The practice and theory of individual psychology / [Alfred Adler].

  • Adler, Alfred, 1870-1937.
Date:
1929
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The practice and theory of individual psychology / [Alfred Adler]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the possibility of direct aggression, circuitous routes which possess vaguely active, sometimes masochistic and always self-torturing characteristics, are preferred. Generally we encounter a mixture of psychic stirrings and disease-symptoms making their appearance either synchronously during the same period of illness, or following one another. When torn from their context in the disease-mechanism, they at times give the im¬ pression of being contradictory or of indicating a split in personality. The context shows that the patient can draw from two contradictory lines to reach his ideal situation of imagined superiority, just as he actually, with the same object in view, will argue correctly or incorrectly, and judge and feel quite independently of his goal. We must, on all occasions, expect the neurotic to possess those view-points, sensations, memories, affects, character-traits and symptoms that are to be presupposed in him by reason of his recognized life-line and goal. Thus the neurotic in order to conquer along the line of obedience, submissiveness, “ hysterical impression¬ ability ”, in order to chain other people down through his weakness, fear, passivity, need for tenderness—has at his hand all kinds of reminders, of fear-inspiring pictures of horror, affect-preparations and identincations with properly adapted feelings and character-traits, in the same way that a neurotic, subject to compulsions, possesses definite principles, laws and prohibitions supposed to apply to himself only, but which in reality invest his sense of personality with a god-like power. As a goal we always find the acquisition of some ideal “ income” for which the patient battles with the means his immediate experiences have shown to be the most suitable, just as tenaciously as a neurotic suffering from compulsion of meeting with accident, struggles for his material ‘‘income”. The same holds true in those cases where active affects like rage, anger and jealousy make the path to pre-eminence secure. These latter are frequently represented by attacks of pain, fainting-spells or epileptic seizures. (Cf. “Trotz und Gehorsam ” in Heilen und Bilden.) All neurotic symptoms have as their object the task of ensuring the safety of the patient’s feeling of personality and the life-line with which he has identified himself. In order to prove his