"The Cloak of Social Feeling": Alfred Adler's Gemeinschaftsgefuhl in Practice and Memory

University of Alabama at Birmingham University of Alabama at Birmingham

UAB Digital Commons UAB Digital Commons

All ETDs from UAB UAB Theses & Dissertations

2022

"The Cloak of Social Feeling": Alfred Adler's Gemeinschaftsgefuhl "The Cloak of Social Feeling": Alfred Adler's Gemeinschaftsgefuhl

in Practice and Memory in Practice and Memory

Esteban T. Arnold

University Of Alabama At Birmingham

Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/etd-collection

Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons

Recommended Citation Recommended Citation

Arnold, Esteban T., ""The Cloak of Social Feeling": Alfred Adler's Gemeinschaftsgefuhl in Practice and

Memory" (2022).

All ETDs from UAB

. 127.

https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/etd-collection/127

This content has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of the UAB Digital Commons, and is

provided as a free open access item. All inquiries regarding this item or the UAB Digital Commons should be

directed to the UAB Libraries O8ce of Scholarly Communication.

“THE CLOAK OF SOCIAL FEELING”: ALFRED ADLER’S

GEMEINSCHAFTSGEFÜHL IN PRACTICE AND MEMORY

ESTEBAN T. ARNOLD

S. JONATHAN WIESEN, COMMITTEE CHAIR

ANDREW W. KEITT

BRIAN D. STEELE

A THESIS

Submitted to the graduate faculty of The University of Alabama at Birmingham,

in partial fulfillment for the degree of

Master of Arts

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

2022

Esteban T. Arnold

2022

“THE CLOAK OF SOCIAL FEELING”: ALFRED ADLER’S

GEMEINSCHAFTSGEFUHL IN PRACTICE AND MEMORY

ESTEBAN T. ARNOLD

HISTORY

ABSTRACT

This thesis provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of Alfred Adler’s

concept of Gemeinschaftsgefühl (community feeling), a simple yet potent idea that started

in a Viennese café and expanded far beyond it. Ideas have lives beyond that of their

authors, and this thesis argues that Alfred Adler’s idea of Gemeinschaftsgefühl was

pressed into the service of various social and political agendas. Adler was privately a

socialist, but he never wished to see Gemeinschaftsgefühl become a tool for this or any

other movement. With an idealistic worldview, Adler sought to challenge and transform

the pervading medical and psychotherapeutic conceptions of health to better aid the

individual sufferer from symptoms of depression, anxiety, and neuroses. This work

demonstrates how several individuals politicized Adlerian psychology and

Gemeinschaftsgefühl and understood this process not as a deviation from Adler’s

psychology but as the fulfillment of his beliefs.

Keywords: Alfred Adler, Gemeinschaftsgefühl, psychology, politicization, socialism,

National Socialism

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ ii

CHAPTER

INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1

ONE: A PHYSICIAN MAKES HIS WAY .........................................................................4

TWO: RED VIENNA’S COMMUNITY FEELING .........................................................24

THREE: CIVIL WAR........................................................................................................50

FOUR: HEALERS OF THE GERMAN SOUL ................................................................75

BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................100

INTRODUCTION

When Alfred Adler was a small boy in Vienna, he suffered from a severe case of

pneumonia. It did not help that he overheard the doctor outside his room tell his father

that the young Adler would not survive. Adler recovered, but the miserable memories

remained. As such, when a young friend’s father asked Adler what he should like to be

when he grew older, Adler replied, “A doctor.” Adler’s experiences with medicine and

healthcare as a child influenced his decision to become a better, more personable

practitioner who could provide patients with a more personable treatment than was

typical at the time. Adler wrote, “the determination to become a doctor never left me. I

could never picture myself taking up any other profession…and I persisted although

many complex difficulties lay between me and my goal.”

Adler did not always know his

work was leading him in the direction of Gemeinschaftsgefühl. He started his practice

with a biological understanding of medicine and mental health. With time, he changed his

approach to a more socially-minded framework that placed the patient in the context of

the community.

This thesis explores the malleable, elastic, and ambiguous nature of Adler’s work

and explores how it could be so easily pressed into the service of different party agendas.

Whereas Adler used his psychology to alleviate the pain of an individual sufferer,

Alfred Adler, The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler-Journal Articles: 1931-

1937, ed. Henry Stein, vol. 7 (The Classical Adlerian Translation Project, 2005), 273.

factions such as the radical Marxists and National Socialists used Adler’s work to secure

often radical ends. Influenced by Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy of as-if, which maintained

that people often pursue imaginary or fictitious goals, Adler strived for his own fiction in

the form of an idyllic civilization imbued with the transcendent sense of community he

created.

His faith and love for humanity appeared almost unconditional. However, he

balanced these idealistic thoughts with the understanding that people were capable of

deviating from a more righteous path.

Since Adler’s passing in 1937, scholars and practitioners have sought to

understand what Adler meant when he spoke of his desire for a world with

Gemeinschaftsgefühl. Intellectual historian Paul Stepansky concluded that Adler was a

reactionary intent on reforming and restoring medicine and psychotherapy to its earlier

eighteenth and nineteenth roots. Harkening back to an age when physicians served as an

intellectual and moral authority, Stepansky saw coercive elements in Adler’s “Religion of

Gemeinschaftsgefühl” meant to regulate the body politic and create the community Adler

desired.

Nevertheless, Stepansky’s views were misleading. Adlerian scholar Lydia

Sicher rebuked the notion that Adler expected people to accustom themselves to any

society as though they were ants living in a heap.

However, Adler was not discussing

any present-day or tangible community on this earth. Adler was a liberal, idealistic

socialist who rejected extreme or radical notions. His vision was for a community that

Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of “As-If,” trans. C.K. Ogden (Abingdon: Routledge,

2000); Phyllis Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom (London: Faber and Faber

Limited, 1938), 72.

Paul Stepansky, In Freud’s Shadow (London: The Analytic Press, 1983), 275.

Lydia Sicher, The Collected Works of Lydia Sicher: An Adlerian Perspective, ed. Adele

Davidson (Fort Bragg: QED Press, 1991), 33.

never manifests on this earth; Gemeinschaftsgefühl is an “unreachable goal.” It is a

“cosmic surrounding, a cosmic togetherness, a cosmic connection” that unites us in the

pursuit of a more altruistic, communal-oriented world.

Whether Adlerian psychology was in the hands of the National Socialists or the

Bolsheviks, Adler dismissed both interpretations as a counter to and abuse of

Gemeinschaftsgefühl. The pure Adlerian doctrine, if one ever existed, passed with its

founder. Nevertheless, the idea persisted. The life of Gemeinschaftsgefühl is messy and

complex; it assumed forms its creator never thought possible. But such an elastic idea

must be something worthy of study to historians of psychology and ideas.

Gemeinschaftsgefühl was not just a thought passively shaped and handled by different

authors. It began as a therapeutic construct to treat neuroses and soon transformed the

social, political, and economic outlook intellectuals and activists employed to navigate

the social world and create new realities. Ultimately, Gemeinschaftsgefühl is an excellent

case study of the appropriation of intellectual work and the power of ideas.

Lydia Sicher, The Collected Works of Lydia Sicher: An Adlerian Perspective, 31-32.

CHAPTER ONE: A PHYSICIAN MAKES HIS WAY

It is tempting to view Alfred Adler as a committed socialist first and a physician

second. However, this would be a mistake. Adler should be understood foremost as a

sincere medical practitioner seeking progressive solutions through a socially-minded

psychology to counter what he called “social misery.”

If and when Adler did incorporate

socialist or Marxist perspectives, it was usually to advance understanding of matters

related to psychology and human nature. As historian Paul Stepansky has noted, “With

Alfred Adler, there was never an outright transfer of allegiance.”

Adler never sought to

fuse his psychology with his politics. Though he pushed for medical and social reforms

under the socialist umbrella, he used his psychology, not Marxism, to explain his

reasoning. Several scholars have written about Marxism’s influence on Adler. They have

characterized the Viennese sage as an apolitical psychiatrist who distanced himself from

the political chaos that raged throughout Europe in a turbulent twentieth century. But his

perspectives on medicine and psychology do contain an, if not Marxist, then an

unmistakable social-democratic tint that addressed the conditions of the working-class

and other marginalized persons. Although Adler did not push for class warfare or the

destruction of the bourgeoisie, he sought to level social conditions and provide accessible

healthcare and training individuals to realize their human potential. These views were in

Alfred Adler, The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, ed. Henry Stein, vol. 2

(Alfred Adler Institute, 2005), 16.

Paul Stepansky, In Freud’s Shadow, (London: The Analytic Press, 1983), 14.

line with increasingly progressive ideals propagated by a generation of Austro-Marxist

thinkers. Ultimately, Adler’s goal was to simplify medical practice and psychology by

making it more accessible to the people.

Adler’s socialism can be traced back to when he was a medical student at the

University of Vienna involved with the student-run socialist groups.

By 1898, he had

joined the Austrian Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei,

SDAP), and was writing articles for the Arbeiter-Zeitung, the party’s lead paper. These

were formative years for the young Adler. He became intimately familiar with the SDAP

and found himself swayed by its “antimonarchistic, pro-democratic, pro-republican,

egalitarian, social-reformist, humanist, pro-labor” ideals. Influenced by such progressive

values that advocated the creation of a better world, Adler’s psychology came to be

centered on a construct he called “Gemeinschaftsgefühl.” Most often translated as

“community feeling” or “social interest,” this idea revolutionized perspectives on the

human condition by emphasizing the individual’s role and responsibility to the

community.

In 1895, at the age of twenty-five, Adler graduated from the University of Vienna

with his doctorate in medicine. He then settled into a role as a poor doctor (Armenarzt)

providing care for Vienna’s poor and uninsured citizens.

While interning at Vienna’s

Poliklinik (Polyclinic) and the General Hospital, institutions that broadly served working-

Stepansky, In Freud’s Shadow, 14.

Kurt Adler, “Socialist Influences on Adlerian Psychology,” Journal of Individual

Psychology 50, no. 2 (1994), 131.

Edward Hoffman, The Drive for Self: Alfred Adler and the Founding of Individual

Psychology, (Reading: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1994), 16-18.

class citizens, Adler learned of the severe health disparities plaguing Viennese laborers.

Observing patients’ chronic conditions and symptoms, he took it upon himself to tour the

cramped, poorly ventilated housing and workplaces workers inhabited. These were the

years in which the Christian Social Party, created by the anti-Semite, Mayor Karl Lueger,

dominated Vienna and neglected the socioeconomic conditions of poorer districts, where

workers were housed “in quarters so overcrowded and squalid as to be considered among

the worst in Europe.”

Disheartened by what he saw, Adler recognized the need for new

approaches to treating disorders and diseases stemming from conditions in one’s

environment, as he changed his professional focus from ordinary physician to enlightened

activist and advocate.

Though Adler had published small works and articles in newspapers, such as the

Arbeiter-Zeitung, these remained largely obscure compared to his first major work of

note, the Health Manual for the Tailoring Trade. In this treatise, Adler captured the

grueling lives of Viennese tailors.

The small custom tailors, who usually employ workers by the week, share

with them their modest homes and food. During the season, they work

with their employees 16 to 18 hours a day, and often through the night,

and reduce their personnel during the off-season. When the workload is

particularly heavy they call on the master piece workers who, with a few

journeymen and with as many apprentices as permitted by the guild, work

at starvation wages.

Adler keenly observed the draconian conditions forced on tailors in the insufferable

cottage industry and pushed for simultaneous healthcare and labor reform coupled with

Stepansky, In Freud’s Shadow, 11.

Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna 1914-1934 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999),

37.

Alfred Adler, The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, ed. Henry Stein, vol. 2

(Alfred Adler Institute, 2005), 4.

government intervention and regulation of the industry. “This situation,” he wrote, “in

which an obsolete and wrong-headed industry is maintained at the cost of their workers’

health cannot be allowed to continue.”

Adler was pro-labor to the extent that he

believed in securing the health of his patients: “Such an examination of human ailments,

not from the perspective of one individual but as a social product, can no longer be

ignored by a physician. Even if a physician’s education, attitude, and position give little

consideration to this viewpoint a physician cannot ignore that modern circumstances

create new problems in medicine as well.”

In other words, traditional medical

perspectives were outdated and would no longer suffice.

From Adler’s point of view, physicians had an ethical responsibility to ensure

patients’ needs were met beyond the confines of the exam room. Preventative medicine

and education thus became integral to the developing Adlerian worldview. Adler

perceived medicine as a tool that could better workers’ lives if used in cooperation with a

socially-minded state. In his pointed critiques of the medical and social infrastructure,

Adler contended:

[Our] current medical system is not adequate to combat widespread

illnesses. A successful fight against tuberculosis, for example, is

unthinkable if the physician is limited to the care of the afflicted patient

whom he provides with the name of his disease, prescribes medication or

offers medical advice, and then sends him back to where death awaits

him.

Medicine had a responsibility not simply to diagnose and cure but to identify the social

and economic factors that could prove detrimental to a patient’s health and well-being.

Adler, The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, vol. 2, 11.

Ibid., 1.

Ibid., 11.

Adler would not stand for anything less, his arguments contributed to an ongoing

transformation of medicine away from a worldview entrenched solely in biology and

physiology to one that reconciled the mind and the body.

In 1902, as Adler pushed for reforms in Viennese medicine and society, he

received a postcard inviting him to attend an informal discussion group at the private

office of the psychoanalyst and fellow University of Vienna medical school graduate, Dr.

Sigmund Freud.

Adler and this small circle of physicians and academics would meet

every Wednesday night in Freud’s apartment over coffee and cigars at Berggasse 19 to

discuss psychoanalysis, medicine, philosophy, and politics.

Initially, the relationship

between Freud and Adler was a match made in heaven. But over the years, it became

clear this was a marriage of convenience that would devolve quickly into one of bitter

resentment.

In his 1904 work “The Physician as Educator,” Adler added to his growing

collection of works pushing for a more socially-minded medicine. Introducing terms such

as “organ inferiority” and “compensation,” Adler found in his studies that “the

development of the body cannot be separated from the training of the mind.”

For

example, Adler theorized that neurosis resulted from organic inferiorities that children

and adults failed to overcome. While such feelings of inferiority are common to almost

all persons, neurosis and related psychological complexes could be attributed to “an

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

42.

Peter Gay, introduction to Civilization and Its Discontents, by Sigmund Freud, trans.

