The drive for self

As the founding father of Individual Psychology, ranked alongside Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as one of the world's most inspired social thinkers, Alfred Adler fashioned a new understanding of personality that took the search for self out of the shadows of Freudian gloom and placed it firmly in the hands of the individual. Here at last is the first major biography of a man who has had a profound influence not only on modern and popular psychology but on the very way we think about ourselves.

From Adler's early life in fin de siecle Vienna, to his break with psychoanalysis and later life in America, The Drive for Self offers a compelling portrait of both the man and his times. An early intimate of Freud and his inner circle, Adler was one of the original four participants in the Wednesday Psychological Society that became the nucleus for worldwide psychoanalysis.

Impressed with Adler's brilliance, Freud referred many patients to him, including his own brother-in-law and by 1910 Adler was appointed president of their psychoanalytic group and editor of their professional journal. Yet slowly and steadily, the relationship between the two brilliant men deteriorated into bitter and lifelong enmity, as Adler refused to toe the psychoanalytic line. When Adler directly challenged basic psychoanalytic dogma about unconscious motivation and childhood sexuality, an outraged Freud removed him from his presidential and editorial posts.

Hoffman throws new light on Freud by examining in depth the intense and often venomous relationship that existed between the two men - revealing both Freud's misuse of power and Adler's courage in defying both Freud and his powerful circle to begin his own school of thought.

Individual Psychology ultimately reflects the life of its founder. Optimistic at its core, it focuses on the uniqueness of each person, describing us as primarily social, not biological beings. Far from being driven by forces we cannot see or control, we actively direct and create our own growth, our own future.

Such is the way Adler lived: From his middle-class Jewish boyhood as a small sickly child in Vienna and an early encounter with death, to his pledge to become a healer and eventual achievement of international recognition, Adler overcame feelings of inferiority and strove for a sense of accomplishment, or what he called superiority.

Here in Adler's life is the basis for so many of his theories and terms, including such popular phrases as the inferiority complex, over-compensation, and life-style, that now permeate modern psychology, education, psychotherapy, consulting, and social work, as well as our very perceptions of our own lives.

With a cast of characters that includes Trotsky and Nijinsky, and set in a time of great social upheaval and change in both Europe and America, The Drive for Self is a fascinating read. Pulling from hitherto unpublished archival materials as well as extensive interviews with Adler's two surviving children, Dr. Hoffman has given us an intense and compelling portrait of a man whose impassioned life's work has proven beneficial to the world.