The student will complete the discussion assignment in paragraph format, answering the questions given in the Discussion assigned week. The student will post one thread of at least 400 words by 11:59 p.m. (ET) on Thursday of the assigned Module. The student will answer each question thoroughly and must use a minimum of the three required scholarly journal articles published within the last three years.

This discussion board centers on Adlerian and Psychoanalytic therapy. Please create a new thread and answer the following:

1. Compare and contrast the two therapies.

2. What are some of their strengths and weaknesses?

3. Which therapy would lend itself to Biblical integration?

4. What are some multicultural aspects to consider?

5. End your post with a lingering question for each of these therapies.

Read: Tan: Chapters 5 – 6

Chapters 5

Adlerian Therapy

Alfred Adler (1870–1937), the founder of individual psychology (Adlerian therapy), was originally part of the inner circle of Sigmund Freud’s Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and even served as its president and editor of its journal. However, Adler had substantial disagreements with many of Freud’s psychoanalytic views, which Freud could not tolerate. Adler therefore parted ways with Freud in 1911, founding his own school of therapy as well as a new society and journal. Individual psychology, or Adlerian therapy, emphasizes social motivation and subjective perception more than sexual drives in human behavior. In particular, Adler was much less deterministic and more optimistic in his view of human nature. He focused more on the significant influence of life goals on behavior, the crucial role of a basic striving for superiority in every individual, the importance of social interest and connecting with the community, the effects of birth order, and especially the substantial influence of a person’s core assumptions and beliefs (erroneous or valid) about their lifestyle, with some freedom of choice (Corey 2021).

Adler’s great impact on contemporary counseling and psychotherapy is not limited to his own individual psychology or Adlerian therapy school. His theoretical ideas and therapeutic techniques have significantly influenced so-called neo-Freudians such as Karen Horney and Erich Fromm, as well as founders of other schools of therapy like Carl Rogers and Albert Ellis, as well as Viktor Frankl and Rollo May. He also helped to popularize his ideas for the general public, who often associate Adler with the concept of the inferiority complex.

Biographical Sketch of Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler was born on February 7, 1870, in a small Austrian village near Vienna. He was the second son (and third child) in a family of six children with Hungarian-Jewish parents. He grew up in an ethnically diverse neighborhood and was more Viennese than Jewish in his identity. He became a Protestant when he was thirty-four years old.

Adler had an unhappy early childhood, filled with emotionally painful experiences and various serious illnesses, including a brush with death due to pneumonia when he was five years old. Two years earlier, when Adler was three years old, a younger brother died in a bed next to him. Adler himself was seriously injured in a couple of bad street accidents near his home. His older brother was very successful and talented, and Adler was deeply envious of him and felt inferior to him. Adler did not do well academically as a young child, so much so that his teacher advised his father to apprentice him to a shoemaker so that he could learn a trade rather than continue in school. However, his father ignored this teacher’s advice and instead encouraged Adler to pursue further schooling. Adler did so and ultimately did well academically. He chose to study medicine at the University of Vienna and graduated with his medical degree in 1895. His childhood experiences obviously had a strong effect on his subsequent ideas, such as those regarding inferiority and the inferiority complex and the basic striving for superiority or mastery and perfection.

Adler married Raissa Epstein in 1897, and they had four children, two of whom also pursued careers in psychiatry and psychotherapy. His wife, who was from Russia, was seriously committed to socialism and feminism. She had a significant influence on Adler and his emphasis on the equality of women and men.

In 1898 Adler began his private practice as an ophthalmologist but changed to general practice. Later, he specialized in neurology and psychiatry. As a practicing psychiatrist, he took a keen interest in the whole person, paying attention to the psychological, social, and physical aspects of an individual’s life.

In 1902 Freud invited Adler to become part of the psychoanalytic group that Freud was forming at the time. Adler was one of the four original members of the group, and in 1910 he succeeded Freud as president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. However, he had serious disagreements with many of Freud’s ideas, especially with Freud’s emphasis on sexual drives. Adler focused more on social motivations and subjective perceptions in explaining human behavior. He also did not undergo psychoanalysis for himself. Freud was unable to tolerate Adler’s significant differences with him, and Adler parted ways with Freud in 1911. Adler founded the Society for Free Psychoanalytic Research or Investigation, which was later renamed the Society for Individual Psychology, and in 1914 he and a colleague launched the Journal of Individual Psychology.

