The Science Of Living

THE SCIENCE OF LIVING The Science of Living By JLlfred JLdler London George Allen W Unwin Ltd Museum Street CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR AND His WORK . . 9 I THE SCIENCE OF LIVING 31 II THE INFERIORITY COMPLEX 56 III THE SUPERIORITY COMPLEX 78 IV THE STYLE OF LIFE 98 V OLD REMEMBRANCES 117 VI ATTITUDES AND MOVEMENTS 135 VII DREAMS AND THEIR INTERPRETATION . . .154 VIII PROBLEM CHILDREN AND THEIR EDUCATION . 173 IX SOCIAL PROBLEMS AND SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT . 199 X SOCIAL FEELING, COMMON SENSE AND THE INFERIORITY COMPLEX 215 XI LOVE AND MARRIAGE 231 XII SEXUALITY AND SEX PROBLEMS 249 XIII CONCLUSION . 268 THE SCIENCE OF LIVING A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR AND HIS WORK DR. ALFRED ADLERS work in psychology, while it is scientific and general in method, is essentially the study of the separate personalities we are, and is therefore called Individual Psychology. Concrete, particular, unique human beings are the subjects of this psychology, and it can only be truly learned from the men, women and chil dren we meet. The supreme importance of this contribution to modern psychology is due to the manner in which it reveals how all the activities of the soul are drawn together into the service of the individual, how all his faculties and strivings are related to one end. We are enabled by this to enter into the ideals, the difficulties, the efforts and discourage ments of our fellow-men, in such a way that we may obtain a whole and living picture of each as a personality. In this co-ordinating idea, some thing like finality is achieved, though we must 9 A THE SCIENCE OF LIVING understand it as finality of foundation. There has never before been a method so rigorous and yet adaptable for followingthe fluctuations of that most fluid, variable and elusive of all real ities, the individual human soul. Since Adler regards not only science but even intelligence itself as the result of the communal efforts of humanity, we shall find his conscious ness of his own unique contribution more than usually tempered by recognition of his collabora tors, both past and contemporary. It will there fore be useful to consider Adlers relation to the movement called Psycho-analysis, and first of all to recall, however briefly, the philosophic im pulses which inspired the psycho-analytic move ment as a whole. The conception of the Unconscious as vital memory biological memory is common to modern psychology as a whole. But Freud, from the first a specialist in hysteria, took the mem ories of success or failure in the sexual life, as of the first and almost the only importance. Jung, a psychiatrist of genius, has tried to widen this distressingly narrow view, by seeking to re veal the super-individual or racial memories 10 A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR AND HIS WORK which, he believes, have as much power as the sexual and a higher kind of value for life. It was left to Alfred Adler, a physician of wide and general experience, to unite the con ception of the Unconscious more firmly with biological reality. A man of the original school of psycho-analysts, he had done much work by that method of analyzing memories out of their coagulated emotional state into clearness and ob jectivity. But he showed that the whole scheme of memory is different in every individual. In dividuals do not form their unconscious memories all around the same central motive not all around sexuality, for instance. In every indi vidual wefind an individual way of selecting its experiences from all possible experience. What is the principle of that selectivity Adler has an swered that it is, fundamentally, the organic con sciousness of a need, of some specific inferiority which has to be compensated. It is as though every soul had consciousness of its whole physical reality, and were concentrated, with sleepless in sistence, upon achieving compensation for the defects in it...