James Strachey, (W.W. Norton & Company, 1930), xiv.

Alfred Adler, The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, ed. Henry Stein, vol. 2

(Alfred Adler Institute, 2005), 33.

inferiority of organs, or, just as serious, the consequences of a strict or pampered

upbringing. It deludes the child into seeing life’s problems as fearful, to regard others as

hostile, and to think first and foremost of oneself.”

This and other of Adler’s theories

were fairly well-received and appeared scientifically valid. However, Adler did not limit

himself to biological or physiological understandings of human behavior. In a telling

conclusion, Adler relayed to his readers that,

The child must be educated toward becoming a member of the

community. The family and school automatically turn in that direction,

even if resisted. Any diversion from that line threatens the child later with

problems in adjusting for work, love, and society. Therefore, only those

are suitable as teacher and educators who themselves have developed a

social sense. Those who are obdurate, individualistic, egotistic, or

fatalistic, especially if they believe inherited qualities cannot be changed,

only cause harm. The same applies to single-minded dogmatists who only

want to educate according to a scheme of their own and not in accordance

with what society needs for its benefit.

Here is the crux of Adlerian psychology. Going forward, Adler would direct his

psychological framework and rhetoric toward improving the education and upbringing of

individuals within the community.

Sigmund Freud was not convinced. He felt noticed that Adler’s perspectives

deviated from classical psychoanalytic theory.

The Adlerian theory was from the very beginning a ‘system’-which

psycho-analysis was careful to avoid becoming. It is also a remarkably

good example of a ‘secondary revision,’ such as occurs, for instance, in

the process to which dream-material is submitted by the action of waking

Adler, The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, vol. 2, 37.

Ibid., 38.

Ursula Williams, “Early Papers of Alfred Adler: The Physician as Educator and Sexual

Problems in Child Rearing” (Thesis, University of Arizona, 1990). In her translation of

Adler’s “The Physician as Educator,” Williams argues that “Adler clearly establishes that

his main concept of Social Interest dates back to this early writing. The historical

importance of this article is undisputed since the development of Individual Psychology

can be dated to this paper,” 3.

thought. In Adler’s case the place of dream-material is taken by the new

material obtained through psycho-analytic studies; this is then viewed

purely from the standpoint of the ego, reduced to the categories with

which the ego is familiar, translated, twisted and is misunderstood.

Whereas Freud obsessed over the unconscious mind, Adler understood patients’ conflicts

as manifesting from the conscious self, or the “ego” that lay between the insatiable “id”

and the unsatisfied “superego.” Freud was perplexed by his younger colleague’s findings

that appeared to challenge his own explanation of neuroses. As a result, “Psychoanalytic

politics took center stage.”

Though Adler had been one of Freud’s strongest allies,

Freud could not help feeling that Adler was creating an offshoot of psychoanalysis with

its own “distinctive psychological ideas,” with his discussions of “organ inferiority” and

failure to “compensate” as the dominant cause of neurosis. Freud worried psychoanalysis

might suffer as a result.

Historian, Peter Gay, sees that a split between Freud and Adler as inevitable.

But had Adler reworked his theories according to Freud’s work, such a rift might not

have occurred. Freud could not stand to have his work challenged by dissidents, and there

could be no compromise. In Freud’s reflections on the history of the psychoanalytic

movement, the egocentric pioneer wrote defensively, “When I perceived how little gift

Adler had precisely for judging unconscious material, my view changed to an expectation

that he would succeed in discovering the connections of psychoanalysis with psychology

and with the biological foundations of instinctual processes—an expectation which was

Sigmund Freud, On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement trans. Joan Riviere

(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1966), 52.

Peter Gay, introduction to Civilization and Its Discontents, by Sigmund Freud, trans.

James Strachey, (W.W. Norton & Company, 1930), xvi.

Gay, introduction to Civilization and Its Discontents, by Freud, xvii.

in some sense justified by the valuable work he had done on ‘organ inferiority.’”

Freud

recognized Adler’s talents for innovation, but he also sensed his collaborator’s lack of

interest in exploring the modalities and constructs within depth psychology

(Tiefenpsychologie). Thus throughout his career, Freud tried to ensure that his disciples

did not stray too far from his teachings. Any reformulations in theory or practice needed

to match a Freudian worldview. Though Freud generously granted Adler space to present

and discuss his original papers and perspectives, it was a paternalistic relationship based

on an insistence that Adler comply with the psychoanalytic model.

On March 10, 1909, Adler delivered a lecture entitled “On the Psychology of

Marxism.” Addressing Freud’s circle, Adler drew parallels between the consciousness-

raising elements of Marxism and the Freudian goal inherent to psychoanalysis of bringing

unconscious feelings, desires, and impulses to the conscious surface. Furthermore, Adler

praised Marx, for his “psychological and intellectual capabilities” that “enabled the great

thinker to gain so deep an insight into the processes of social development.” Adler

continued:

His insight into natural and social processes enabled him, as did his

psychological [capacity] for the intensive penetration of his field, to see

clearly what is, through [our study] of analytic psychology, beginning to

dawn on us with increasing clarity: the primacy of instinctual life.

From this standpoint, Adler was still operating in a Freudian, psychoanalytic framework.

But now, to Freud’s dissatisfaction, he appeared too eager to experiment with the

parameters of psychoanalysis. In the end, Freud was left unconvinced, as he remarked

Sigmund Freud, On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, 50-51.

Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, eds., “On the Psychology of Marxism,” Minutes of

the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society 2 (1909), 172–78.

upon the conclusion of the brief lecture that “it must be stated that Adler has failed to

offer us any evidence of our line of thought in Marx. Rather, Adler has tried to present

the psychological foundation for Marxist positions.”

There is some truth to Freud’s

statement here. Adler did not appear to be arguing for a direction that fused

psychoanalysis with Marxism but was more interested in using Freudian analysis to

explain why the modern proletariat was so attracted to Marxism in the first place.

While Freud was skeptical about connections between psychoanalysis and

Marxism, Austro-Marxist intellectuals praised Adler’s work and embraced his seemingly

class-oriented insights infused with biology and psychology. Josef Strasser, one of the

first of many dissidents to press Adlerian psychology in the service of party politics and

platforms, related Adler’s concepts of “organ inferiority” and the “inferiority complex” to

the ongoing class struggle socialists waged in Austria. Of Adler’s psychology, Strasser

wrote, “Marx elevated socialism from utopia to science by making us aware of the real

drivers of social development. Perhaps the path taken by Adler leads to the same goal in

biology. In this respect, there is a certain agreement between Marx’s theory and the

doctrine of organ inferiority unmistakable.”

Adler himself contributed at least one

article to the socialist journal, yet he did not include any comparisons between organ

inferiority and Marxism. Instead, he limited himself to a discussion of ongoing trends in

medicine and psychology explaining in further detail the relationship between organ

inferiority and disease.

Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, eds., “On the Psychology of Marxism,”, 175.

Josef Strasser, “Schwäche Als Entwicklungsfaktor,” Der Kampf 1, no. 3 (1907), 139.

Alfred Adler, “Ueber Vererbung von Krankheiten,” Der Kampf 1, no. 9 (1908): 425–

30.

Tragically, Adler’s talent, ambition, and successes would prove his downfall. In

1911, Freud replaced Adler as president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

This

divorce was far from amicable. Members of Freud’s circle split between the two

charismatic leaders as they exchanged arguments on the merits of Freudian versus

Adlerian psychology. Writes C.P. Bankart:

After Adler’s address, the members of the society were in an uproar. There

was pointed heckling and shouted abuse. Some were even threatening to

come to blows. And then, almost majestically, Freud rose from his seat.

He surveyed the room with his penetrating eyes. He told them there was

no reason to brawl in the streets like uncivilized hooligans. The choice

was simple. Either he or Dr. Adler would remain to guide the future of

psychoanalysis. The choice was the members to make. He trusted them to

do the right thing.

Adler resigned as chair of the society, writing in the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, the

central newsletter of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, “I hereby advise the readers of

this periodical that as of today I am resigning from this journal’s editorial office. The

publisher, Professor Freud, is of the opinion that the scientific differences between him

and me are such that the joint publication of this periodical, in his view, seems

inappropriate. I have decided, therefore, to resign voluntarily from the editorship.”

bittersweet end to a nine-year partnership between Adler and Freud marked the beginning

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

76-77.

C.P Bankart, Talking Cures: A history of Western and Eastern psychotherapies.

(Pacific Grove, 1997). As quoted in John Sommers-Flanagan and Rita Sommers-

Flanagan, Counseling and Psychotherapy Theories in Context and Practice: Skills,

Strategies, and Techniques, Second Edition (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons,

Inc., 2015), 81.

Alfred Adler, The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler- Journal Articles: 1910-

1913, ed. Henry Stein, vol. 3 (The Classical Adlerian Translation Project, 2003), 85.

of a new epoch in psychology, setting the stage for Adler to exit from the shadows of

psychoanalysis and into the spotlight as the father of Individual Psychology.

Given Adler’s separation from the Freudians in 1911, one has to ask what

distinguished the newly formed Adlerian association from Freud’s psychoanalytic

society. Sarcastically, Freud quipped in his History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement:

When, after irreconcilable scientific disagreements had come to light, I

was obliged to bring about Adler’s resignation from the editorship of the

Zentralblatt, he left the Vienna society as well, and founded a new one,

which at first adopted the tasteful name of ‘The Society for Free Psycho-

Analysis’ (Verein für Freie Psychoanalyse). But outsiders who are

unconnected with analysis are evidently as unskillful in appreciating the

differences between the views of two psychoanalysts as we Europeans are

in detecting the differences between two Chinese faces.”

Fortunately for Freud, “Adler took a step for which we are thankful; he severed all

connection with psycho-analysis, and gave his theory the name of ‘Individual

Psychology.’

Later emphasizing the central differences between psychoanalysis and

Individual Psychology, Adler laid out his psychology’s basic framework, “Individual

Psychology is based on the empirical fact that the first stage of the germ cell is a person’s

‘I’, a totality, a personality, given all the potentialities for human development.”

Adler

fundamentally disagreed with Freud’s biologically mechanistic psychology that reduced

people to a set of unconscious primal instincts repressed by modern civilization. Adler

paved the way for a more optimistic view of humanity that understood that while drives

for aggression or superiority existed within the individual psyche, this did not mean that

humans were naturally prepossessed to act in constant aggression toward one another;

Freud, On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, 51.

Freud, On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, 52.

Alfred Adler, “Individual Psychology and Psychoanalysis,” ed. Henry Stein, Collected

Clinical Works of Alfred Adler 7 (2005), 26.

Otherwise, the world might revert to a state of nature Freud postulated once existed but

was now suppressed and redirected via mass reaction formations.

Adler may have felt his approach to psychology was empirically driven, but this

did not mean others in the medical or psychiatric community felt the same. In 1911,

Adler applied to be a lecturer at his alma mater, the University of Vienna. Four years

later, he received a rejection notice stating that due to perspectives that his work was

largely speculative and supposedly failed to meet the standards of evidence-based

research.

Taking this news in stride, Adler continued his research by exploring what

Freud would call surface-level or “ego psychology.”

Adler focused less on sexual

feelings or libido and emphasized the aggressive drive for mastery and the education of

individuals for social interest. Undoubtedly influenced by the works of Friedrich

Nietzsche, Adler posited that all individuals strive through will towards mastery or

superiority. Yet, he did not reach the same conclusions. The concept of will-to-power, or

“striving” as phrased by Adler was done at the expense of social interest or community

feeling. The goal of Individual Psychology and its practitioners was to help train

individuals to contribute to the well-being of the community through tasks of work, love,

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (W.W. Norton & Company, 1930),

42-43.

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

95. Janek Wasserman notes that “few Jews were actually professors, given the anti-

Semitism within the Austrian academy.” This may have played a part in Adler’s inability

to acquire a position in the university system. Janek Wasserman, Black Vienna The

Radical Right in the Red City, 1918-1938 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 33.

Freud, On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, 52; Hoffman, Drive for Self,

95-96; Timothy Pytell, Viktor Frankl’s Search for Meaning (New York: Berghan Books,

2015), 27.

and friendship. This goal was achieved by acquainting patients with the innate sense of

Gemeinschaftsgefühl, or community feeling.

Adler’s blossoming research and practice was put on hold when the assassination

of Archduke Franz Ferdinand led Austria and Adler to war. Adler was drafted as a

physician into the Austrian army and served at various aid stations and hospitals to

provide psychiatric services and counseling to soldiers traumatized at the front.

Distinguishing between the use of psychology in peacetime and psychology at war, Adler

noted that while on one hand therapy for civilians aimed to “cure patients of their illness,

or at least to relieve them of their symptoms, in order to allow them to pursue their

chosen way of life” in stark contrast the “purpose of treatment of neuroses by the military

is just as obvious: to return the patient not to his own chosen way of life, but to qualify

him for service for ‘the common good.’”

Adler’s contempt for war, propaganda, and a

state that appeared to be manipulating its populace to support a pointless war over

imaginary borders only grew in intensity.

Over time, Adler lent increasing importance to the role of society and the

individual’s role within that society. Consequently, it became Adler’s goal to treat

patients afflicted with symptoms of depression, anxiety, and neurosis by helping them

recognize that it is not by turning inwards that one could find salvation but outwards to

the community for recognition and purpose. Through work, love, and friendship, one

Robert Freschl, “Friedrich Nietzsche and Individual Psychology,” International

Journal of Individual Psychology 1, no. 4 (1935): 87–98.

Alfred Adler, “New Aspects of War Neurosis,” Collected Clinical Works of Alfred

Adler 2 (2005), 160.

would find redemption in mutually supportive networks of neighbors and comrades. But

even these principles had limits.

Upon the outbreak of war, an intoxicating sense of nationalism coursed through

Austria. Wrote novelist Stefan Zweig: “The trains were full of recruits who had just

joined up, flags waved, music boomed out, and in Vienna I found the whole city in a

fever.” Even the most pacifist writers like Zweig found themselves lost in the swelling

surge of national pride and community as “young recruits marched along in triumph, their

faces bright because they, ordinary people who passed entirely unnoticed in everyday

life, were being cheered and applauded.” Suddenly people wished to know their

neighbors and colleagues and recognize them as brothers in the fight to defend the

Fatherland. Zweig confessed that “there was something fine, inspiring, even seductive in

that first mass outburst of feeling. It was difficult to resist it. And in spite of my hatred

and abhorrence of war, I would not like to be without the memory of those first days.”

