children. It is easily understood that we find among criminals two main types — the Ugly-neglected and the Handsome-pampered.

  I have tried among criminals with whom I have been in contact myself, and in the descriptions of crime I have read in books and newspapers, to find the structure of the criminal personality and I have always found that the key of Individual Psychology can give us an understanding of the circumstances. Let me choose a few further illustrations from an old German book by Anton von Feuerbach. I may remark in passing that it is often in old books that I have found the best descriptions of criminal psychology.

  (1) The case of Conrad K., who murdered his father with the help of a servant.

  The father had neglected the boy, treated him cruelly, and mishandled the whole family. Once the boy struck back at him and his father brought him before the courts. The judge said: "You have a wicked and quarrelsome father and I can see no way out." You notice how the judge himself provided the boy with an excuse. The family tried in vain to find a remedy for their troubles. They were confronted with a difficult problem and in despair. The father took a woman of bad reputation to live with him and drove his son out of the house. The boy made the acquaintance of a day laborer who had a passion for putting out hens' eyes. The laborer counseled him to kill his father. He hesitated because of his mother; but the situation went from bad to worse. After long deliberations, the son agreed, and killed his father with the aid of the laborer. Here we see how the son was not able to spread his social interest even to
a father. He was still deeply related to his mother and esteemed her highly. Before he could pierce through the remainder of his social interest, he needed to have extenuating circumstances suggested. It was only when he gained support from the day laborer, with his passion for cruelty, that he could intoxicate himself into committing the crime.

  (2) Margaret Zwanziger, called "the famous poison murderess."

  She was a charity child, in appearance small and deformed; therefore, as Individual Psychologists would say, stimulated to be vain and anxious to attract attention. She was grovelingly polite. After many adventures, which brought her nearly to despair, she tried three times to poison women in the hope of securing their husbands for herself. She felt deprived and could not think of any other way to "get her own back." She pretended pregnancy and attempted suicide in order to secure these men. In her autobiography (so many criminals delight to compose autobiographies) she writes, giving unconscious testimony to the views of Individual Psychology, but unable to understand her statement: " Whenever I did anything wicked, I thought, No one is ever sorry for me: why should I worry if I make others sorry?”

  In these words we can see how she works up to the crime, drives herself on, and provides extenuating circumstances. It is a remark I often hear when I propose cooperation and interest in others:—" But others don't show any interest in me!" My answer is always: "Somebody has to begin. If the others are not cooperative it is not your affair. My advice is that you should begin and not care whether the others are cooperative."