Understanding Human Nature (Paperback)

~ (Author), Colin Brett (Translator) "WE ATTRIBUTE CONSCIOUSNESS only to moving, living organisms..." (more)
Key Phrases: Individual Psychology, Virgin Mary

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

As relevant today as when written, this timely reprint of a classic in individual psychology shows the way to increased understanding of ourselves and our role in society.

What are we? What is our nature and our role? Where are we going and why? It was the psychodynamics behind these central questions that made Understanding Human Nature so important and useful. Originally published in England by Oneworld, and long regarded as a handbook of individual psychology, it introduces the main themes of Alfred Adler's work, including the belief that we are decision-making beings responsible for our own behavior--and capable of changing it.

Adler's central aim was to help people live effectively and with a feeling of belonging to the community, and, consequently, Understanding Human Nature's focus is the person in the world, shaping and being shaped by relationships with others. Exploring such themes as the child and society, one's world view, aspects of unreality, character traits, expressions of character, and feelings and emotions, Adler demonstrates his principle's practical application to the conduct of everyday relationships.

Adler foresaw that for our survival, we must run the world as a caring, interdependent whole, and his valuable and pertinent insights can help us transform ourselves and life on earth.

About the author: A contemporary of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler was born in a Vienna suburb to a Jewish grain merchant. After becoming a medical doctor, Adler went on to found individual psychology and write more than 300 books and papers on child psychology, marriage, education, and the principles of individual psychology. Adler died in 1937 and is recognized along with Freud and Jung as one of the three great fathers of modern psychotherapy.

The Adler Collection is also available to you which includes Understanding Human Nature as well as the following two publications: Understanding Life which is an inspiring work that offers direction and wise counsel for increasing awareness of self, one's motivations, and the importance of each person's unique contribution to society; and What Life Could Mean To You where he examines a wide range of themes common to all our lives, including family and school influences; adolescent development; feelings of superiority and inferiority; the importance of cooperation; the "problems of work, friendship, and love and marriage; and the individual and society.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

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Product Details

• Paperback: 247 pages
• Publisher: Hazelden (May 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568381956
• ISBN-13: 978-1568381954
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #744,871 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology, May 27, 2008

By	Chris Brand "crispian" (Edinburgh, Midlothian United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

Written 1993, subsequently shortened


Alfred Adler (1870-1937), the first heretic of psychoanalysis, barely scraped through childhood. The second of six children of a Viennese grain merchant, he suffered from rickets and spasms of the glottis. He almost died on several occasions from pneumonia and street accidents. In the cot alongside him when he was three, his nearest younger brother did actually die of diphtheria. Undaunted, however, by his diminutive stature (5' 2") or by his maths' teacher's pessimistic forecasts, he succeeded in medical school, in ophthalmology, in family life and eventually, despite Freud's preferring to advance the established Gentile psychiatrist, Carl Jung, in popularising a form of psychoanalysis. True to his own history, Adler would see competition between peers for resources as much more important than incestuous infantile sexuality. Now there is a pleasant yet authentic, new, and of course 'non-sexist' translation of one of his best-known works.

Today, some of Adler's proposals are admittedly a little creaky. Adler tended to maintain that 'lifestyle' crystallizes by one's first birthday. He held intelligence testing (even of the 'g' factor) to be "unreliable"; and genetic inheritance of intelligence (or of anything else psychological) was a "superstition". Adler feared 'labelling' effects by which he believed he himself had almost been retarded. Homosexuality involved a rift with the *opposite*-sex parent. Educational streaming was unhelpful. Smaller classes would improve educational standards. And full employment would reduce the crime problem until teachers trained in Adlerian theory solved it in perpetuity.

More alarming to likely readers of the present volume will be several deviations from Adler's general utopian idealism and political correctness. Adler favours free society's notorious 'division of labour' and the provision of relevant specialist education: he is even content to educate girls differently from boys, in view of girls' forthcoming life-tasks. Monogamy-plus-children is the only marital arrangement worth considering, and wicked old European psychiatrists were wrong to recommend that their patients take lovers. Pre-marital intercourse is discouraged. And 'pampering' is ceaselessly denounced by Adler as yielding later 'whingeing' and 'whining' "neurotics, criminals, drunkards and perverts."

