history about ALFRED ADLER

Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler
Born	February 7, 1870 Rudolfsheim near Vienna,Austria-Hungary (nowRudolfsheim-Fünfhaus, Vienna,Austria)
Died	May 28, 1937 (aged 67) Aberdeen, Scotland
Residence	Austria
Nationality	Austrian
Ethnicity	Jewish
Occupation	Psychotherapist, psychiatrist
Known for	Individual Psychology
Spouse	Raissa Epstein

Alfred Adler was born at Mariahilfer Straße 208^[6] in Rudolfsheim, a place near Vienna at the time but today part of Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus, the 15th district of Vienna. He was the second child of seven children of a Hungarian-born, Jewish grain merchant and his wife.^[7] Early on, he developed rickets, which kept him from walking until he was four years old. Hearing the doctor saying to his father "Your boy is lost" was at the age of four when He almost died of pneumonia. And it was at this age that he decided to be a physician.^[8]

Alfred was an active, popular child and an average student who was also known for his competitive attitude toward his older brother, Sigmund.

In 1895 Adler received a medical degree from the University of Vienna. During his college years, he had become attached to a group of socialist students, among which he had found his wife-to-be, Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein, an intellectual and social activist from Russia studying in Vienna. They married in 1897 and had four children, two of whom became psychiatrists.

Author, journalist, and Wiccan priestess Margot Adler is Adler's granddaughter.

Alfred Adler (February 7, 1870 – May 28, 1937) was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology.^[1] In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement as a core member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He was the first major figure to break away from psychoanalysis to form an independent school ofpsychotherapy and personality theory.^[2] This was after Freud declared Adler's ideas as too contrary, leading to an ultimatum to all members of the Society (which Freud had shepherded) to drop Adler or be expelled, disavowing the right to dissent (Makari, 2008). Following this split, Adler would come to have an enormous, independent effect on the disciplines of counseling and psychotherapy as they developed over the course of the 20th century (Ellenberger, 1970). He influenced notable figures in subsequent schools of psychotherapy such as Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis.^[3] His writings preceded, and were at times surprisingly consistent with, later neo-Freudian insights such as those evidenced in the works of Otto Rank, Karen Horney,Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm.

Adler emphasized the importance of equality in preventing various forms of psychopathology, and espoused the development of social interest and democratic family structures for raising children.^[4] His most famous concept is the inferiority complex which speaks to the problem of self-esteem and its negative effects on human health (e.g. sometimes producing a paradoxical superiority striving). His emphasis on power dynamics is rooted in the philosophy of Nietzsche, whose works were published a few decades before Adler's. However, Adler's conceptualization of the "Will to Power" focuses on the individual's creative power to change for the better.^[5] Adler argued for holism, viewing the individual holistically rather than reductively, the latter being the dominant lens for viewing human psychology. Adler was also among the first in psychology to argue in favor of feminism making the case that power dynamics between men and women (and associations with masculinity and femininity) are crucial to understanding human psychology (Connell, 1995). Adler is considered, along with Freud and Jung, to be one of the three founding figures of depth psychology, which emphasizes the unconscious and psychodynamics (Ellenberger, 1970; Ehrenwald, 1991).