Customer Reviews

The Drive for Self: Alfred Adler and the Founding of Individual Psychology

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The title says it all. Wait, no, the title says it's the best biography. So far as I know, it is also the only biography, in English, of Alfred Adler. Given Adler's enormous influence on American counseling and psychotherapy this is...peculiar. Adler himself is hardly a peripheral figure in the history of psychoanalysis, and this biography does his life justice. More information on exactly what it was he taught is better limned from other sources, notably his own (well, OK, he used a ghost writer) works, especially "Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler" by the Ansbachers, which is indispensable for making sense of Adler's evolving thought process. For most of us, Freud is the fallback position for mouthing generalities about the composition of the psyche. Here Freud's towering achievement is put in a new perspective. Adler, Freud's friend, his defender, his rival, and eventually, a despised heretic (to Freud), gets his due here as a founder of modern psychoanalytic practice, for better or worse.