Theory of Personality Development - Essay Example

Running Head: ALFRED ADLER’S IDEAS Alfred Adler’s Ideas [The Writer’s Name] [The Name of the Institution] Alfred Adler’s Ideas Introduction Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology continues to be recognized by counselors as a popular theoretical orientation (Smith, 1982). According to Adler (1931/1958, 1956), one of the most important elements in conceptualizing clients and their difficulties is the concept of lifestyle. Alfred Adler devised a theory of personality' development that was holistic, social, teleological, and phenomenological. Practical applications of Adlerian ideas and methodologies have been both provocative and therapeutically and educationally useful. Though Adler talked and wrote extensively about various aspects of his theory of personality, he did not specify to any great length how children should be trained. (Bruhn, 1992) Additionally, like other socially oriented theorists of his time, he was a practicing psychotherapist who built his theory mostly on observation and inferences from therapy. Adler was the first theorist to emphasize the fundamental social nature of people. According to Adler (1927, 1930, 1931/1980), people are inherently motivated to engage in social activities, relate to other people, and acquire a style of life that is fundamentally social in nature. Each person is born with the capacity to develop his or her social interest. Social interest is a person's ability to interact in a cooperative way with people that leads to a healthy society. In this way people develop a sense of belonging and tend to contribute to others in the society. While a person is born with social interest, it must be raised and grown all along. How an individual engages and develops this social interest shapes his or her personality. Personality is also shaped by the choices people make to satisfy their needs. These needs effect a person's behavior because, according to Adierian principles, all behavior is purposive and goal-directed (Thompson & Rudolph, 1996). Therefore, people act in ways that meet their needs and develop their perception of social interest. Discussion Adler believes that each individual is different from all others and that the creative self within each of us styles this unique personality. Adlerians, as opposed to most behaviorists, see the environment and heredity as supplies to be used by the creative self, which molds those supplies into the life style. Heredity and environment are influential, but never deterministic. If two identical twins were given exactly similar environmental experiences, there would be two similar but uniquely different individuals. (Burton, Harris, 1955) The individual always subjectively interprets factors that impinge upon him from heredity and the environment. We make of life what we decide best will fit our purposes. According to Adler, at birth human beings are small and helpless; we are totally reliant upon other people for existence. As we grow our minds develop faster than our bodies so that we can see objects that we desire and are unable to reach, sense danger and are unable to move in order to avoid it. (Boeree, 2006) For a time during the crucial years of personality development, everyone about us is larger and more capable. This contributes to feelings of inadequacy and a desire for power to overcome the feeling of being less than. Adler saw the individual's alignment with the outside world as critical to both assessment and intervention, and he believed that the raw material with which the Adierian counselor works is the relationship of the individual to the problems of the outside world (Ansbacher & Ansbacher). The individual's healthy functioning is thus based upon equilibrium internally and alignment externally. Adler (1964) saw this alignment as critical to survival, asserting that "the conditions of our terrestrial existence are hostile to the person whose contact with them is imperfect, or who is not in harmony with them" (p. 49). Adler (1979) advanced the belief that individual strivings have direction and are unified around a goal. Further, he believed that this movement was a unique and creative endeavor of the individual. "The direction of the psychological movement has a goal of perfection, security, completion, always in the meaning and interpretation of the individual" (p. 51). On the subject of self-determination, Adler (as cited in Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956) believed that the individual's own creative choices are the critical determinants of one's attitude and relationship to the larger social context. Another key element in Individual Psychology is the idea that life presents challenges in the form of critical life tasks. Adler (as cited in Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956) articulated them as problems of behavior toward others, problems of occupation, and problems of love. These three arise from the inseparable bond that of necessity links men together for association, for the provision of livelihood, and for the care of offspring, (p. 42) Adier's approach to understanding the individual was to focus upon his or her unique approach to these tasks. This is the method of operation by which the individual endeavors to surmount deficiencies and address the life tasks. This represents a critical function of Individual Psychology which, according to Adler (1979), "endeavors to delineate the individual form of creative activity—which is the life style" (p. 70). The holistic nature of humans is what enables compensation—the force by which one's strengths may balance or surmount one's weaknesses. This striving to overcome actual or perceived inferiorities—the will to power—is seen as the common driving force in all humans. Further, humans are embedded in the larger social