Adler interrupted his theoretical work to serve as a medical officer in the Austrian army during World War I. After the war, he demonstrated his social interest, especially in children, by establishing over thirty child guidance clinics in the Vienna school system. He also began training other professionals to use his ideas and the techniques of individual psychology, which focused on the whole individual. Adler advocated for school reforms and better child-rearing practices and spoke out against prejudices that were responsible for conflict.

Adler also wrote for the general public and was able to popularize his ideas and the methods of individual psychology. His book Understanding Human Nature (1959) became a widely read bestseller in the United States.

Adler first visited the United States in 1926 and later made many trips to lecture in the United States and other countries. In 1935 he and his wife moved to New York, where he held a faculty position at Long Island College of Medicine. Adler kept a very busy, grueling schedule. Although his friends urged him to slow down, Adler ignored their warnings. He died of a heart attack on May 28, 1937, in Aberdeen, Scotland, during a lecture tour. After Adler’s death, Rudolph Dreikurs played a major role in the expansion of individual psychology in the United States.

For further information on Adler’s life and work, see Bottome (1957), Orgler (1963), Rattner (1983), E. Hoffman (1994), Mosak and Maniacci (1999), J. Carlson, Watts, and Maniacci (2006), J. Carlson and Maniacci (2012), J. Carlson and Englar-Carlson (2017), Sweeney (2019), and Sperry and Binensztok (2019).

Major Theoretical Ideas of Adlerian Therapy

Perspective on Human Nature

Adler’s perspective on human nature was much less pessimistic and deterministic and more optimistic than Freud’s view. Adler emphasized the individual’s freedom to responsibly choose life goals and purpose in life, which can guide one’s life and lifestyle. He has therefore been considered a forerunner to the existential school of therapy by existential therapists such as May and Frankl, who also emphasized one’s freedom to choose and be fully responsible for one’s own life. Although Adler acknowledged that a person’s basic approach to life is already formed within the first six years of childhood, he focused more on one’s interpretation of the meaning of early childhood experiences and a longing for social connectedness as crucial motivations of human behavior. Adler also emphasized the teleological, or goal-oriented, nature of human beings, focusing on conscious choice more than the unconscious, in seeking fulfillment and meaning in life.

A major aspect of Adler’s theory is his description of inferiority feelings, which are seen as normal, occurring in every human person. Every individual has some area of deficiency that will lead to feelings of inferiority. To compensate for such feelings, however, a person will be motivated to strive for mastery, competence, or success: a basic striving for “superiority” or perfection, but not necessarily in an arrogant way. Adler was therefore basically optimistic in his view of human beings as capable of positive compensation for inferiority with a creative striving for superiority.

Adler also emphasized the whole person or total personality of an individual, with attention to all aspects of functioning, including the social and systemic context and the psychological and physical dimensions. He called his approach to therapy individual psychology to emphasize that it focused on the whole person in social context instead of being reductionistic and narrowly attending to only the internal psychological or biological aspects of the individual.

The major theoretical ideas of Adlerian therapy are subjective perception or interpretation of reality; unity and holistic development of personality (including goal-oriented and purposeful behavior, inferiority and a basic striving for superiority, and the lifestyle of an individual); social interest and community feeling; the life tasks; and birth order (see Corey 2021, 99–104).

Subjective Perception of Reality

Adlerians take a phenomenological approach to understanding their clients by focusing on how a client perceives or interprets reality and gives meaning to personal experiences. In other words, the crucial element is a client’s subjective experience of reality in terms of their own perceptions, interpretations, assumptions, beliefs, values, thoughts, and feelings, not some objective reality out there. This subjective, phenomenological view of the client’s experience of reality as a major influence on human behavior is a key concept not only in Adlerian therapy but also in many other contemporary approaches to counseling and therapy, such as existential therapy, reality therapy, cognitive behavior therapy, rational emotive behavior therapy, solution-focused brief therapy, family therapy, and feminist therapy (Corey 2021, 125). Eventually attempts have been made to integrate Adlerian therapy with cognitive and constructive therapies (R. Watts 2003).