The feeling Zweig described and countless other Austrians and Germans felt was the

sense of community (Gemeinschaftsgefühl) Adler had described in writings but failed to

describe clearly.

Yet, Adler could not help feeling that the sense of community brought on by the

war was inspired by all the wrong reasons. While he reasoned that “Germans ourselves

are inspired and animated by a strong sense of community,” there were dangers and

pitfalls to such strong feelings of community. Adler feared, rightfully so, that the feeling

of community he described could be “transformed from an ends to a means and thus the

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday trans. Anthea Bell (London: Pushkin Press,

1942), 245-246.

verity of the feeling of community was employed with cunning and deception by

nationalism and imperialism in their craze for dominance and power.”

Though Adler

wholeheartedly believed community feeling was the natural way of man, he remained

aware of the potential for abuse and manipulation of community in the interests of

nationalism and totalitarianism.

In the midst of the war, Adler returned to Vienna on leave and made his way back

to his familiar hideout at the Café Central. Such establishments held a special place in the

life of several Viennese intellectuals, and Adler was no exception. The renowned cultural

historian Carl Shorske wrote on the importance of Viennese cafes to intellectual life:

“The salon and the café retained their vitality as institutions where intellectuals of

different kinds shared ideas and values with each other and still mingled with a business

and professional élite proud of its general education and artistic culture.”

Adding to this

analysis, scholars such as Erwin Dekker have noted that “for many Viennese, these

coffeehouses were much more than just a café, it was closer to a living room. It was

where they read the newspapers, met their friends, and regularly received their mail and

had their washed clothes delivered.”

Having been denied a position at the University of

Vienna, Adler had little choice but to operate outside the university system. Thus, the

cafés served as an informal office for scholars and artists seeking the company of like-

Alfred Adler, “Bolshevism and Psychology,” Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler

2 (2005), 153.

Carl Shorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books,

1961), xxvii.

Erwin Dekker, “The Vienna Circles: Cultivating Economic Knowledge Outside

Academia,” Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 7, no. 2 (2014): 30–53.

minded individuals. The Café Central, in particular, became a favorite meeting ground

for Adler’s newly created Society for Free Psychoanalytic Study.

It was in 1916 that a mentally exhausted Adler sat silently in an unusually quiet

Café Central among familiar friends and colleagues. The society members wished to

know what his plans were for the future. He declared to his loyal apostles at the Café

Central, “It seems to me,’ Adler said in answer to his questioner, but looking seriously

from one to the other round the long table, ‘that what the world chiefly wants today is

Gemeinschaftsgefühl (community feeling).”

Adler’s circle reportedly responded with

mixed feelings. The philosopher Alexander Neuer, voicing his dismay, exclaimed,

“Gemeinschaftsgefühl, what a word to use-it does not even exist in philosophy!” “‘It is

what the world wants,’ Adler repeated quietly.’

As part of their punishment as instigators of the world war, the allied powers

stripped Austria of its lands traditionally used to grow crops and provide for markets. But

Adler practiced what he preached. He encouraged his neighbors and friends to grow local

community gardens suggesting and to “show a little foresight and add to the stock of food

by growing vegetables wherever there is any ground for them, and perhaps by breeding

rabbits, since they breed swiftly and in large quantities.”

Adler’s insight may have

saved a few lives, as Vienna soon faced dire straits. The once vibrant fín-de-siècle years

faded into memory as Austria suffered greatly after the war. Deprived of its vast

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

76-77.

Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom, 120.

Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom, 135.

farmlands and client-states, the country went bankrupt. The economy collapsed, and with

it the people’s morale.

Forced to go from a vast empire to a small republic, Austria suffered a precarious

existence in those years after the First World War. In his memoirs, Zweig noted:

Of the six or seven million inhabitants who were now required to describe

themselves as German Austrians, two million freezing, hungry people

crowded into the capital. The factories that used to bring wealth to the

country were now in foreign territory, the railway network was a mere

remnant of its former self, the national bank’s reserves of gold had been

seized, and it still had to pay off the huge burden of the war loan…There

was no bread, no coal, no oil. Revolution or some other catastrophic

outcome appeared inevitable.

Yet, there was hope for the starving nation. On May 22, 1919, Vienna elected its first

socialist mayor Jakob Reumann. This event signaled the start of a progressive era of

Viennese politics and contributed to the city’s international reputation. The socialist

capital of the world, dubbed Red Vienna. The period from 1919 to 1934 saw the Austrian

Social Democratic Party (SDAP) or Austro-Marxists, hold a popular majority in the

municipal government. And for a time, the SDAP aspired to join in a political union

(Anschluss) with Germany’s newly established republic. However, the signing of the

Treaty of Saint Germain, to end the First World War, precluded such a possibility.

Moreover, despite Social Democratic victories in Vienna, a strong coalition of

conservative Christian Socialists dominated the national parliament and left the Austro-

Marxists little choice but to retreat to the “Red Fortress.”

Zweig, The World of Yesterday, 305.

Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna 1914-1934, 32-33.

These losses in the national political arena forced a shift in Austro-Marxists’ aims

and aspirations. Although funds were low and the Austrian krone rapidly depreciating,

the SDAP leadership strived for a social revolution driven by building projects designed

to refurbish the city’s many dilapidated physical and social institutions. At last, a

responsible government was in place to address the hellish conditions Adler noted nearly

twenty years earlier in the Health Manual for the Tailoring Trade.

Adler’s movement spiked in the ensuing years. Carl Furtmüller, a friend of

Adler’s since the fallout at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, introduced him to the

newly appointed Minister of Education, Otto Glöckel. In light of the city’s dysfunction

and depleted morale, Glöckel, a committed Social Democrat stated, in conversation with

Furtmüller: “I am not interested in educational specialists, however, learned. I should like

a set of practical teachers who could educate the parents as well as the children into

becoming good human beings!” Furtmüller responded to Glöckel with the solution, “Well

that is not impossible here in Vienna, since I can introduce you to the very man to help

you! There is a doctor called Adler, who not only wants what you want, but knows by

what steps it can be produced. Why not get him to teach the teachers?”

Following this

interaction, Adler’s psychology grew popular with Social Democrats, teachers, and the

general public. Like the cafes, child-guidance clinics acted as a third space for Adler.

There, he delivered weekly lectures to teachers, parents, and students on the methods of

Individual Psychology, pedagogy, and child rearing. This space was reserved for the elite

bourgeois of Vienna; anyone who sought to improve upon their child’s upbringing was

welcome to attend Adler’s public lectures.

Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom, 128.

Indeed, a consistent aim throughout Adler’s life was to teach Individual

Psychology and its principles so that everyone could understand. However, this approach

dissatisfied certain members of Adler’s Society for Individual Psychology, who felt

compelled to protect psychology and science from ordinary people who had no place in

intellectual affairs. One follower reportedly asserted,

Adler had everything in his power to form such a school. He had only to

make his psychology into a school of medicine for us to spread Individual

Psychology throughout the world…We all knew that, and we were all

prepared to accept what further he had to teach us, but this stuff for

everybody—this sudden missionary ideal of Gemeinschaftsgefühl—how

could we deal with it? The medical profession must keep its science above

the crowd! Adler should, as a scientist, have known this, and he should

have known that if he insisted on spreading this sort of religious science

through the laity, we, as a profession, could not support him.

Unlike Freud, Adler did not believe psychology was a science reserved for a patriarchal

guild or men’s fraternity (Männerbund).

Psychiatrists, physicians, and educators would

make the complex clear and open the gates of science and medicine to meet the needs of

ordinary people.

Through Gemeinschaftsgefühl Adler sought to understand the frameworks people

used to cope with the fast-paced, modern world. With Vienna under the direction of a

newly installed Social Democratic government, Adler’s psychology would receive

immense patronage and privilege under the city’s progressive leadership. Exploring the

connections between politics and ideology in interwar Vienna, the historian Janek

Wasserman sees Adler as an intellectual recruited by the Social Democrats to help their

Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom, 123.

Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis

(New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 93.

cause in the socialist revolution. These years from 1918 to 1938, have been characterized

by a conflict between “red” socialists and Marxists and “black” conservatives and fascists

that Wasserman calls “the struggle for intellectual workers.”

Adler was one such

“intellectual worker” socialists and Marxists recruited in their efforts to move Vienna

toward a brighter, progressive future. Ultimately, this battle for Vienna was a microcosm

of a far graver situation churning in the shadows of interwar Europe. Despite a rocky

reception, Gemeinschaftsgefühl, among other Adlerian constructs, would prove a

valuable asset to the city and its people, as Vienna experienced a political rebirth. For

better or for worse, Adler’s ideal of community feeling would experience several

transformations throughout his life and after living in the memory and practice of

individuals determined to appropriate its contents for their own agenda.

Janek Wasserman, Black Vienna The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918-1938 (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 2014), 46.

CHAPTER TWO: RED VIENNA’S COMMUNITY FEELING

It is not enough to explain the exceptional nature of Red Vienna by the mere

presence of its intelligentsia. Rather, any traces of exceptionalism in the Austro-Marxists’

achievements ought to be credited to its government and representatives who consulted

their leading intellectuals and presided over a progressive, science-informed politics. As

recalled by the Neo-Freudian Marie Jahoda, Red Vienna was “not so much a theory as a

way of life…pervaded by a sense of hope that has no parallel in the 20

century.”

Austria’s First Republic, lasting from 1919 until its collapse in 1934, symbolized

progress for the Social Democrats in Austria, who were eager to accomplish their goals

by democratic means. As asserted by Otto Bauer, a leading Social Democratic

figurehead, the Austrian Social Democratic Party’s (SDAP) mission was to earn a

majority in the Parliament by garnering enough votes from the people. Once achieved,

they would show the world what feats socialism could accomplish.

Unlike Russian

Bolshevists who resorted to violence and terrorism, the Austro-Marxists distinguished

themselves by their willingness to infuse democratic principles into their socialist

doctrine. The story of intellectual workers like Alfred Adler, who helped Vienna’s social

Marie Jahoda, “The Emergence of Social Psychology in Vienna: An Exercise in Long-

Term Memory,” British Journal of Social Psychology 22 (1983): 349.

Otto Bauer, “The Austrian Revolution,” ed. Rob McFarland, Georg Spitaler, and Ingo

Zechner, The Red Vienna Sourcebook, 2020, 119–21.

democratic government elevate working-class conditions through school and

healthcare care reforms, is endearing.

While Freud was renowned internationally for his iconoclastic views on human

nature, Adler enjoyed increasing popularity in Vienna with the Social Democratic

leadership and citizens benefitting from their works.

Since Adler’s departure from the

Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1911, a series of other analysts, notably Carl Jung,

Sandor Ferenczi, and Wilhelm Reich, abandoned the classical Freudian framework to

fashion their own approaches to psychoanalytic thought or join other movements, thus

impeding Freud’s momentum and monopoly over psychology. Adler and Individual

Psychology benefitted significantly from the break with Freud, as his compelling

psychological theories and practice brought him adoration and praise across the

cityscape.

Throughout the 1920s, the Social Democrats saw an opportunity to improve

several facets of everyday life for the people via increased access to education,

healthcare, and housing across class divides. Recruited to assist them in their efforts,

Adler would play no small part in this push for progress. Adler subsequently acquired a

position as a lecturer at the Volksheim Ottakring, an institution sponsored by the

Viennese adult education centers (Volkshochschule) in working-class districts. This

marked the beginning of his effort to build a more practical pedagogical psychology

through the expanding child-guidance movement.

Prior to these Social Democratic

reforms in Viennese education, instruction revolved around training children for

McFarland, Spitaler, and Zechner, The Red Vienna Sourcebook, 134.

McFarland, Spitaler, and Zechner, The Red Vienna Sourcebook, 141.

obedience and followed a more rigid, authoritarian approach. Recalling his experiences in

Austrian schools, Stefan Zweig described the curriculum as “taught according to a dry-

as-dust plan,” making the lessons “dry and lifeless, a cold apparatus of learning that was

never attuned to the individual and, like an automaton programmed to recite the terms

‘good, satisfactory, unsatisfactory,’ showed only how far we met the demands of the

curriculum.”

Zweig was not alone in his assessment. Adler, writing about his own

experience with Viennese schools, described a similar atmosphere of training children for

obedience rather than honing the child’s innate creative personality.

When I was a little boy, our Austrian school expressed perfectly the

government’s ideal of citizenry unquestioningly obedient to bureaucratic

officialdom. I had to sit quiet, my hands folded on the table. I was not

allowed to move. My duty was to obey orders, and to be meticulously

respectful and toward the teacher and toward the government he

represented. I had had a free childhood at home. In this I differed from

many of my schoolmates and so perhaps I felt repression the more acutely.

I know now as I knew when I was a boy, that I was not a ‘bad’ child. I was

never a liar, I did not steal, I went to school regularly in spite of my

intense dislike for it, I worked conscientiously, and I was an average

student. Yet I always had the worst report in the class because of my mark

in ‘morals.’ I could not fit myself to the approved mold; I could not create

the impression of servile obedience which was the school’s ideal—and so

I was ‘bad.’

Adler never advocated training children or adults for “servile obedience.” He often

emphasized the creative personality and the use of “encouragement,” rather than

“discouragement” in his theory and practice. Commenting on Adler’s approach to

teaching and education, Lewis Way described the Austrian psychiatrist as a man whose

“ideal of educating people for independence and responsibility was also different from

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday trans. Anthea Bell (Pushkin Press, 1942), 52-53.

Alfred Adler, “A Doctor Remakes Education,” The Survey 58 (1927): 490.

the ideal of educating people for obedience to a reactionary government.”

Fortunately,

the children of postwar Vienna would not have to suffer the same experiences Zweig and

Adler endured. As Adler further noted, “Public schools are always the reflection of the

government that establishes and maintains them.”

Beginning in 1922, when Otto

Glöckel, former minister of education, became head of the Vienna State School Council

(Stadtschulrat für Wien), the SDAP removed the authoritarian style of instruction that

trained students for submission in favor of more liberal education with a key emphasis on

Alfred Adler’s philosophy of Gemeinschaftsgefühl (community feeling).

If there ever

was an ideal setting for someone as progressive and idealistic as Adler and his

psychology, Red Vienna was it. Adler’s reputation for progressive education and

practical psychology while working alongside the SDAP and in the schools. According to

Janek Wasserman, given that the “most successful outreach by the Austro-Marxists was

in psychology,” it makes sense that Adler’s approach prospered at a time when liberal

scholars and politicians used the science of the mind and behavior to ameliorate social

conditions.

