Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler
Alfred W. Adlerwas an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings of inferiority—the inferiority complex—is recognized as an isolating element which plays a key role in personality development. Alfred Adler considered human beings as an individual whole, therefore he called his psychology "Individual Psychology"...
NationalityAustrian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth7 February 1880
CountryAustria
Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority.
More important than innate disposition, objective experience, and environment is the subjective evaluation of these. Furthermore, this evaluation stands in a certain, often strange, relation to reality.
It is one of the most effective attitudes of the neurotic to measure thumbs down, so to speak, a real person by an ideal, since in doing so he can depreciate him as much as he wishes.
The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder, with the truth.
Death is really a great blessing for humanity, without it there could be no real progress. People who lived for ever would not only hamper and discourage the young, but they would themselves lack sufficient stimulus to be creative.
We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a "getaway." We cannot love and be limited.
What is courage? Courage is the willingness to risk failure...There is only one danger I find in life, and that, indeed, is a real one. You may take too many precautions.
You can be healed of depression if every day you begin the first thing in the morning to consider how you will bring a real joy to someone else.
A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt dangerous.
The widespread belief that Yuppies as a class would perish from Brie-cheese poisoning turned out to be over-optimistic.
Every pampered child becomes a hated child.... There is no greater evil than the pampering of children.
War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.
Each generation has its few great mathematicians, and mathematics would not even notice the absence of the others. They are useful as teachers, and their research harms no one, but it is of no importance at all. A mathematician is great or he is nothing.
It is one of the triumphs of human wit ... to conquer by humility and submissiveness ... to make oneself small in order to appear great ... such ... are often the expedients of the neurotic.