Unity and Holistic Development of Personality

Adler viewed human personality holistically, with the individual developing in a unified way by self-selecting a basic life goal formed in the context of the person’s unique life experiences as well as specific family, social, and cultural environments. The interpersonal relationships in the social context of an individual are considered in Adlerian therapy much more than the person’s internal or psychological dynamics.

Three major concepts in Adlerian therapy relating to human personality development in a holistic way are goal-oriented and purposeful behavior, inferiority and a basic striving for superiority, and lifestyle.

Goal-Oriented and Purposeful Behavior

In addition to Freud, with whom he increasingly disagreed over time, Adler was also influenced by several significant historical figures, including Pierre Janet, who asserted that the general reason for neurosis is an underlying sense of inferiority; Friedrich Nietzsche, who stressed the central significance of the individual as well as the striving for perfection; Karl Marx and his ideas on socialism and social forces as the major influence on human behavior; and especially Hans Vaihinger, a philosopher who wrote The Psychology of “As If” (1911), emphasizing that people form their own perceptions of truth or reality and live by their own self-selected purposes and fictional goals (Parrott 2003).

Adlerians therefore view human behavior as being goal oriented and purposeful, motivated more by future goals than past experiences, a teleological explanation rather than a deterministic one. Fictional finalism is a term often used by Adlerians to refer to a self-selected, imagined life goal that influences an individual’s behavior and actions. However, Adler himself eventually replaced this term with others such as “goal of perfection” or “guiding self-ideal” to refer to a person’s basic striving for mastery or superiority (R. E. Watts & Holden 1994). Clients can choose their own subjective life goal, which will help them to act in ways consistent with it and to perceive and interpret their experiences accordingly.

Inferiority and Striving for Superiority

Adler assumed that fundamental feelings of inferiority and the need for their compensation expressed in a basic striving for superiority or perfection or completion are innate in all human beings. Earlier he had written about organ inferiority, referring to physical defects or personality deficiencies, in the causation of neurosis (1917). However, Adler was optimistic that human beings can compensate for their feelings of inferiority originating in childhood by striving for superiority, competence, and mastery, resulting often in creative and successful achievements in life.

Nevertheless, feelings of inferiority can become abnormal when they form an inferiority complex, in which an individual appears to self and to others as someone unable to solve a problem in a socially useful way (Ansbacher & Ansbacher 1956). Abnormal feelings of inferiority can also result in a superiority complex, whereby a person appears to self and to others as someone who is capable and strong, but the external appearance of self-importance and inflated self-confidence actually mask deep and abnormal feelings of inferiority (Sharf 2016).

Lifestyle

A person’s lifestyle in the Adlerian context refers to a plan for living or a style of life based on one’s fundamental beliefs, a lifestyle that pulls together reality for the person and lends meaning to life experiences. One’s lifestyle is thus the typical way that one lives or moves toward a self-selected life goal. Adlerians view people as proactive participants in life and society. Although they believe that an individual’s life goal is mainly set within the first six years of life, they also believe one can still correct faulty or invalid assumptions and beliefs and consciously choose a more appropriate life goal based on more accurate and valid assumptions and beliefs and hence a new lifestyle guided by the revised life goal (Corey 2021).

Social Interest and Community Feeling

Adler’s ideas about social interest and community feeling may be his most unique and important theoretical contributions to individual psychology (Ansbacher 1992). Social interest refers to a person’s sense of empathy and identification with others and interest in achieving a better future for all humanity. Social interest is usually demonstrated through shared social activities with respect for others. Adler viewed social interest as a crucial characteristic of mental health. Community feeling is closely associated with social interest and refers to a sense of belonging and social connectedness with others in the contexts of family and society and the world (Corey 2021).

