Alfred Alder 1879-1937“It is the feeling of inferiority, inadequacy and insecurity that determines the goal of an individual’s existence.”
Alder and Sigmund Freud were colleagues in the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society but Alder never bought into Freud’s theory that humans were primarily guided by the unconscious mind. Alder believed that birth order and what he termed the “inferiority complex” played a significant role in the development of the human psyche and that even very young children consciously seek power in their world.
Alder believed we are motivated by our goals and our perceptions of ourselves, factual or not, and he understood that a singular fixation on a goal and our beliefs or “fictions” about ourselves and the likeliness of achieving that goal can make us intractable and resistant to change. He wrote: “The hardest thing for humans to do is to know themselves and to change themselves.”
Yet millions of people are seeking to do just that through coaching. Change can be hard but the motives to change can be so great that the person is driven to do something different and break a pattern of thought and/or behavior. A hundred years after Alder was developing and lecturing on his theories, we are finding pathways as individuals and as a society to embrace change and examine and discard the “fictions” that keep us stuck.
I think Alfred Alder would be very proud.