Since Adler’s publication of “The Physician as Educator” in 1904, Adler had

preached the social and practical value of physicians to society, and only now was his

vision becoming a reality. Once more, he reiterated the value of the physician to

education,

Lewis Way, Alfred Adler: An Introduction to His Psychology (London: The

Whitefriars Press, 1956), 49.

Adler, “A Doctor Remakes Education,” 490.

Rob McFarland, Georg Spitaler, and Ingo Zechner, eds., The Red Vienna Sourcebook

(Rochester: Camden House, 2020), 314.

Wasserman, Black Vienna The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918-1938, 68.

For thirty years I have been training teachers to look at their work with the

eyes of a physician and to graft onto their work the physician’s technique.

As I look back, I see most clearly of all, the place of vantage the physician

occupies as a teacher. He is outside the friction and difficulties of the

home and school. He brings to both not only his special knowledge but

also the careful, patient scientific attitude and method, which are even

more important in dealing with human behavior than with the behavior of

laboratory test tubes or microscope slides. The work my assistants and I

have done in some public schools of Vienna has proved what

collaboration between teachers and psychiatrically trained physicians can

achieve.

With these insights, Adler and a united coalition of teachers and physicians paved the

way for an experimental approach previously unfamiliar to the Viennese public school

system.

With Otto Glöckel’s blessing, Adler finally had a space to introduce his

psychology to the larger populace. “In the two years since the War, I have been able to

establish twenty-two mental hygiene clinics for public school children. The twenty-two

clinical directors are all my pupils, physicians trained as psychologists and educators.”

Between a thriving private practice, the Volksheim, and the child-guidance clinics,

Adler’s itinerary must have appeared without end. His psychology was so popular that

“All the Volksschulen (peoples schools/adult-education centers) and Hauptschulen

(secondary schools) in the city of Vienna worked in connection with the child-guidance

centers. Any child in these schools who showed backwardness, or was difficult in class,

was brought by the teacher to the nearest clinic for advice and treatment; so that children

from six to fourteen years of age in the city of Vienna, had access to this special

psychological retraining between the years 1921 to 1934.”

The child guidance clinics in

Adler, “A Doctor Remakes Education,” 490.

Adler, “A Doctor Remakes Education,” 491.

Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom, 129.

Vienna were open to parents, teachers, and other persons interested in learning more

about the principles and theory of Individual Psychology.

Invoking the spirit of Gemeinschaftsgefühl, Adler approached children with the

same philosophy he had preached during the Great War to his colleagues at the Café

Central. It was important to Adler that people realize that “no man liveth unto himself

alone.”

Raising the child in a way that emphasized cooperation and community was

central to Adlerian pedagogy, and Adler imparted this knowledge to all seeking solutions

to difficult children.

As recalled by one Adlerian teacher, Oskar Spiel:

During the years 1920 to 1924 we spent most of the time in studying the

Individual Psychological technique of child guidance. I want to remember

here in deep gratitude the help and understanding given to us by our

master, Alfred Adler. We had to learn how to make use of this technique

in our class and school respectively, and how to transfer the technique of

treating one child to the treatment of the collective, the whole class. In

these years the fundamentals of the Individual Psychological system of

education in and through the school were developed.

Adler knew that if one truly wished to see a reduction in the prevalence of mental health

symptoms and disorders, healthcare needed to be more proactive than reactive. He

reasoned, “No psychologist, no physician, no clinic can reach every child individually.

But the school is the center where all children may be trained in the right attitudes.”

Adler perceived his psychology as a consciousness-raising approach meant to elevate

insight, awareness, and empathy. He described a case of a mother whose daughter had

Adler, “A Doctor Remakes Education,” 491.

Oskar Spiel, “The Individual Psychological Experimental School in Vienna,” American

Journal of Individual Psychology 12, no. 1 (1956): 1.

Alfred Adler, “A Doctor Remakes Education,” 494.

recently reentered her life and came to him for counseling. Quickly, Adler identified the

issues plaguing the two.

From the beginning, I could see that the mother treated the child with

exaggerated educational insistence, which was particularly unfortunate

because the girl had been brought up in a congenial environment and

expected still greater kindness from the mother. But in her eagerness that

her child should not fail the mother was overstrict, keenly disappointing

the girl. She developed a great emotional tension, blocking her progress

both at school and at home. Exhortation, reproaches, criticism, and

spanking only intensified the emotion, with consequent hopelessness on

both sides. To confirm my impression, I spoke with the girl alone about

her foster parents. She told me how happy her life with them had been.

Then, bursting into tears, she also told me how she had enjoyed being with

her mother at first. I had to make the mother understand her mistakes. The

girl could not be expected to put up with such harsh training. Putting

myself in her place, I could perfectly understand her conduct as an

intelligent reaction, that is, as a form of accusation and revenge. In a

situation of this type, with less social feeling, a child may easily become

delinquent, neurotic, or even suicidal. But in this case, I was sure the girl

could improve if the mother were convinced of the truth, and impressed

the child sufficient change of attitude. Therefore, I explained to the mother

that the belief in inheritance was nothing but a nuisance, after which I

helped her realize what her daughter had reasonably expected when she

came to live with her, and how she must have been disappointed and

shaken by such disciplinary treatment, to the point of utter inability to do

what was expected of her.

Adler helped this mother empathize with her daughter and see things from her daughter’s

point of view. In the Adlerian framework, children did not behave randomly. There was

often a reason behind the behavior: to get attention, gain power or control over a

situation, or display frustration.

Adler often deciphered what children and adults could

not express verbally through their actions. Adler’s therapy did two things at once.

Alfred Adler, “How Position in the Family Constellation Influences Life-Style,” ed.

Henry Stein, Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler 7 (2005), 259-260.

John Sommers-Flanagan and Rita Sommers-Flanagan, Counseling and Psychotherapy

Theories in Context and Practice: Skills, Strategies, and Techniques, Second Edition

(Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2015), 83.

Individuals were relieved to find a path where they knew their contributions to the world

mattered, and the community benefitted from healthy, productive individuals.

However, many Freudians apparently viewed Adlerian psychology as a farce that

veiled the contents of a science that treated children and adults formulaically with the

intent of “subordinating an unsuspecting populace.”

This was not the first time, nor

would it be the last, that one attempted to connect Adlerian theory and practice to

authoritarian strategies meant to coerce patients or students into submission. Adler, once

more, was put on the defensive against Freud’s followers. Soon, however, Adler would

be forced to defend his psychological perspectives not only from the Freudians but from

his own disciples.

At a 1924 meeting of the International Organization for Individual Psychology

(IOIP) in Nuremberg, Germany, Adler lectured on “Individual Psychology and Outlook

on Life.” Various heads of sections of the IOIP were in attendance, including Dr.

Leonhard Seif of Munich and Dr. Fritz Künkel of Berlin. Summarizing the positions of

Individual Psychology and their aims, Adler relayed to his followers:

Individual Psychology sees the source of man’s problems with regard to

communal living in his lack of preparation education for the tasks of the

community. We find this lack of preparation (1) in pampered children who

lack in physical, verbal, and mental development and who, consequently,

fail to become self-sufficient; (2) in discouraged and suspicious children

who never became affectionate and who now go through life hostile,

unable to establish relationships, and lacking the courage to persevere; (3)

in children who suffer from organ deficiencies. By clarifying their

erroneous perceptions of life and the opportunities open to them, as well

as the capabilities they possess, Individual Psychology seeks to ease their

integration into the community. Beyond that, its goal is to convey a better

understanding of childhood in order to avoid the harm mentioned above.

Phillip Henry, “Experimental Futures and Impossible Professions: Psychoanalysis,

Education, and Politics in Interwar Vienna, 1918-1938” (PhD diss., University of

Chicago, 2018), 175-176.

Individual Psychology believes that what matters is not what a person

brings with him into life, but what he makes of it.

Nowhere in his discussion did Adler reference Marxism, socialism, or any other political

theory. These psychologists and clinicians were gathered to discuss pure psychology, not

the pros and cons a socialist revolution. Adler made it clear when he spoke on Individual

Psychology that there would be no fusion with political agendas.

Despite Adler’s infectious optimism for the future of Individual Psychology and

its role in child-rearing spreading across Central Europe, some of his brightest students

found fault with his assertions that Gemeinschaftsgefühl was really as vital to

understanding the psyche as Adler understood it. Viktor Frankl, a former member of the

Freudian analytic circle, challenged the biologically mechanistic framework or

reductionist approach used by Freud in psychoanalysis. His constant search for meaning

led him on a lifelong mission to enhance the connections between psychotherapy and

philosophy. After encountering Adler’s works while in medical school in Vienna, Frankl

turned to Adler, hoping to master the insightful psychology that appeared to acknowledge

a more conscious style of living that Freud seemingly rejected.

A year after Adler’s declaration to the international meeting of individual

psychologists, Frankl published an article in the International Journal for Individual

Psychology (Internationalen Zeitschrift für Individualpsychologie), where he explains

Adlerian psychology through an allegory.

Two old men are dying. One has lived embracing the principle of egoism.

For him, everything was purposeful only in relation to his individual life.

Thus…everything is purposeless for him, meaningless. It is different for

Sophie Freudenberg, “Report on a Meeting of the International Organization for

Individual Psychology,” ed. Henry Stein, The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler

vol. 5, 78.

another whose meaning in life, and his worth, he has found in the

community. Even dying, his life appears to him full of meaning, because

he is situated in the supra-individual and stays untouched from the

destruction of the separate parts. One old man has always lived with the

thought, ‘what can I buy with this?’ From this perspective his whole life

must seem pointless, because for his whole life he can buy nothing. The

other is liberated, because these thoughts don’t even present themselves:

he didn’t do anything, he didn’t live, to be able to ‘buy something with

this!’

Frankl’s ability to explicate profound concepts and ideas in such provocative fashion

brought him into Adler’s good graces, who praised Frankl’s efforts in stressing the

importance of the community in everyday life and mental well-being. Yet, the article left

Frankl feeling skeptical of his mentor’s framework. Frankl thoughtfully, perhaps

obsessively, analyzed the allegory’s basic premise. In the tale, the two elderly men lying

on their respective deathbeds reflect on what that life has meant to them. While one felt

his life of personal, or selfish, accomplishments to be meaningless, the other who

understood life through the lens of community, feels at peace. Adler often iterated to

audiences that his psychology could be summarized via the time-tested adage, “Love thy

neighbor as yourself.”

Frankl understood Adler’s arguments but did not agree with his

conclusions. Through his allegory, Frankl understood that each of the respective old

figures preparing for death had a choice. One chose to live for himself and the other for

the community. Contrary to Adler's belief that every life harbors an innate sense of

community that must be nurtured and encouraged, Frankl felt this to be as reductionist as

Freud’s work. He worried that Adler's worldview could be carried to the extreme of

Viktor Frankl, “Psychotherapie Und Weltanschauung: Zur Grundsätzlichen Kritik Iher

Beziehungen,” Internationalen Zeitschrift Für Individualpsychologie 3 (1925): 251. As

quoted in Timothy Pytell, Viktor Frankl’s Search for Meaning (New York: Berghan

Books, 2015), 32.

Bottome, Alfred Alder: Apostle of Freedom, 122.

impeding the individual's ability to choose how he or she wishes to live. But for the time

being, Frankl would conclude his article with the understanding that Adler desired all his

followers to possess.

Happiness and ability are a unit, I would like to say: a biological unit. The

neurotic cannot be happy because he is not up to life because he dislikes it,

devalues it, hates it. The psychotherapist's task is to give the love of life

and the will to community back to him completely, and he can easily do

this by means of a critical discussion in which the value of life, the value

of the community, becomes clear as unprovable, but given, as not allowed

demanding, but already in the personal interest; because the way to

personal happiness to satisfaction, 'beatitudo,' leads through the sense of

community (Gemeinschaftsgefühl), the courage to face life, the 'virtus.'

Frankl’s conclusion summarized the tasks of Individual Psychology neatly. However, he

ultimately abandoned this framework, opting for a different approach that prioritized

individual choice over contributions to the community as a signifier of normal

functioning. Intellectual differences were the breaking point for the master and student, as

he and Adler disagreed over Gemeinschaftsgefühl’s place in psychology. Although

Frankl hoped Adler would permit him to work on the ideological components of

Individual Psychology, this was not to be the case. In the aftermath, Adler

“excommunicated” Frankl from the order of those worthy of calling themselves

Individual Psychologists.

Frankl elaborated, “From that moment on, Adler never spoke

to me. When I approached the tables where the Adlerians sat at the Café Siller—the

Freudians had a different café—Adler left. He never greeted me. I felt very hurt. I loved

him and I admired him. I knew his weaknesses but I liked him.”

Frankl, “Psychotherapie Und Weltanschauung,” 252.

David Cohen, “The Frankl Meaning,” Psychology Today, 1977, 58. As quoted in

Pytell, Viktor Frankl’s Search for Meaning, 35.

David Cohen, “The Frankl Meaning,” 58.

As Frankl dissected Gemeinschaftsgefühl’s moral and philosophical components,

persons nearest and dearest to Adler prodded the practical social psychologist to align his

psychology with more radical Marxist views. Raissa Adler, Adler’s Russian wife, met

Alfred in their time at the University of Vienna. A dedicated socialist, Raissa contributed

to her husband’s theories and perspectives on gender and sex roles in society and likely

inspired his equally progressive and feminist views.

At a gathering of the Adlerian

circle in Vienna, Phyllis Bottome made the acquaintance of Raissa, remarking of the

Russian socialite, “She was a highly intelligent woman who knew well at least four

languages, French, German, English, and Russian, and loved giving language lessons to

students.” In their chance encounter, Bottome praised Herr Doktor Adler’s teachings and

her debt of gratitude to his work. Raissa replied, “I do not agree with all that Adler

teaches. Not that I am against his main principles of Individual Psychology, but I think

these matters have an economic basis and should be dealt with politically, and my

husband does not.”

Raissa supported the Bolshevik cause in Russia and was close to the

Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. She would later praise the Soviet education system

for its effective use of her husband’s psychology in their schools. Addressing the method

of sexual education in the Soviet Union, Raissa wrote:

The views of Marxist educators, for whom the physician and educator

Aron Salkind is an excellent advocate, are in almost complete alignment

with those of Individual Psychology. Educators intend to influence

unhealthy deviance in children’s sexual lives through the collective; they

also achieve great success in this area. They do not shy away from

bringing highly sexually-focused children into the collective, it is

extremely rare that one of these children must be removed from the group,

John Sommers-Flanagan and Rita Sommers-Flanagan, Counseling and Psychotherapy

Theories in Context and Practice: Skills, Strategies, and Techniques, 81.