environment, within which their unique strivings and mastering of the life tasks take place. Alignment with the environment is critical to the individual's health and survival and is necessary for the functioning of society at large. The individual and environment are mutually interdependent. Dysfunction occurs when people, because of inadequate preparation in childhood, allow feelings of inferiority to drive their withdrawal from society rather than energize their normal striving for superiority. Pathological feelings of inadequacy cause them to protect themselves from confrontation with the life tasks. They instead choose a direction on the "useless" side of life, retreating from productive involvement with society. The Adierian concept of mental health was well articulated by Wolfe (as cited in Mosak, 1979): "The psychologically healthy or normal individual is one who has developed his social interest, who is willing to commit himself to life and the life tasks without evasion, excuse, or sideshows" (p. 60). To the Adierian counselor, a person's approach to the life tasks will provide evidence of mental health, neurosis, or psychosis. Adler (1927/2002) pointed out that the psychic life of man is an attempt to establish a position with regard to the demands of social existence. In neurosis and psychosis, the establishment of this position has gone seriously astray. Adierian counselors believe that, as children, each individual develops a cognitive map, or a lifestyle, that guides him or her through life. This map includes the individual's perception of self in relation to the world. It also includes the long-range goals of the individual and the conditions, personal or social, which are requisite for the individual's sense of security. Life presents people with stresses and disruptions that test the lifestyle, and the responses of the individual at these times can also be useful or useless, functional, or dysfunctional. Adler (1969) suggested that dysfunction be measured in relation to the life tasks. A normally functioning person will address life tasks directly, responding affirmatively and without qualification. Adler recognized the coherence of the personality and the unity of the individual in all his or her expressions (Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956). In viewing humans as unitary beings comprised of interdependent parts, Adler the physician also saw in this interdependence the means by which the body compensates for deficiencies. Compensation, the body's physiological response to organ inferiority, represents the Adierian template for psychological adjustment. There is always a temptation to view a client in terms of his present crisis in isolation from his total behavior. If we are able to determine the mistaken goals of the client, we can see that what appears to be a problem of occupation, for example, is really a problem that is reflected in his entire approach toward life, including the tasks of love and socialization. (Ansbacher, 1956) We cannot know all of the factors that went into the development of the client's personality, but still we can understand him. When we determine his purposes, we can know him as a whole. The client's every behavior reflects his subjective purposes, his mistaken goals. Holism Adierian psychologies adopted holism from Jan Smuts (1926/1996). AdIer used the concept in two ways: First, to keep his psychological formulations focused on the indivisible whole of the individual rather than parts or elements of a person (hence the name Individual Psychology); and second, to emphasize that individuals live in contexts (or fields) and must be understood within the social embeddedness of their lives (Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956). In this sense, AdIer was the first systemic therapist. To him, human beings were not merely a collection of traits or parts but rather were active agents, engaged with others, creating and interpreting life within specific communities and cultures. Here, Adier's (1933/1938) psychology of use becomes paramount. Heredity and environment play important roles in human development, but they cannot be fully appreciated until we know what interpretation of them an individual has made and to what use she or he puts these aspects of life. We see the uses to which people put themselves in their interactions with others and in the ways they meet the challenges and tasks of life. In this sense, personality is more than the sum of one's traits and capacities. It is the use to which these traits and capacities are put, and use always evolves into movement and transformative enactments in the world. Personality is the individual's creative exercise or use of self with others in the world. Inferiority Feelings and Striving For Significance Adler (1930/1970) linked inferiority feelings and the striving for superiority (compensation) together as two parts of the same process. Further, he seemed to imply that the former tended to precede the latter. By superiority, of course, Adler again implied a movement toward that which the individual expected would be a better position, even a superior one. Indeed, Adler often used terms like perfection and completion when he wanted to emphasize movement toward a self-determined, fictional goal. But he also used more concrete concepts, like a striving for success or for security, when talking about young children or movement toward more immediate goals. The Individual's Style of Living So returning to Adier's (1933/1938) original conceptualization, human beings are in relatively constant movement from a felt-minus position to a felt-plus. At some point in individual development, a fictional life-goal of perfection or completion is formed, and from that point on, the personality is unified with almost every thought, belief, conviction, feeling, behavior, and