The Life Tasks

Adler described the following three universal life tasks that everyone seeks to successfully accomplish: (1) the social task of building friendships; (2) the love-marriage task of achieving intimacy; and (3) the occupational task of work, making significant contributions to society (see Dreikurs & Mosak 1966). Three other life tasks that Adlerians have added are these: (4) the self-acceptance task of learning to get along with oneself (Dreikurs & Mosak 1967); (5) the development-of-spirituality task, which involves growing in one’s life goals, meaning, values, and relationship with the universe (Mosak & Dreikurs 1967); and (6) the parenting and family task (Dinkmeyer, Dinkmeyer, & Sperry 1987).

Birth Order

Adler viewed birth order and sibling relationships as another crucial factor influencing a person’s social relationships and lifestyle. He emphasized that the psychological, or perceived, birth order of the child is more significant than the actual, chronological, birth order. He provided possible influences of birth order on the oldest child (who is treated like an only child, with some pampering, until the next child comes along), the second child (who must share attention with another child, often with some competitive struggle), the middle child (who often feels forgotten or squeezed out and can be a problem child or a peacemaker), the youngest child (who tends to be the most pampered child), and the only child (who is often pampered by parents and may have trouble sharing with others) (see Corey 2021, 103–104). Adlerians often criticize birth-order research that focuses only on actual position or birth order in the family. A good example that illustrates the need to look more at the psychological birth order rather than simply at actual birth order in a family is provided by Sharf, using the model of a family with three children, in which the first child is one year older than the second (or middle child), who in turn is twelve years older than the youngest (or third child). Adlerian therapists may approach this specific family as consisting of two subsystems: the first as a family with a younger and an older sibling (the first two children), and the second as a family with an only child, with the youngest child viewed more like an only child (2016, 132).

Therapeutic Process and Relationship

In helping their clients, Adlerian therapists use a model that is more psychoeducational than medical. They do not view their clients as mentally ill and in need of a cure. Instead, Adlerian therapists believe that the major problem for their clients is that they are discouraged in dealing with problems and struggles in living. Encouragement is therefore the most important therapeutic method employed in Adlerian therapy, which also involves directly informing, teaching, and guiding clients to help them change their faulty assumptions and the mistaken goals in their private logic or thinking, so that they can be reeducated to live more on the useful rather than the useless side of life. Clients will then experience more social interest and community feeling, with greater courage and self-confidence to live this way.

The therapeutic relationship between the Adlerian therapist and the client is a warm and collaborative one: they can work together to make the changes necessary for the client to live a more meaningful and fulfilling life. The Adlerian therapist focuses on strongly encouraging and affirming the client, in order to counter the significant discouragement that often brings clients into therapy in the first place. The Adlerian therapist is therefore active and directive, but also very empathic, supportive, and encouraging. The client needs to be open and willing to disclose personal and family information. For example, the Adlerian therapist will use a questionnaire to assess the client’s family constellation: relationships and experiences with parents, siblings, and others who are living with the client at home. The therapist will also ask the client to provide early recollections, memories of specific events in childhood that the client is able to reexperience, in order to further assess how the client views self and others, as well as envisioning the future. The Adlerian therapist uses such methods to assess the client’s lifestyle, so that clearer goals for therapy can be collaboratively set. Adlerian therapy tends to be relatively short term, usually lasting from several months to a year or so.

Some of Adlerian therapy’s main psychoeducational goals for the client include fostering social interest, countering discouragement, reducing feelings of inferiority, and modifying faulty assumptions and mistaken goals—that is, changing a person’s lifestyle, changing faulty motivation and values, encouraging an individual to have a sense of equality with others, and helping the client to become a productive member of society (see Mosak & Maniacci 2008, 79).

Major Therapeutic Techniques and Interventions

Adlerian therapy is usually conducted in the following flexible and sometimes overlapping phases (Dreikurs 1967):

Establishing a therapeutic relationship

Conducting an assessment of the client’s dynamics

Providing insight and interpretation

Facilitating reorientation and reeducation

More-specific therapeutic techniques and interventions in each of these four major phases of Adlerian therapy are here briefly described. Adlerian therapists are quite pragmatic and eclectic in the specific therapeutic techniques they use to help clients achieve their therapeutic goals (e.g., see J. Carlson & Englar-Carlson 2017; Sperry & Binensztok 2019; Sweeney 2019).