Phyllis Bottome, “Frau Dr. Adler (Mrs. Raissa Adler),” Journal of Individual

Psychology 18, no. 2 (1962): 182.

and the responsibility is usually placed on the collective and not on the

individual child. Soviet educators also concur with us regarding the belief

that questions are never to be individually blown up into a bigger issue

but, rather, need to be treated as a part of other questions surrounding the

raising of the child and regarding more sexually-oriented children or

children with behavioral problems…They also fully stand by our side on

views about the inherent traits and developmental potential of children. In

the context of psychoanalysis and Individual Psychology, Salkind states in

his book Questions of Soviet Pedagogy that both trends constitute

irreplaceable and practical material that unlocks unanticipated and deep

contemporary mechanisms with a metaphysical basis, and he adds that it is

‘an extraordinarily difficult task to separate that which is acceptable, from

the unacceptable.’ However, Salkind expects more from Individual

Psychology, as he also states, ‘We need literature about Adler’s

characterology, which places his healthy aspects of reactionary genetics in

opposition to orthodox Freudianism. The study of Adlerianism is the most

urgent task of Marxist pedagogy.’”

Like other Austro-Marxists, Adler tried to distance himself from socialist ideas that

advocated the creation of a proletarian dictatorship. He viewed the Bolshevik Revolution

as a prime example of the manipulation of community feeling and spirit for profit at the

expense of the people, but in the end, the “tragedy of their marriage was that Alfred had

not made her. Raissa had already made herself, and she was one of those few beings who

cannot really be either altered or influenced by others.”

Though Alfred and Raissa

eventually reconciled their intellectual differences to preserve their marriage, he could

not salvage the fraternal feeling that connected Adlerian circles that sprouted throughout

Europe. Ultimately, his Marxist students wished to merge Marx’s framework with

Adler’s.

Raissa Adler, “Child Guidance in the Soviet Union,” International Journal of

Individual Psychology (1931): 297–309. Adlerian psychology had piqued the interest of

Russian psychologists and physicians since Adler’s time with the Vienna Psychoanalytic

Society, offering translations of his work in the Russian science journal, Psychotherapy.

V.M. Leibin, “Adler’s Ideas in Russia Prior to World War I,” Journal of Individual

Psychology 44, no. 3 (1988): 270–81.

Phyllis Bottome, “Frau Dr. Adler (Mrs. Raissa Adler),” 182.

In these years of the First Republic, Austro-Marxists led the fight in Vienna,

advancing the social revolution through state-sponsored reforms. But in the shadows

were conservative Christian Socialists and nationalists who despised the republic and

sought to establish a Führer state that would replace the sham society sponsored by

agents foreign to German culture and nationalism. Vienna may have been red, but the

vast majority of Austria was black and conservative. As his controversial student, Manès

Sperber, observed, “Adler was alarmed at the danger to Individual Psychology which

seemed to threaten from the direction of its Marxist wing. He accused his Marxist

followers of hopelessly compromising his doctrine and systematically provoking the ire

of the rightists and the Nazis.”

Adler could appreciate Marxist sentiments, such as,

“man is not only a social animal, but an animal which can develop into an individual only

in society.”

However, he rebuked Marx’s fatalistic thinking of history that demanded a

bloody revolution from the people. Radical Marxists like Sperber and Adler’s wife,

Raissa, believed then that Adler’s Gemeinschaftsgefühl could act as the soul of socialism,

inciting the people to take action and overthrow the ruling classes. Adler, however,

condemned violence, no matter the intent. Although he never disputed that Individual

Psychology possessed Marxist roots, he would never declare his psychology to be a

Marxist psychology.

From 1921 to 1934, most of Adler’s work was focused on clinical practice and

practical application for the training of teachers and physicians. Throughout this time,

Manés Sperber, Masks of Loneliness: Alfred Adler in Perspective (New York:

Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1974), 223.

Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York:

International Library Publishing Company, 1904). As quoted in Erich Sachs, “Individual

Psychology and Karl Marx,” Journal of Individual Psychology, (1974): 159.

many of Adler’s students also made unique contributions to Adler’s movement.

However, none may have been more polarizing than the radical Marxist wing, which felt

Adler needed to consolidate his psychology and politics. Manès Sperber, a student well-

versed in Adlerian psychology and committed to Bolshevism, insisted Adler fuse his

socialist perspective with psychology and proclaim Individual Psychology as a Marxist

psychology. This is where Adler drew the line in his life’s work and politics. Rather than

compromise Individual Psychology, Adler broke with his Marxist students. Sperber

recalled that Adler was “determined to use all available means to destroy our position, or

at least to weaken it so much that our entire influence would evaporate. Everyone had to

know that we were no longer individual psychologists and thus had no right to invoke

him or his teachings.”

Defending himself and fellow Marxist Individual Psychologists

Otto and Alice Rühle-Gerstel, Sperber asserted that they “had never needed to invoke the

name of Adler, who meant less to their readers than they themselves.” Otto Rühle, a

distinguished German social activist, and his wife, Alice, had published several works on

Marxist theory and politics. Sperber concluded that Adler ought to have treated his

Marxist adherents better, for it was their adoration and advocacy of his psychology that

brought his work greater recognition and renown in “the cities of Germany and in several

European countries,” where they “had been the ones to make Individual Psychology

known.”

Sperber, Masks of Loneliness, 223.

Sperber, Masks of Loneliness, 223-224.

Alice Rühle-Gerstel, a bright woman born in Prague, published her second major

work, The Path to We (Der Weg Zum Wir) on Individual Psychology in 1927.

The

book, an attempt to demonstrate the compatibility of Adler’s school of thought with

Marx’s, hit the shelves at a critical moment when the future of the First Republic was in

question. Despite a positive result for the SDAP in the 1927 national elections, it

remained the minority party opposed to the Christian Social and Pan-German party

coalition under Chancellor Ignaz Seipel. Given these circumstances, it is easy to

understand why Adler felt uncomfortable about his students publishing works that

appeared too radical and risked undermining the Austro-Marxist project in Vienna. The

Austro-Marxists were not proponents of Soviet-style communism, but Raissa Adler,

Alice Rühle-Gerstel, and Manès Sperber appeared intent on supplying their radical

comrades with more intellectual firepower via Adler’s psychology. They hoped Adler

would understand that the best way to achieve his goals in psychology was to take action

and align himself with the Communists. Conversely, in 1926, the SDAP congress

convened with an agenda to assert the “party’s devotion to political democracy and its

institutions.”

However, after three men affiliated with the conservative paramilitary

Home Guard (Heimwehr) were acquitted for the murder of two socialist demonstrators,

hundreds of disgruntled workers stormed the Palace of Justice in Vienna, the fate of the

republic appeared uncertain.

Her first major work being a text that introduced readers to Freudian psychoanalysis

and Adlerian Individual Psychology. Alice Rühle-Gerstel, Freud Und Adler: Elementare

Einführung in Psychoanalyse Und Individualpsychologie. (Freud and Adler: Elementary

Introduction to Psychoanalysis and Individual Psychology). (Dresden: Verlag Am

Anderen Ufer, 1924).

Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934 (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 40.

Rühle-Gerstel may have possessed honest intentions, but her actions resulted in

her and her husband’s dismissal from the Adlerian circle. Displaying her intimately

accrued knowledge of Adler’s psychology, she dedicated space in her work to explain

Adler’s idea of community feeling (Gemeinschaftsgefühl) in Marxian terms.

Each individual's spiritual development is therefore linked to the temporal

conditions of his life and, moreover, linked to his inseparable whether

hostile or comradely bondage to his fellow human beings. These fellow

human beings are not a conglomerate of sheer individuals, but flow into a

higher totality, the community. The need to sit down with this fellowship

manifests itself in the soul through a drive Adler calls social interest. The

expression is ambiguous, because it also includes the feeling of

community. All—whether human or anti-human—feelings that relate to

the relationship of the ego relate to the community of other egos. Man is

not, as in pre-capitalist (religiously oriented) psychology, the responsible,

free master of his inner life. But he is also not, as in the time of

materialism, a will-less plaything of "circumstances" and his "innate"

instincts and dispositions. He is tied to the possibilities already provided

by past and living communities, which also determine his individual goal.

He cannot jump out of the frame alone. He may well swap a blatantly anti-

social behavior for a more anti-social one when the former becomes too

expensive. However, he cannot banish the forms of perception "male –

female," "above - below" from his life plan by willful decision. This is the

task of the community, whose freedom consists precisely in the

changeability of such forms of perception and their socio-economic

foundations.

Rühle-Gerstel pinpointed the “ambiguous” nature of Gemeinschaftsgefühl and used it to

her advantage. Adler’s failure to provide a clear meaning of the philosophy worked to his

disadvantage because it left readers the opportunity to interpret as they pleased. Thus,

Rühle-Gerstel found the nature of community bound in “socio-economic foundations”

that arrested the individual’s ability to find freedom. In Rühle-Gerstel’s worldview,

Gemeinschaftsgefühl would provide the motivation one needed to overcome capitalism.

Alice Rühle-Gerstel, Der Weg Zum Wir. Versuch Einer Verbindung von Marxismus

Und Individualpsychologie (Dresden: Verlag Am anderen Ufer, 1927), 117-118.

As far as Adler was concerned, the book was an insult. He had previously warned Rühle-

Gerstel about any attempts to combine his platform with politics. This was to be the final

straw, as Adler ceased his collaborative efforts with Alice and her husband, Otto.

Alice Rühle-Gerstel nevertheless appears to have carried her unique Adler-

Marxist worldview to her death in 1943. Writing in exile in Mexico, Rühle-Gerstel

recorded her conversations with the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, discussing how

Adlerian psychology served as an ideological drive and a better complement to Marxism

than psychoanalysis. “At one of these lunches…I unfolded my own Adlerian standpoint,

but Trotsky showed more interest in Freud. I tried to show that while Freud was cleverer,

more scientific, more profound, and Adler shallower and woollier, the latter’s work did

have a solid socialist foundation, whereas Freud’s attitude was reactionary in

comparison.”

Trotsky, who had lived briefly in Vienna prior to the First World War,

had been a family friend to the Adlers. Kurt Adler, Adler’s only son, later recalled a day

at the park shared between the two families, where Adler impressed Trotsky with his

knowledge of socialism and psychology.

Ultimately, Adler had no interest in associating himself or his psychology with

the Bolshevik movement; yet, this did not stop social theoreticians from conceiving of

Gemeinschaftsgefühl as a strictly proletarian philosophy. The new socialist mission post-

World War 1 was to address the challenges of living in such uncertain, revolutionary

times and prepare working-class citizens for the coming revolution that would replace

capitalism with a new utopia of classless, communal living. However, two tasks needed

Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom, 181.

Alice Ruhle-Gerstel, “No Verses for Trotsky: A Diary in Mexico,” 1937, 32.

to be addressed before such a radical transformation could occur. The first was to educate

the children in the Adlerian program of working in cooperation and preparation for the

three tasks of work, love, and occupation. The Social Democrats in Austria, like Josef

Strasser’s 1907 article for Der Kampf, applied Adler’s diagnosis of feelings of inferiority

(Minderwertigskeitsgefühl) to the working-class population. They understood Adler’s

“inferiority complex” and used it as a sociological explanation in the socialist school of

thought that perceived the working-class as starting from an inferior, subordinate position

in society and constantly striving for a better position in a capitalist world. While

rebuilding the city was primary to Austro-Marxist goals, of equal importance was

reforming the population psychologically by cultivating the crucial trait of

Gemeinschaftsgefühl (feeling of community) through educational, recreational, and

cultural initiatives.

Adler’s psychology could no longer be defined as “his” psychology,

as it now appeared to belong to the greater community. Gemeinschaftsgefühl began as a

simple idea, banal even, and written off by early Adlerians as a sentimental cliché. What

started as a meaningless phrase would inspire, divide, and, eventually, assume a life of its

own. A sort of “intellectual communism” came into play, where ideas were borrowed,

distributed, dispersed, and implemented to create new models, frameworks, and ideas

utilized to bring about the class revolution.

As Adler’s circle imploded, the Austro-Marxist project and the republic were

under similar duress. The Christian Social Party and black Viennese conservatives did

not make things easy for the socialist faction. However, the SDAP received a morale

Sabine Hake, The Proletarian Dream: Socialism, Culture, and Emotion in Germany,

1863-1933 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), 271.

boost when a post on the front page of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, the central organ of the

Social Democratic Party, featured a declaration of support for the Viennese Social

Democratic government from some of the city’s most distinguished academics and

intellectuals.

The short proclamation voiced the assent of intellectual workers who felt

“the state and society have the responsibility to make life easier for individuals rather

than more difficult. We therefore condemn all hardships imposed by authoritarian

demands.” Adding to these sentiments, they urged readers not to ignore “the great social

and cultural achievements of the Viennese authorities. It is this great and prolific

achievement that cares for the needy, educates, and develops young people on the basis

of the best possible principles, and guides the current of culture into the deepest channels,

these deeds are what we want to recognize; we want to know that this achievement

transcending political considerations will be maintained and promoted.” Austria’s

intellectuals proclaimed, “The struggle to elevate humanity and the battle against lethargy

and barrenness will always find us at the ready. And at this very moment, too, we are

ready.” The reader’s attention is then drawn to the first name inscribed, “Dr. Alfred

Adler.” Alongside Adler’s names are two other prominent psychologists from that period,

Professor Karl Bühler and Dr. Sigmund Freud. As noted by Wasserman, the list “read

like a who’s who of interwar Viennese cultural life and seemed to signify a high point in

the relations between the Austro-Marxists and Viennese intellectuals.”

Adler’s

reputation throughout Vienna and Central Europe added to the dramatic effect of such a

“Die Kundgebung Des Geistigen Wien,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, April 20, 1927. As found in

Janek Wasserman’s Black Vienna The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918-1938, 47.

Wasserman, Black Vienna The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918-1938, 47.

petition, as his name now carried substantial weight when appended to movements and

petitions.