interaction aiming the person toward that final goal. As people move through life, therefore, they develop a characteristic style of living, a lifestyle. Family constellation While Adler (1927/1946, 1930/1970, 1932) often referred to the family constellation as a system that included parents and children and even extended family, he would quickly dismiss larger systemic considerations to focus on essentially five birth positions. In actual therapeutic practice, Adler approached the examination of birth order phenomenological even though his written and oral presentations tended to offer rather concrete and detailed descriptions of birth order, similar to Toman's (1993) ordinal descriptions. When birth order is used phenomenological, we understand these positions to be vantage points from which individuals view life. If someone is the oldest child in the family, there are many ways in which she or he can be the oldest: The range of possibilities is actually quite wide. What the oldest is unlikely to do is adopt the range of viewpoints associated with being the second-of-only-two, a middle child, a youngest child, or an only child—although with age, health, and gender differences, any positional adoption is possible. Life tasks Another of Adier's (1927/1946, 1932) great contributions was the conceptualization of life tasks, Adier's three life tasks, the communal or social task, the occupational task, and the love and marriage task, were both biological and psychological necessities for the survival and development of humankind. Early humans formed into herds or communities because individually they were not strong enough to survive. They divided the labor so that there was balance in the community and resources could be shared. Men and women learned to cooperate enough to create, birth, and care for the next generation, guaranteeing the continuation of the species. Each of these tasks required the development of psychological capacities for friendship and belonging, for contribution and self-worth, and for cooperation. Adler correctly noted that effectively solving these tasks was intimately connected to our mental health—and that neurosis, psychosis, and criminal behaviors were properly understood as retreats from these tasks. Even today, the American Psychiatric Association (2000) assesses dysfunction in these tasks in the diagnosis of its clinical and personality disorders, Erik Manager and Leo Gold (2000) would prefer to leave the life tasks at Adier's original three because, for them, these tasks are tied to human survival on this earth and are, therefore, universal to all human communities. They are not alone in this perspective. There are many who have suggested that Adier's life tasks should be elevated to the sacred. But life does indeed evolve, and what was once needed for survival changes with the development of humankind. Conclusion Adler was the first of a number of theorists to identify thematic dimensions from an individual's early recollections (1931/1980). The response to each theme, in turn, generates inferences about the personality dynamics of a child. The pattern, for example, of an individual being alone in several early memories suggests that social relationships are either not important or are difficult in the life of the child. Thus in the late 1930s, Adler had come from an early emphasis on organ inferiority, and a latter emphasis on striving for power and social superiority, to an evolutionary emphasis that focused on the need to belong and on striving to contribute to human welfare. In so doing Adler gave psychology a holistic and optimistic theory that integrated individual and group processes, as well as beliefs, attitudes and motivation. Taken together, these perspectives lead to thick holistic descriptions, biographies-in-progress, and the narratives of an individual's lifestyle. Such narratives are not merely stories co constructed for the moment in the therapist's office. Rather, they are increasingly accurate descriptions of the real life that a real person is really living. It is from this perspectives’ kind of knowing that a foundation is laid for the integration of other models. References Adler, A. (1927). Practice and theory of individual psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Adler, A. (1930). The education of children. New York: Vail-Ballou Press. Adler, A. (1932). What life should mean to you. London: George Allen & Urwin. Adler, A. (1938). Social interest: A challenge to mankind (J. Linton & R. Vaughan, Trans.). London: Faber & Eaber. (Original work published 1933) Adler, A. (1946). Understanding human nature (W. B. Wolfe, Trans.). New York: Greenberg. (Original work published 1927) Adler, A. (1969). The practice and theory of Individual Psychology. Totowa, NJ: Littlefield Adams. Adler, A. (1970). The education of children (F. Jensen, Trans.). Chicago: Henry Regnery. (Original work published 1930) Adler, A. (1979). Superiority and social interest (3rd ed., rev.). New York: W. W. Norton. Adler, A. (1980). What life should mean to you. (A. Porter, Ed.). New York: Perigee Books. (Original work published 1931) Adler, A. (2002). The neurotic character. San Francisco: Classical Adierian Translation Project. (Original work published 1927) American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed., text revision). Washington, DC: Author. Ansbacher, H. L., & Ansbacher, R. R. (Eds.). (1956). The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. New York: Basic Books. Bruhn, A. R. (1992). The Early Memories Procedure: A projective test of autobiographical memory, part 1. Journal of Personality Assessment. 58, 1-15. Burton, A. and Harris, R. E. (Eds.) Clinical Studies of Personality. New York: Harper, 1955, pp. 836. Boeree Dr. C. George. (Copyright 1997, 2006). 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