Psychology Journal Entry: Adlerian Theory

Psychology Journal Entry: Adlerian Theory and Its Personal Application Alfred Adler's Theory of Psychology, Personality, and Development Alfred Adler was an Austrian psychologist born in 1870 who died of a heart attack in 1937. He argued, intriguingly, that all motivation is a product of a singular drive to achieve individual perfection or a personal ideal (Boeree, 2006). This approach to psychological motivation and development has its critics, largely because few believe that achieving such an ideal is even remotely possible.

Worse, many people who struggle towards perfection are left frustrated and depressed when they find they cannot achieve their goal, despite their best efforts. Unlike other psychologists like Freud, Adler avoided breaking down an individual's personality into the smallest possible parts. Whereas Freud preferred to view motivation and development in terms of psychological components such as the id, ego, and superego, Adler believed that this reductionism was not entirely useful. Instead, Adler was a proponent of holism as applied to human psychology.

By this, I mean that Adlerian theory considers the whole of the individual within the individual's physical and social context within the larger environment (Boeree, 2006). The number of possible factors that must be considered when dealing with an individual's personality and motivations can be so great, Adler argued, that nothing less than a complete understanding of the individual's overall context would provide enough information to draw reasonable conclusions.

Adler also differed from other psychologists of the day -- and today -- because of where he placed his focus and emphasis in studying individual motivation. Other theorists see motivation as the product of one's past. In other words, if an individual experiences Event a during childhood, then we should expect that that individual would perform Behavior B. As an adult. This is one approach to the question of a motivation's origins.

Adler, however, advocated teleology, which states that motivation is the act of moving towards the future, not being mechanically driven by the events of the past. Teleology is future-oriented and requires an individual to concede that while life may be hard or uncertain, one always has the ability to make choices that will change the nature of that life (Boeree, 2006). Adler, then, saw motivation as a function of an individual's desire to achieve a particular goal, not simply as the product of past events beyond the individual's control.

This differing perspective places a greater emphasis on the free agency of the individual to take control of his or her life and change it for the better. Adler did, however, agree that childhood development has a profound and lasting impact on the shape of a person's personality and lifestyle later in life (Boeree, 2006).

The events that an individual experiences during childhood will have an effect on the nature of that individual's behaviors and reactions later in life -- though Adler's theory allows for the individual to self-reflexively understand his or her behavior and make changes to it if desired. For instance, an child that is ridiculed by peers growing up might well develop a sense of inferiority that will affect the later development of the individual's personality.

Over time, childhood feelings of inferiority can lead to anxiety and depression, or motivate the child to become superior in some aspect of his or her life. Journal Entry: An Adlerian Perspective Adler's theories have a remarkably consistent application in my own life. As an adolescent, I was physically abused by my mother who used me as an object of blame for all of the events that went wrong in her life. The abuse was severe. At times, neighbors would have to step in to protect me.

Later in my adolescence when I was fifteen years old, a school counselor pushed me toward legal remedies to my situation. So that I could be better protected. I learned later that much of my mother's anger toward me was redirected anger that she felt for my biological father, whom she left was I was very young because of infidelity. My mother remarried after leaving my father and had more children -- it is entirely plausible that I represented an unwanted link to that earlier period in her life.

This fact likely made it easier for her to direct her anger at me when things went wrong, though they were no fault of my own. My response to this childhood abuse is a textbook example of Adlerian theory as it applies to abused or neglected children. Adler argues that these children can respond with an overcompensating motivation that drives them to become better in some aspect of their life when told, implicitly or explicitly, that they are inferior (Boeree, 2006).

My mother's abuse implicitly reinforced in my childhood mind that I was somehow inferior and undeserving of love or validation. In order to prove this condemnation wrong, I was unconsciously motivated to compensate by proving I was better than I was told. Throughout school and college I worked very hard and earned GPAs in the 3.98 or 4.0 range. I worked harder than my circumstances would have seemed to allow, being the first in family to get a college degree.

Even now, I am working even harder to secure a Master degree and realize an ideal that Alder would say is motivated by my desire to compensate for childhood trauma. Unlike some other psychological theorists who would argue.