A month after the intellectual workers of Vienna’s declaration to protect the

interests of the republic and democracy, Dr. David Levy, an American psychiatrist from

New York, was granted the opportunity to witness the fruits of the Austro-Marxist labors

in the schools. The experience of seeing Adler’s psychology in practice fascinated Levy,

who praised the Adlerian circle’s efforts to apply Individual Psychology in the classroom.

Unlike psychoanalysis, Individual Psychology was not a closely kept secret formula.

Adler often sacrificed technical complexity with the hope of imparting his psychology in

a way that all persons could understand. What impressed Levy more was the use of

Adlerian terminology by children who, through Individual Psychology, appeared to have

such profound insights into their own behavior and motivations. Providing a transcript of

one of the class sessions consisting of mostly teenage boys, aged thirteen to fourteen,

Levy recorded the class discussion on “problems of discipline” as mediated by the

teacher and discussed by the class:

Teacher: We will now stop all work and consider problems of

discipline. Hans, you take the chair.

Hans: [Hans takes the teacher’s place on the little raised platform;

the teacher takes a rear seat]: We are now ready for problems of discipline.

Does anyone want to speak?

Ludwig: I want to report on Germond. I noticed yesterday that he

studied more industriously when he sat in the back row.

Another Pupil: I noticed the same thing.

Teacher: Is it true, Germond, that you study better in the back row

than up front?

Germond: Yes! I study better there.

Teacher: Would you prefer to sit in the back row then?

Germond: Yes.

Teacher: Fine. Hereafter you may sit in the back row. I am very

glad to hear such good reports of you; that you are becoming a more

industrious fellow. [Germond blushes a bit and sits down.]

Hans: Does anyone have a question?

Louis: I want to report about Fritz. Yesterday he made a mess with

the water. He spilled water on the little children!

First Pupil [a little fellow with spectacles]: What were the

psychologic factors involved?

Second Pupil: He wanted to show off. He wanted to appear as a

hero to the little ones.

Third Pupil: How do you know? You weren’t there.

Second Pupil: Well, that’s my theory. [This is followed by a furor

of raised hands].

Hans: You cannot all talk at once. [He points to the hands, giving

each a number and later calling on them by number. Each number then

gives his notions; then the teacher arises and questions them about their

ideas, Socratic style, ending with the point that regardless of Fritz’s

particular motives such an act is motivated by an attempt to play the hero

based on the ‘masculine protest,’ the basis for expression of the energy of

the individual; that through this ‘masculine protest,’ through this desire to

be a somebody, ‘to achieve,’ Fritz had expended a tremendous amount of

good energy in a very useless way. ‘There was nothing heroic about it. It

was really cowardly because it was useless. He had done injury to smaller

boys; it was an unfair contest. Now what would real heroism be? To

achieve distinction through one’s tasks; through the fulfillment of duty,

through aiding one’s fellow men, etc.’

[In all fairness to Herr Spiel and to Fritz, I should say that this

whole discussion was carried on apparently without affectation and

without personally condemning Fritz, the teacher utilizing the latter

chiefly as subject matter. Later on, Fritz took part in a similar discussion

concerning others, rather freely.]

First Pupil: Well, what has Fritz got to say about it?

Another Pupil: Sure, let Fritz talk. [Fritz keeps his seat.]

Teacher: Fritz, won’t you stand up and tell us about it?

Fritz [Rises slowly, rather abashed]: Well—well, I did [pause]—I

did spill a little water [pause]—but I don’t want to talk about it.

A Pupil: Sure! He does not have to expose himself before us.

Teacher [To Fritz]: Would you rather talk to me alone after

school?

Fritz: Yes!

Teacher [Goes to Fritz and pats him on the shoulder]: Sure, we can

talk about it all by ourselves.

David Levy, “‘Individual Psychology’ in a Vienna Public School,” University of

Chicago Press 3, no. 2 (1929): 208-209.

The teacher in this session was Oskar Spiel, an expert Adlerian educator who had worked

with Adler since 1920 to reform the Viennese schools and curriculum in the style of

Individual Psychology. Levy's enthusiasm stemmed not only from Spiel's impressive use

of psychology in the classroom but also from the children's ability to discuss issues

among themselves respectfully and democratically. In some ways, it was as though they

were resurrecting the ancient Greek polis in the Viennese classroom. One will notice that

while the teacher does not dictate to the children, he still facilitates the discussion. This is

due to Adler’s belief that one could not simply hand the reins over to children and allow

them to be the deciders of the agenda, as this might lead to chaos.

Just as the family was organized as a unit, so too did Adler believe that children

ought to be trained as part of a whole. “When they are trained in this way, children are

really interested in one another, and enjoy cooperation.”

The pursuit of

Gemeinschaftsgefühl required the active, conscious participation and cooperation of the

greater community to allay the struggles for superiority that Adler perceived to be

indomitably seeping throughout modern civilization.

Unfortunately, Gemeinschaftsgefühl and Individual Psychology have been misconstrued

and, over time, misunderstood as rigid, authoritarian-like ideologies that aim to cram the

individual personality into a mold. Despite criticisms from historians who have found

fault with the Austro-Marxist cultural struggle (Kulturkampf) and accompanying

Adlerian psychology who seemingly subordinated workers while simultaneously

professing to liberate them, these politicians and intellectuals used practical insights to

Alfred Adler, What Life Should Mean to You (London: Bishop & Sons, Ltd., 1932),

163.

Alfred Adler, What Life Should Mean to You, 164.

avoid Bolshevik-style dictatorial regimes. Such is the case with historian Helmut Gruber

who perceives the Austro-Marxist reforms not as benevolent acts, but as measures taken

to condition working-class citizens for service to the state.

100

Similar to the American

Founding Fathers, who feared granting too much liberty or democracy to a potential mob

that might seize power for themselves and violate the public good, Adler and the Austro-

Marxists realized there were limits to democracy and the need for guidance in the

creation of a republic. Yet, Adler never intended for a psychology that sought to coerce

and subordinate citizens to a higher authority. Transcripts of discussions in Viennese

classrooms that used Individual Psychology reveal an egalitarian atmosphere, thus

countering arguments claiming Individual Psychology’s mission to promote social

interest and community feeling among children to have been an anti-democratic

psychology. Children’s rights and status in the community improved, if only slightly, as a

result of Individual Psychology.

Characteristic of Adler’s psychology was its unrelenting optimism about human

nature and the possibility for change. “When a doctor once said to Adler: ‘I do not

believe you can make this backward child normal.’ Dr. Adler replied: Why do you say

that? One could make any normal child backward; one should only have to discourage it

enough!’” Following this belief, Adler declared to an audience in attendance at the

People’s Institute (Volksheim), “…a person at the age of five is already complete does

not agree with the principles of Individual Psychology. We go even further by saying:

The individual is complete in his second year of life, but he is not unalterable. Rather, he

100

Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934 (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

attains form and shape by age two, depending on the circumstances under which he grew

up. We cannot accept the reasoning that, because the child at this early age has already

formed the unity of his personality, a bad seed must continue to sprout.” Ultimately, and

“Above all, we must discard the idea that someone cannot be saved.”

101

Adler’s jovial spirit disarmed many of his more defensive clients and opponents

who recognized the sincere nature of this Viennese physician. In a training session with

her father, Alexandra Adler, who had recently finished her training in medical school at

the University of Vienna, witnessed her father at work. A young boy wishing to speak

with Adler approached him and timidly yet candidly stated, “I feel horribly guilty when I

masturbate.” Adler replied to the embarrassed boy without skipping a beat, “You mean to

say you masturbate and feel guilty? That is too much. One would be enough: either

masturbate or feel guilty. But both is too much.”

102

Adler’s humor simultaneously

disarmed potential adversaries and brought solutions to light that patients might not have

otherwise considered.

Despite his collaborative efforts with the Austro-Marxist municipal government,

Adler grew increasingly protective of Individual Psychology and Gemeinschaftsgefühl to

the point of expelling students and colleagues from his society for their seemingly

heretical views in favor of more radical politics. If seen in the light of that generation of

social democratic thinkers like Otto Bauer and Max Adler, who were committed to

socialist ideals by way of democracy, then it would make sense that Adler would not risk

101

Alfred Adler, “Unteachable Children or Unteachable Theory,” Collected Clinical

Works of Alfred Adler vol. 5, 91-92.

102

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

273.

sacrificing his psychology to politics he saw as predatorial in nature. Adler enjoyed a

government that sought to create a better community for workers and their children. In

the context of Red Vienna, Gemeinschaftsgefühl, or training children for social interest,

was compatible with the aims of the Austro-Marxists.

Ironically, Adler, who resented Freud for his egoistic tendencies, became

increasingly similar to the authoritarian leader of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, who

expelled Adler for views deemed incompatible with psychoanalytic theory. In any event,

these petty rivalries may have soon appeared inconsequential as the ensuing decade

would bring unprecedented horrors to Central Europe. While Adler lectured in the halls

of the People’s Institute in Vienna, preaching his philosophy of Gemeinschaftsgefühl and

social interest, a group of fascist conservatives pulled at strings that would bring about

the undoing of the republic. These Austrian “black conservatives” succeeded in bringing

an end to the republic and democracy and introduced a species of Austrian fascism

characterized by its reactionary Catholic leadership and desire to replace the republic

with a strong dictatorship, or Führer state.

CHAPTER THREE: CIVIL WAR

On February 12, 1934 a brief but violent civil war erupted in the streets of

Vienna. The Republikaner Schutzbund (Republican Protection League) of the Austrian

Sozial Demokratische Arbeiterpartei (SDAP) faced off with the Austro-Fascist coalition

loyal to the conservative chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss. Leading the Heimwehr (Home

Guard), a conservative paramilitary force, and the newly formed Vaterländische Front

(Patriotic Front), an Austrian nationalist organization, Dollfuss refused new elections and

banned all opposition parties.

103

The Adlerian educator Oskar Spiel recounted later in life

the “next eleven years” of “Fascist terror” that followed Dollfuss’s grab for power.

104

Adler’s schools were closed as progressive idealists like Spiel braced themselves for what

was to come. Democracy and the republic in Austria were at an end.

Despite the SDAPs successes in Vienna, radical conservatives did not wish to see

their power displaced by left-leaning socialists. As a result, Dollfuss called for the arrests

of party leaders and forced them out of the local and national government. Otto Bauer, a

leading Social Democratic, having recognized that the republic had fallen, wrote on the

dire situation:

The only ones who have escaped arrest are the ones who were on the

battle lines and were thus unreachable by the police. By decree, the

government revoked the mandate of all Social Democratic members of the

national Council and the Federal Council, as well as that of all members of

103

Janek Wasserman, Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918-1938, 201.

104

Oskar Spiel, “The Individual Psychological Experimental School in Vienna,” 2.

state assemblies and municipal councils, despite that fact that this mandate

was given by the people in free elections. The party headquarters and the

people’s houses [Arbeiterheime] have been occupied, and the party press

has been outlawed. Everything that hundreds of Austrian workers have

built for forty-five years has been destroyed.

105

In light of this political upheaval, Adler urged his students and colleagues to make plans

to leave Europe. Unfortunately, not everyone listened. Benito Mussolini had assumed

total control over Italy, Hitler in Germany, Russia to Stalin, and now Dollfuss in Austria.

The small alpine land was one more domino in a series of European governments to

succumb to fascism and totalitarianism.

Adler left Europe in a migration that witnessed several leading Jewish

intellectuals fleeing autocratic regimes for more democratic societies. A Time magazine

entry celebrating his coming to Long Island described Adler as “grey but dynamic. When

he lectures he strides to & fro on the platform, he wrinkles his nose so vigorously his

eyeglasses quiver. He speaks English with an Austrian accent. There is something

infantile about his features, something fugitively masked by his glittering eyes and

sardonic smile.”

106

Despite having taught courses at Columbia and the New School for

Social Research, it was the Long Island College of Medicine that offered a full-time

faculty position to Adler as Professor of Medical Psychology.

107

As Adler arrived in New

York, Dr. Samuel Beck, recently graduated from Columbia University, embarked on a

105

Otto Bauer, “The Rebellion of the Austrian Workers: Its Causes and Its Effects,” ed.

Rob McFarland, Georg Spitaler, and Ingo Zechner, The Red Vienna Sourcebook, 2020,

719.

106

“Medicine on Long Island,” Time, October 10, 1932.

107

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

277.

tour of Vienna to see the mecca of psychological theory and practice with his own eyes.

Writing in March of 1934, just a month after the Austrian Civil War, Beck noted:

In Vienna two forces shape the psychologist’s scene. On the one hand it is

the personalities. Just picture a city having the two Freuds; the two

Bühler’s; Alfred Adler, who is absent in person only; Erwin Lazar, who,

for all his premature death nearly two years ago, is very much a living

factor. This is not to mention some of the lesser luminaries that revolve

about these greater lights. On the other hand, it is the community interest,

the Gemeinde Wien. For as one wanders from one center of activities to

another browsing from what each has to offer, one will find that, however

varied may be the scientific perspective or practical approach of each, one

thread runs through and is common to all: the community has a concrete

interest in all these undertakings; all waters of psychological search and

research ultimately flow back to the Gemeinde (community).

108

[Emphasis

Added].

At this point, the Austro-Fascist regime had not yet successfully purged the city of its

unique sociocultural experiments and ideals. Enough of the spirit of Red Vienna

remained for Beck to appreciate the remnants of the psychologists’ practical

contributions to the people. But more significantly was the “community interest” that

Beck observed. Everything appeared interconnected, an empathetic and intimately

constructed society where individuals felt impelled to contribute their ideas and insights

for the general well-being of their fellow man. The only thing noticeably absent now was

the man who had spent most of his career in Vienna preaching to those who would listen

on the significance of community feeling, social interest, and loving your neighbor as

yourself.

The collapse of Austria’s republic disturbed the Austro-Marxists, who wondered

what went wrong in their experiments with socialism and republicanism. Some wondered

108

Samuel Beck, “European News Letter,” The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 4,

no. 3 (1934), 422.

whether they should have been more aggressive in their movement to bring about a

classless society. Moderate Social Democrats like Otto Bauer remained committed to the

revisionist Marxist vision while he simultaneously conceded that “We have been

defeated, and the question that torments our brains is whether we brought about this

bloody disaster through our political mistakes of our own making, whether we carry this

blame for ourselves.” While a few, mostly conservatives, felt the Austrian socialists were

too radical, most seemed to think they were not radical enough. But the Austro-Marxists

were not Bolsheviks. When civil war broke out between the fascists and socialists, Bauer

asserted that Austria’s working-class and socialist leaders were prepared to strike and

save the republic. The Dollfuss regime justified its seizure of power by claiming that the

SDAP had planned a coup to overthrow the republic, thus forcing the conservatives’ hand

to save the republic from the red forces. Not as eager to resort to violence, Social

Democrats had hoped they might be able to reason with Dollfuss and spare their nation a

costly war. But “the civil war broke out eleven months later just the same, but under

circumstances that were considerably less favorable to us. This was a mistake—the most

fatal of our mistakes—and this time it was a misstep to the right.”

