Volume 2

Understanding human nature / by Alfred Adler.

  • Adler, Alfred, 1870-1937.
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Understanding human nature / by Alfred Adler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    titude, the constant search for the elevation of one’s own personality. The vain role is always that of expectation and acquisition. Contrast your vain person with that other individual who shows a well developed social feeling, who goes through life with the question, 4‘What can I give?”, and you will see the enormous differences in character and in value immediately. And so we arrive at a point of view which people have understood for thousands of years. It is expressed in a famous Biblical line: “It is more blessed to give than to re¬ ceive.” If we reflect over the meaning of these words, the expression of great experience in human nature, we rec¬ ognize that it is the attitude and mood of giving which is meant here. It is the mood of giving, or serving, of help¬ ing, which brings with itself a certain compensation and psychic harmony, like the gift of the gods which takes root in him who gives it away! On the other hand the acquisitive people are usually dis¬ contented, being occupied solely with the thought of what they must still achieve and still possess, in order to be happy. The acquisitive man, whose look is never directed toward the necessities and needs of others, and to whom the misfortune of others is a joy, has no place in his sys¬ tem for reconciliation and peace with life. He demands the unbending submission of others to laws which his egoism has dictated. He demands a different heaven from the one which exists, a different way of thinking and feeling; in short, his dissatisfaction and immodesty are as execrable as everything else which is characteristic of him. There are the other and more primitive forms of vanity which we find in those people who dress conspicuously, or with a certain sense of their own importance, who deck themselves out like monkeys in order to make a brave ap¬ pearance, in much the same way that primitive man at-