Establishing a Therapeutic Relationship

The Adlerian therapist works at forming a warm, empathic, and collaborative relationship with the client, based on genuine caring, encouragement, and mutual respect and trust. The therapist does not rush to problem-solve but instead provides much support and understanding to facilitate client exploration and disclosure.

In this first phase of therapy, the Adlerian therapist employs the following therapeutic techniques: listening and attending with deep empathy, sensitively understanding and tracking the client’s subjective experiences as far as possible, clarifying and setting goals, and making tentative interpretations of the possible purposes of the client’s behaviors and symptoms (Corey 2021).

Conducting an Assessment of the Client’s Dynamics

This second phase of Adlerian therapy uses two main types of interview: the subjective interview and the objective interview (Dreikurs 1997). In the subjective interview, the Adlerian therapist, through active and demonstrated deep interest, supports the client in telling their life story as fully as possible. The therapist attempts to identify the purposes and meanings of the client’s life experiences. Toward the end of this subjective interview, the client is often asked whether they have anything else to share with the therapist so that the therapist can better understand the client and their concerns. To further clarify the client’s problems and goals, Adlerian therapists often end the subjective interview by asking “The Question”: “How would your life be different, and what would you be doing differently, if you did not have this symptom or problem?” (Corey 2021, 109). A shorter version of The Question is this: “What would be different if you were well?” (Parrott 2003, 135).

The objective interview seeks to obtain information in the following areas: the history of the client’s problems; precipitating events, if any; medical history, with past and present medication usage; social history; reasons for the client coming to therapy at this specific time; the client’s way of coping and dealing with life tasks; and an assessment of the client’s lifestyle (Corey 2021). Adler conceptualized lifestyle as consisting of four major components: the self-concept, the view of oneself based on reality; the self-ideal, the view of oneself as one would like to be; the picture of the world, one’s view of the reasons for things working the way they do in the external world; and one’s ethical convictions. This lifestyle, meaning basic strategy or map for living, influences one’s choices and behaviors. There are three major “entrance gates to mental life” that Adlerian therapists explore with clients in order to assess and better understand their lifestyles: birth order and the family constellation, early recollections or memories, and dreams (Parrott 2003).

Birth Order and Family Constellation. Birth order, or perceived psychological birth order, is an important part of the assessment of the client’s family background and experiences or family constellation. With the client, the Adlerian therapist explores not only the client’s birth order, but also experiences with the mother and father, siblings, and others in the family; the marital relationship between the client’s parents, including how they dealt with conflicts; and the disciplinary methods they used with the children. Adler viewed such family-of-origin experiences as having a crucial effect on the personality development of an individual. Early Recollections or Memories. Adler emphasized the crucial significance of a person’s earliest memories or recollections of specific, clear events, especially in childhood, for understanding the client’s present lifestyle or current view of life. The Adlerian therapist often guides a client in recalling such early memories or recollections: “I would like to hear about your early memories. Think back to when you were very young, as early as you can remember (before the age of ten), and tell me something that happened one time” (Corey 2021, 111). In a shorter version of this request, the therapist says: “Think as far back as you can and tell me your earliest memory from your childhood years” (Parrott 2003, 126). The therapist will ask for more details about a specific recollection and not settle for vague, general memories. Clients often provide several specific early recollections, which the Adlerian therapist will record in order to identify possible themes that may be connected to the client’s current lifestyle or view of life.

Dreams. Adler viewed dreams not as wish fulfillments (as Freud did) but as an individual’s attempts to deal with future difficulties. The moods or emotions experienced in a dream may also be related to the next day’s anticipated events. Adler further interpreted dreams as possible reflections of progress (or the lack of it) in Adlerian therapy. He noted that dreams may become more active as therapy progresses more successfully and the client makes more therapeutic changes in life and lifestyle. Dreams can therefore be used—in conjunction with family constellation, including birth order, and early recollections or memories—to assess a client’s lifestyle in Adlerian therapy.

In addition to these three major ways of lifestyle assessment, Adlerian therapists may also use two others: assessment of a client’s basic mistakes and assets (Sharf 2016, 138–139). Basi

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Compare and contrast the two therapies What are some of their strengths and weaknesses?

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