109

With fascism and totalitarianism on the rise in Europe, intellectuals feared the

consequences of the dissolution of democratic structures, as with the First Republic in

Austria and the Weimar Republic in Germany. Reactionary politics and philosophies,

with a strong emphasis on a romanticized Volk (folk) ideology, captured the hearts and

minds of racial and ethnic Germans who, since the end of the First World War, resented

109

Otto Bauer, “The Rebellion of the Austrian Workers: Its Causes and Its Effects,” ed.

Rob McFarland, Georg Spitaler, and Ingo Zechner, The Red Vienna Sourcebook, 2020,

722.

republics as sham institutions forced on them by foreign powers. In Austria, conservative

intellectuals like the philosopher Othmar Spann, who viewed socialism, democracy, and

capitalism as corruptors of the German spirit, helped pave the way for Austro-Fascism

and National Socialism. Their ideas were realized in Dollfuss’s seizure of power, as they

believe in a “German spiritual rebirth” through Catholicism and were fueled by völkish

antimodern values and thoughts. Counter to Adler’s idea of Gemeinschaftsgefühl, which

advocated a democratic, free flowing sense of community, these conservatives aspired to

create a “Weltanschauungsgemeinschaft” or a “closed community with a shared

worldview.”

110

In the summer of 1935, Adler left Vienna heartbroken. His clinics were closed for

“political reasons,” and the nation’s future appeared bleak. He sold his country home in

the outskirts of Vienna, at Salmannsdorf, a district west of the city, taking one last look at

the pleasant scenery. In what would be his last lecture given in Vienna, Adler concluded

before he departed, “Children, do something—and do it well” (Kinder, macht etwas, und

macht’s gut).

111

He said his final goodbyes to friends, colleagues, and all the teachers he

trained to use Individual Psychology in the schools. Oskar Spiel, Ferdinand Birnbaum,

Carl Fürtmuller, Lydia Sicher, and Alexander Neuer were just a few of the Adlerians who

stayed behind to protest fascism and continue the Adlerian mission of spreading

Gemeinschaftsgefühl. As Adler never saw his homeland again.

Leaving Austria discouraged Adler, but opportunities in the United States restored

his confidence. Audiences in America were undoubtedly far more familiar with Freud

110

Wasserman, Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918-1938, 23.

111

Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom, 228.

and psychoanalysis, but Adler’s endearing simplicity captured the hearts and minds of

both lay and scientific audiences. In a glowing review posted in the Detroit Jewish

Chronicle, Adler was praised for his engaging insights that resonated with scientific and

lay audiences.

Today the world is Dr. [Alfred] Adler’s clinic. He has been the honored

guest and speaker before the most important civic groups here and in

Europe, at universities, medical and child study foundations; he is among

the world’s foremost authorities on child psychology and his books are

standard text books while his other writings—some designed for the

laymen, some for scientists only—have been translated into many

languages and indicate Dr. Adler’s rare ability to address both types of

audiences, simply, profoundly, thrillingly. Eclipsing, as many think, the

contributions of [Sigmund] Freud and [Carl] Jung, Dr. Adler’s discoveries

rank with those of the world’s greatest scientists, and his theories are as

applicable to the life of the normal individual as to the mentally

disturbed.

112

Freud was a superstar, but Adler was becoming an international figure in his own right.

Even the renowned physicist, Albert Einstein, was kind enough to write Adler a letter

summarizing his appreciation for Adler’s work in psychology.

113

Unlike Freud, Adler was greatly enthused by the opportunity to expand his

psychology in the great continent across the Atlantic.

114

In 1926, he departed from

112

“Dr. Alfred Adler at Town Hall in Cass Theater on Feb. 28,” The Detroit Jewish

Chronicle, 1936, The Detroit Jewish News Digital Archives.

113

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

313-314. Hoffman indicates that Adler had written to Einstein first, hoping to receive

feedback on his theories from the former patent clerk. Einstein’s letter reply, dated

February 4, 1937, stated his “embarrassment” to accurately or objectively assess Adler’s

contributions to psychological theory and practice due to his lack of knowledge in

psychology. Nevertheless, he kindly notes his appreciation of Adler’s psychology:

“While Freud has almost exclusively used the sexual desires and the sphere of anxiety as

his motive, you have systematically used the complex of social sentiments: one could

almost call it…anxiety about the social position.”

114

Since an invitation extended by Granville Stanley Hall and Clark University in 1909

to lecture in the United States, Freud had professed his repeated disdain for all things

American. It is believed some of Freud’s anti-Americanism stemmed from difficulties

Britain on the White Star Line vessel R.M.S Majestic and set sail for New York. He was

slated to give talks in Manhattan at the Beth Israel Hospital, Cooper Union Institute, and

Mt. Sinai Hospital. A New York Times article lists Adler as one of six speakers at the

Young Women’s Christian Association on 610 Lexington Avenue “for the purpose of

giving people who are guiding social service work a more intelligent understanding of

mental hygiene.”

115

Included in this panel was the American behavioral psychologist, Dr.

John B. Watson, known for the controversial “Little Albert” experiments demonstrating

how children’s behavior could be conditioned and his affair with a graduate student that

led to his expulsion from Johns Hopkins University. During his stay, reporters for the

New York Times and New York World took the opportunity to ask Adler about the

political rumblings in Europe. As one headline read, “Mussolini Spurred to his Fight for

Power by Pique over Inferiority as a Child, Says Dr. Alfred Adler,” Adler took the

opportunity to condemn not only Italian fascism but the Soviet regime led by men whom

Adler denounced in Nietzschean terms as opportunistic “supermen.”

116

After fulfilling

his lecture tour obligations in New York, Adler continued north to Boston and west to

Chicago and Detroit. Psychoanalysis remained popular among American intelligentsia

and the avant-garde movement. However, Adler’s lectures brought him success across

establishing an American branch of the psychoanalytic society and perceptions of

American decadence. Remarking to British friend and colleague Ernest Jones, Freud

snidely remarked, “Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.” As quoted in Peter

Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Times (New York: Anchor Books, 1988). 563.

115

“Mental Hygiene Lecture Dates Set,” New York Times, December 26, 1926.

116

“Mussolini Spurred to His Fight for Power by Pique Over Inferiority as a Child, Says

Dr. Alfred Adler,” New York World, December 26, 1926. As quoted in Hoffman, The

Drive for Self: Alfred Adler and the Founding of Individual Psychology, 175-176.

the U.S. and ushered in what cultural historian Warren Susman has called the “age of

Alfred Adler.”

117

In his writings on mid-twentieth-century America, Susman used an Adlerian

interpretation to describe transformations in American culture. The industrial age and

Great Depression clashed, creating a sense of existential dread for millions of Americans.

And while this did not mean millions rushed to buy copies of Adler’s works

Understanding Human Nature (1927) or Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind (1938),

the rampant fears and anxieties expressed by those suffering from unemployment and

rushing to relief lines appeared parallel to Adler’s psychological doctrine that sought to

establish a dependable sense of community for individuals struggling to cope with an

unpredictable world. Or, as Susman summarizes, “social science and design joined hands

with an Adlerian vision to reshape men and culture in America as Americans themselves

sought help in finding their culture and playing their required roles in it.”

118

Adler did not

fail to spread his psychology to America. His simple lecture style resonated with

117

Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the

Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), 200; An amusing story regarding

Adler appears in the Detroit Jewish Chronicle dated August 16, 1929. When announced

that Dr. Alfred Adler had been appointed as a "consulting psychiatrist to the National

Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement," confusion swelled in the press and

around the nation. They were apparently "stunned, for we had not heard anything about

the appointment, which was announced in the newspapers it seems." After all, “Alfred

Adler is a name to be conjured with!” After some “detective work” by the Chronicle, it

was revealed that the “man appointed as consultant and director in the field of psychiatry

phase of criminology by the National Commission of the Law Observance Enforcement

is Dr. Herman Adler of Chicago—not Dr. Alfred Adler of Vienna.” Stating that while the

“Chicago gentleman may be a very good psychiatrist…he has not yet attained the

international reputation that Freud’s collaborator has achieved.” For “It would be queer to

have the United States government appoint an Austrian Jew, wouldn’t it? No matter how

famous that person,” as the article concludes: “Now you may breathe.”

118

Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the

Twentieth Century, 201.

American audiences, lay and scientific, but at what cost? His messages were absorbed

into the fast-paced American experience; all was remembered but his name.

In a 1931 paper, Adler defined the limits of psychoanalysis and explained his

concepts of human nature, as seen through the lens of Individual Psychology.

The Freudian view is that man, by nature bad, covers this unconscious

badness through censorship merely to get along better in life. Individual

Psychology, on the other hand, states that the development of man, by

virtue of his inadequate physique, is subject to the redeeming influence of

social interest, so that all his drives can be guided in the direction of the

generally useful. The indestructible destiny of the human species is social

interest. In Individual Psychology, accordingly, maintains that, due to his

physique, i.e. physical condition, a biological factor, man is inclined

toward social interest, toward the good. We find neurotics, psychotics,

suicides, etc., only when social interest is throttled. In this case the child

becomes egoistic, loses interest in others, and presses his biologically

founded striving for significance toward the useless side to reach his goal

of personal superiority.

119

This may have been a response to Freud’s recently published work, Civilization and Its

Discontents. As Freud appeared to possess an increasingly jaded point of view on modern

civilization and society, he attacked idealistic perspectives that sought to establish an

ideal community on earth. Whereas Adler had preached to audiences that his psychology

was founded on the age-old principle to love your neighbor as yourself, Freud retorted,

“Why should we do it? What good will it do us? But, above all, how shall we achieve it?

How can it be possible?”

120

Where Freud saw limits to one’s propensity for love and

empathy with his fellow man, Adler’s unrelenting optimism saw Gemeinschaftsgefühl

and social interest as man’s universal destiny.

119

Alfred Adler, Superiority and Social Interest, ed. Heinz Ansbacher and Rowena

Ansbacher, 3

ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1979), 210-211.

120

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (W.W. Norton

and Company, 1930), 66.

As Freud continued reasoning that instincts and unconscious drives were far more

powerful forces than any conscious action, he had by now seamlessly incorporated

Adler’s “aggression instinct” into his views.

121

On the concept coined by Adler, Freud

wrote:

The existence of this inclination to aggression, which we can detect in

ourselves and justly assume to be present in others, is the factor which

disturbs our relations with our neighbor and which forces civilization into

such a high expenditure [of energy]. In consequence of this primary

mutual hostility of human beings, civilized society is perpetually

threatened with disintegration. The interest of work in common would not

hold it together; instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable

interests.

122

Freud rejected the idea of a sentimental social or community feeling powerful enough to

bring peace and harmony to the world. Instead, Freud conceived of a world fueled by

aggression and repressed due to its being shackled by modern civilization.

Like polarized atoms, Adler moved away from Freud and towards a more

optimistic psychology attuned to the innate potential for social interest in all persons. Yet,

despite Adler’s reasoning that people are social beings, Adler continued to acknowledge

the presence of what he called the “striving for superiority,” an attitude that Adler

considered to be a counterforce to social interest.

123

Whereas Freud asked his patients to

accept the suppressed primal, unconscious instincts hidden within, Adler countered that

such an approach was against the logic of human nature; if only Freud could understand

121

Heinz Ansbacher and Rowena Ansbacher, eds. The Individual Psychology of Alfred

Adler: A Systematic Presentation in Selections from His Writings (New York: Basic

Books, Inc., 1956), 267.

122

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 69.

123

Carl Fürtmuller, “Alfred Adler. A Biographical Essay,” in Superiority and Social

Interest, ed. Heinz Ansbacher and Rowena Ansbacher (New York: W.W. Norton &

Company, 1979), 388-389.

that life does not revolve around sex and aggression. Adler had a clear vision supported

by his teleological view of history that impressed upon people the importance of

mastering Geimeinschaftsgefühl. Only when everyone worked in the community’s

interests, through the prescribed tasks of work, love, and friendship, would civilization

achieve its ultimate form. When Adler spoke of social interest, he felt it was a secret

humanity had forgotten and only needed to be reminded of to awaken the altruistic

character within. He knew people sought a usable framework to make sense of the

absurd, and he felt his psychology provided a clear, sensible guide that even the most

common folk could understand.

However, Adler was not the only speaker capable of rousing community feeling

and spirit. When asked his opinion of Nazi Germany, the Viennese sage candidly

declared the German state to be “Sixty-five million people in search of an author!”

124

Fifteen years prior to Hitler’s ascension as the new “author” of the Third Reich, Adler

wrote on the potential for the abuse of social interest:

The present stage of our culture and insight stull permits the power

principle to prevail. However, it can be adhered to no longer openly but

only through the exploitation of social interest. An unveiled and direct

attack of violence is unpopular and would no longer be safe. Thus when

violence is to be committed this is frequently done by appealing to justice,

custom, freedom, the welfare of the oppressed, and in the name of

culture…It is in this way that the disastrous exploitation of social interest

by the striving for power comes about. Social interest is transformed from

an end into a means and is pressed into the service of nationalism and

imperialism.

125

124

Ibid, 63.

125

Alfred Adler. “Abuse of Social Interest.” In The Individual Psychology of Alfred

Adler: A Systematic Presentation in Selections from His Writings, (New York: Basic

Books, Inc., 1956), 455-56.

Throughout Adler’s life, Gemeinschaftsgefühl endured as an intellectual commodity used

to justify and propagate the agenda of various political parties. In turn, Adler had often

strived to steer his psychology and constructs clear of attempts at political appropriation.

He insisted on the apolitical nature of his psychology, and in conversations with friends,

he would declare that “‘Individual Psychology is like a basket of fruit, out of which any

passer-by can take whatever agrees with him!’”

126

Adler’s distaste for governments,

leaders, and regimes that manipulated their peoples as means to an end never faltered. He

knew Gemeinschaftsgefühl was a philosophy at risk of abuse and misuse by sly

politicians seeking to obtain power and authority by exploiting people’s fears and

emotions.

