Adlerian individual psychology

Freud said we're pushed by buried sexual drives; Alfred Adler broke away and said we're pulled forward — by goals, purpose, and the drive to overcome feeling small. His Individual Psychology is warm, future-oriented, and deeply testable because its vocabulary is so distinctive.

Start with the engine. Everyone begins life little and dependent, so we all carry feelings of inferiority. Healthy people convert that into striving for superiority — not domination, but a lifelong push toward growth, competence, and mastery. When inferiority overwhelms someone, they develop an inferiority complex; overcompensate, and you get a superiority complex.

Adler was the first to make birth order clinically famous — not literal position but the psychological position. Firstborns (dethroned by a sibling) often become responsible, authority-oriented achievers; middle children compete and seek fairness; youngest children may be pampered or ambitious; only children mature early among adults. It's a tendency, not a law.

The organizing concept is lifestyle (style of life) — the unique, largely unconscious blueprint of goals and convictions each person forms by roughly age six to make sense of self, others, and the world. To uncover it, Adlerians famously gather early recollections — a handful of specific childhood memories treated as projective snapshots of one's current worldview (accuracy doesn't matter; the chosen memory reveals the lifestyle).

Two more pillars: social interest (Gemeinschaftsgefühl) — a sense of belonging and concern for the welfare of others, which Adler made the very yardstick of mental health — and encouragement, the counselor's primary technique for building courage and countering discouragement, which Adler saw as the root of dysfunction.

Clinical Pearl: If a stem features inferiority/striving for superiority, birth order, lifestyle, early recollections, encouragement, or social interest, think Adler. The two highest-yield distinctives: social interest = his benchmark of mental health, and early recollections = the projective tool for revealing lifestyle.