Nevertheless, there are three main propositions of Adler's that are, with qualification, especially consonant with modern understandings and researches.
(1) Individuality. Twin and adoption studies of the 1980's showed people are indeed 'radically individual', as Adler maintained. Only for general intelligence do biological relatives other than identical twins much resemble each other; and unrelated adoptees who grow up together show virtually no psychological similarities at all by adulthood. 50% of eminent people (U.S.Presidents, British Prime Ministers, first-rank world-class philosophers, eminences of English literature, and top British businessmen) turn out to have experienced major horrors in childhood such as serious medical conditions and parental death and bankruptcy, so compensation is as likely as capitulation providing intelligence is adequate. However, to rule out the imposed environment and to admit only a limited role for inheritance on personality is not to rule out genes. Indeed, genes -- in particular, 'gene packages' and the multiplier effects between different genes that cannot be simply passed on to children because genes segregate independently -- now come into their own as a way of explaining otherwise paradoxical human diversity.
(2) The unconscious. Adler's view of the unconscious was non-mysterious and non-dynamic. The unconscious-to-conscious relation is as "photo-to- negative": by just one lie to oneself, the unconscious can realize the master plan arrived at by consciousness. ('I have been rejected'; 'I am really superior'; or 'I have an excuse'.) Once such simple re-drafts of the story (or 'document') of one's life occur (cf. Margaret Donaldson, 1992), the 'lifestyle' derived from the 'guiding fiction' takes over whether one is awake or asleep. In dreams, the Adlerian unconscious can sometimes be caught engaged in the very same problem-solving work as goes on in daily life, yet without the constraints of reality. This view of dreams as a continuation of daytime speculations, anxieties and re-organising of accounts is more plausible than Freud's view that dreams provide disguised fulfilment of forbidden wishes.
(3) Competition and co-operation. At least by 1918, when he added the concept of 'social interest' (altruism) to his first personality process of 'personal interest' (egoism), Adler was arguably on the right track. Despite having lost both Adler and Jung over 'the doctrine of sexuality', Freud himself, by 1922, came to the view that eros was not in fact enough, even when id was considered in harness with superego. Belatedly, room had to be made for thanatos, the omnipresent death-wish that would help explain masochism, the horrors and hysterias of war, the mind's 'repetition compulsion' to dwell on painful stimulation and memories, and perhaps the aggressive elimination of pain and competitors.

Was Adler right? Well, in making personal interest and social interest not opposed to, but independent of each other, he can certainly be said to have anticipated the relations obtaining between today's 'Big' personality dimensions of 'Independence' (will, disagreeableness) and 'Tender- mindedness' (affection, and 'g'-free openness) (Brand, Egan & Deary, 1993). However, Adler's more lasting contribution to psychology will prove to have been in insisting on radical individuality, in some ontogenetic stories that merit careful testing, and in his addressing aspects of human personality that Freud gloomly packaged as thanatos and then left in an eerie limbo. Adler granted others the possibility of what he might without immodesty have observed in himself: will, achievement-striving, a strong sense of responsibility, assertiveness, self-help and 'personal interest' alongside soul, sympathy, tender-mindedness, idealism and 'social interest'. If they can grasp the importance of genes and 'g', Adlerians might still help face down the crudely determinist -- mainly environmentalist -- psychologies of the past.


REFERENCES

BRAND, C.R., EGAN, V.G. & DEARY, I.J. (1993). 'Personality and general intelligence.' In G.L.Van Heck, P.Bonaiuto, I.J.Deary & W. Nowack (eds.), Personality Psychology in Europe 4, 203-228. Tilburg University Press.
DONALDSON, Margaret (1992). Human Minds. London : Allen Lane.

14 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Good, yet somehow unsatisfying, December 31, 2001

By	A Person (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

Adler is an excellent writer, and his simple language and the clarity of his thoughts make this a great read, but his advice and theories leave me with a bit of a hole. It seems that he too often illustrates all the negative aspects of certain types of human behaviour stemming from various childhood experiences without offering any type of solution to the problems. He might throw in a short paragraph of advice at the end of a passage but overall it is a negative message he seems to be sending out. With his thinking, it seems like any above-average human like an actor or a musician is not a gifted person, but someone who wasn't given enough attention when they were young and is now overcompensating for this. That is a very pessimistic outlook and I don't neccesarily think we can simplify it like that. All of this intellectual and scientific thinking only belittles the human spirit and drive and makes it seem like we are machines rather than souls. Overall, though this is a fine book, but dont look for any solutions of how to be a great social person, read it if you want to understand what kind of a person you don't want to be.

11 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars UNDERSTANDING HUMAN NATURE, November 9, 2000

By	adrianaFerenzi (london) - See all my reviews

...The purpose of the book is first to point out how the misguided behaviour of the individual affects the harmony of our social and communal life; second, to teach individuals to recognise their own mistakes; and finaly, to show them how to adjust harmoniously to their social environment... This book is thus dedicated to the task of illuminating humankind`s progress towards a better understanding of human nature. {Alfred Adler}

As relevent today as when it was written. Realy pleasure to read.