Despite Hitler’s early attempts to play the calm, thoughtful leader and feign social

interest, Adler was not fooled. In a speech given on May 17, 1933, Hitler impressed upon

the world:

It is…in the interests of all that present-day problems should be solved in

a reasonable and final manner. No new European war could improve the

unsatisfactory conditions of the present day. On the contrary, the

application of violence of any kind in Europe could have no favorable

effect upon the political or economic position which exists today. Even the

ultimate effect would be to increase the disturbance of European

equilibrium and thus, in one manner or another, to sow the seed of further

conflicts and complications. The result would be fresh wars, fresh

uncertainty, and fresh economic distress. The outbreak of such infinite

madness, however, would necessarily cause the collapse of the present

social and political order. A Europe sinking into Communist chaos would

bring about a crisis the extent and duration of which could not be foreseen.

It is the earnest desire of the National Government of the German Reich to

prevent such a disturbing development by means of its honest and active

cooperation.

127

126

Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom, 62.

127

Adolf Hitler, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, ed. Norman

Baynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), 1046.

Hitler talked about “cooperation” and condemned war, but his motivations were sinister.

He looked at a “community” as a means to an end and sought to weaponize it for his own

path to superiority. Thus, in a letter dated October 15, 1933, Adler thoughtfully wrote,

“…even this poor Hitler uses my views for fooling the people.”

128

Despite no indication

that the Führer himself ever paid any attention to Adlerian psychology, it was not long

before some of Adler’s students were led astray into the service of Nazism and

totalitarianism.

Occasionally, Adler used his psychology to understand what attracted people to

such large, fanatical, nationalistic mass movements. Distinguishing “good” movements

from “evil” ones, Adler identified a few times when mass movements had proven

beneficial to the progress of mankind, as in the case of the creation of language that

required cooperation and social interest. However, at this point in history, Adler

perceived an inherent danger to mass movements that appeared vulnerable and

susceptible to manipulation by demagogues.

Today, in view of the irrefutable proofs that Individual Psychology has

presented, we must recognize that people meet situations in adulthood

with the viewpoint and attitude they adopted in childhood. For example,

people who have built up their style of life as pampered children will meet

all later situations, including the economic, with the expectation that

others will prepare the way and make things easier for them. No matter

what sort of movement they may join, religious, political, or cultural, they

will expect everything from other people, most often from a leader who

can think and work for them, assume all responsibility, and make himself

a crutch for their indecision. If he shows them the possibility of more

favorable positions, with perhaps the highest cultivation of humanity as

his avowed ultimate goal, they will follow him enthusiastically, even

though common sense speaks against the move.

129

128

Marina Bluvshtein, “Individual Psychology as a ‘Living Force of Progress’ 76, no. 1

(2020): 13.

129

Alfred Adler, “Mass Psychology,” ed. Henry Stein, Collected Clinical Works of Alfred

Adler, vol. 7 (2005), 154.

Adler viewed Gemeinschaftsgefühl as an irrefutable principle withstanding and evolving

throughout time. However, he did not see this philosophy in the light of a collective “hive

mind” mentality where individuals were robbed of their freedom and individuality. The

community Adler hoped for was not a gray, lifeless mass but a vibrant collective that

understood civilization was at its best when people worked in harmony towards shared

goals. The “power of the ‘sense of community’ and the exercise of this sense by the

individual” was a force strong enough to steer the individual in the direction of virtuous

action, justice, and reason. Adler possessed such certainty on the nature of

Gemeinschaftsgefühl that he could not comprehend a community or society preferring

any other way of living. “The feelings of compassion and altruistic pleasure, the respect

and recognition granted the successful efforts to produce beauty in art and life all show

that the human masses, though their accord is by no means perfect, are guided by a

common urge to value the welfare and humanity as a whole.”

130

Adler considered these

feelings to be innate and only had to be encouraged and brought to fruition via a liberal

education and attentive parenting.

Yet, as innate as Adler believed the sense of community to be, he could still write

that “the idea of the community of mankind must be instilled in early childhood.”

131

Such

a statement is confusing and contradictory to Adlerian scholars. Was

Gemeinschaftsgefühl an innate instinct that developed through evolution, or was it a

philosophy that required instruction? Adler split the difference and found the solution to

this question via biology and sociology. He reasoned that each child is born with the

130

Alfred Adler, “Mass Psychology,” 150.

131

Ibid, 158.

innate potential of Gemeinschaftsgefühl, but being born with such a trait was not enough.

Children needed to receive an education and training that would allow them to tap into

the sense of community embedded within the schema and taught to express it in healthy,

positive ways. Otherwise, one’s potential for Gemeinschatsgefühl would be wasted. If a

child was not trained in the direction of Gemeinschaftsgefühl, then he would strive for

goals that ignored the betterment of the community.

The “striving” feeling Adler often spoke of did not always mean that one sought

to dominate others to gain satisfaction. Rather, striving was a normal and healthy act that

all persons experience. Adler regarded inferiority and superiority complexes as disorders

that deviated from the normal route of social interest.

These complexes are not in the germplasm, they are not in the

bloodstream: they simply happen in the course of the interaction of the

individual and his social environment. Why don’t they happen to all

individuals? All individuals have a sense of inferiority and a striving for

success and superiority which makes up the very life of the psyche. The

reason all individuals do not have complexes is that their sense of

inferiority and superiority is harnessed by a psychological mechanism into

socially useful channels. The springs of this mechanism are social interest,

courage, and social-mindedness, or the logic of common sense.

132

Everyone strives towards achievement, recognition, and purpose. In attaining these goals

and benchmarks in life, people derive a sense of “completeness.” Thus, Adler refereed to

a healthy striving attitude as the “striving for completeness.”

133

However, if children or

adults were not trained in the right attitude for the heightened sense of community, they

would likely behave in ways that could only be categorized as selfish or egoistic. Adler

132

Alfred Adler, The Science of Living (Mansfield Centre: Martino Publishing, 2011),

215-216.

133

Alfred Adler, “Advantages and Disadvantages of the Inferiority Feeling,” ed. Heinz

Ansbacher and Rowena Ansbacher, Superiority and Social Interest, 1933, 51-52.

hoped that if enough people were trained to recognize community feeling as the proper

attitude in life, one would see a reduction in neurosis, depression, anxiety, crime, and

war. As Adler had once proclaimed in the Café Central, the world needed

Gemeinschaftsgefühl; but was the world finally ready to listen?

The year 1938 brought Europe and the world one step closer to war. After an

attempted coup launched by the Austrian National Socialists succeed in assassinating

Dollfuss in 1934, but failed to hand power to the Nazis, Kurt von Schuschnigg ascended

to the Chancellorship as devout and conservative a Catholic as his predecessor. While

Schuschnigg was a strong leader, Hitler had momentum and a vast military on his side.

The allied powers held their breath, waiting to see how Austria would fare against their

German brethren. A wired transmission from the New York Times reported that “most of

the Austrian cities and villages have shown a desire to maintain the independence of their

country.” Hitler and the Third Reich’s precarious relationship with Catholic and religious

institutions provoked Austrian Catholics’ anxieties about how a Nazi takeover would

affect their ability to practice their faith. Far less concerned with religious matters, the

Social Democrats in Austria feared a “lowering of their standard of living and a complete

subordination to German militarization.” The SDAP further understood that if the nation

were annexed to Nazi Germany, any hopes for reviving the republic would be

extinguished. The New York Times optimism that “a possibility of a rapprochement

between the Socialists and the Fatherland Front (Vaterlandische Front) for the common

defense of their country against Nazi absorption” ultimately went unfulfilled.

134

March 11, 1938, German troops crossed the border into Austria; on March 14

, Hitler

134

“Austria Resists Anschluss,” New York Times, March 1, 1938.

and his brown-shirted Sturmabteilung marched triumphantly through the swastika-clad

streets of Vienna.

135

Post-Anschluss Austria, deprived of its intellectuals who once stood

by as loyal defenders of the republic, became sullen and depressed. Thinkers like Alfred

Adler, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and many others evacuated for safe havens

promising intellectual freedom and liberty. Any Austro-Marxist achievements in the so-

called Red Fortress faded into the recesses of those Viennese intellectuals and laborers

who had worked side by side to achieve the successful fusion of socialism and

democracy.

After the Anschluss, Stefan Zweig remembered Nazi thugs descending on Vienna

as they carried out vicious acts against those marked as Jews.

University professors were forced to scrub the streets with their bare

hands; devout, white-bearded Jews were hauled into the synagogues by

young men bawling with glee, and made to perform knee-bends while

shouting ‘Heil Hitler!’ in chorus. They rounded up innocent victims in the

streets like rabbits and dragged them away to sweep the steps of the SA

barracks. All the sick, perverted fantasies they had thought up over many

nights of sadistic imaginings were now put into practice in broad

daylight.

136

As their reality came crashing down, some hoped they might be able to compromise with

the Nazi state. Freud had already had the pleasure of dealing with the Nazis as early as

1933 when they burned his books and derided psychoanalysis as a “Jewish science.” His

German colleague, Felix Boehm, wrote him recommending that the two Jewish directors

of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society, Max Eitington and Ernst Simmel, step down. Freud

was initially skeptical but soon gave in. The first of many great compromises that

135

William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster,

1960), 347-348.

136

Zweig, The World of Yesterday, 432.

occurred from the years 1933 to 1945 did no favors as Jewish practitioners fled, and

membership in the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society “dropped from 65 to fewer than 15, and

the number of students dropped from 222 in 1931 to 34 in 1934.”

137

As Austria and Germany succumbed to Hitlerism, an ongoing class revolution in

the Soviet Union brought radical Communists to condemn Freud and Adler’s

psychologies for their perceived bourgeois elements and respective failures to address the

social and economic needs of the proletariat. Manès Sperber, Adler’s former student, now

revolted against his former mentor and friend. They challenged Individual Psychology on

the grounds that Adler could have put his psychology at the service of the Communists as

motivation for the proletariat to fight for the ideal community Marx advocated, but after

years of trying to convince Adler of the necessity to align Individual Psychology with

Marxism, the moderate socialist had consistently denied the possibility of this ever

occurring. Thus, Sperber announced:

Adler’s Individual Psychology was in fact once the leftist branch of

bourgeois/petty bourgeois psychology. In his paper, The Psychological

Movement, Sigmund Freud bases Adler’s views in his socialistic

worldview. In fact, Adler in his time searched for the basis of his views in

Marx and Engels. But just as the social-democratic leadership in the last

decade has steadily developed into the most threatening danger to the

proletariat and the most bitter enemies of the proletarian revolution,

orthodox ‘legitimate’ Adlerian Individual Psychology has developed more

and more into a social-fascistic system, social in some expressions,

fascistic in system: in practice, promoting and supporting fascism.

138

137

Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis, 226.

138

Manés Sperber, “The Present State of Psychology,” Fachgruppe Für Dialetisch

Materialische Psychologie, 1932. As quoted in Edward Hoffman, The Drive for Self:

Alfred Adler and the Founding of Individual Psychology (Reading, Massachusetts:

Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1994), 259.

The lines were drawn, and the message was clear, “You are either with us, or against us.”

Simultaneously, Alice Rühle-Gerstel, felt there was no room left for indecision of

apolitical perspectives, declaring “it is no longer feasible for a school of psychology to

declare itself as ‘neutral’ and to close its eyes to the social realities.’”

139

Adler, never

blind to these social realities, did not allow his politics to lead his psychology. His

psychology could inform his politics, but it was never committed to one platform,

figurehead, or agenda.

Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist known for his work on child development

and language, kept tabs on the new developments occurring in German psychology.

Writing from the Soviet Union, he noted the fascist element that, like a parasite, infected

German psychology and its practitioners with its rigid worldview. While he noted that

“bourgeois psychology” had become increasingly popular in the “past few decades” in

Germany, works were being perverted and brought to an extreme by fascism and

National Socialism.

The new regime has accelerated catastrophically the growth of and

exposed a great number of hitherto vague, not fully recognized, masked

tendencies, and as a result, a basic infrastructure within the system of

fascist psychology has been created with the most astonishing speed

during the past year…There cannot, of course, be any discussion of the

creation of a new psychology in a time as short as that which has elapsed

from the establishment of the fascist regime. Fascism began to penetrate

psychology in a different way. It rearranged the ranks of German

psychology by bringing into the foreground everything reactionary which

previously existed in it. But this alone would have been enough. As has

already been said, it was also necessary to knock together, in the shortest

139

Alice Rühle-Gerstel, “The Role of Psychology in the Social Upheaval,” Fachgruppe

Für Dialetisch Materialische Psychologie, 1932. As quoted in Hoffman, The Drive for

Self: Alfred Adler and the Founding of Individual Psychology, 259.

possible time, a system of psychology which would correspond to the

entire fascist psychology.

140

Psychological theory and practice in Germany changed according to the dictates of the

new reigning party. Therapy free from politics was dismissed in favor of clinical

professionals committed to the Nazi state who changed their practices in accordance with

Volkish ideology.

Though Gemeinschaftsgefühl had not gained much traction in the intellectual

rhetoric and discourses of Central Europe, a weak reception did not stop its eventual

appropriation to advance respective agendas for power and superiority. Leonhard Seif, a

longtime German colleague of Adler’s from Munich, was one of the first to turn his

efforts to the newly reorganized German General Medical Society for Psychotherapy.

Seif had been a faithful advocate and educator for Adlerian psychology in Germany.

Responsible for training several of the qualified Adlerian practitioners and clinicians in

140

Lev Vygotsky, “Fascism in Psychoneurology,” 1934, 327; René van der Veer and

Anton Yasnitsky’s work, “Vygotsky in English: What Still Needs to Be Done,”

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 45 (2011): 475-93 discusses Adler’s

early influence on Vygotsky, as in Vygotsky’s 1928 publication, “The dynamics of child

character,” in which Vygotsky commended Adler’s efforts in psychology. Vygotsky also

discussed the relationship between Adler’s psychology and Marxism, writing, “Adler’s

theory is often connected—especially in circles of German and Austrian social-

democrats—with Marx’s theory…None of the contemporary psychological ideas has

such enormous significance for pedagogues, for the theory and practice of education, as

this idea of Adler.” Vygotsky’s original works contain positive references of this sort to

Adlerian psychology. However, many of these references were removed posthumously

after Vygotsky’s death in 1934. Van der Veer and Yasnitsky speculate that these

revisions may have occurred due to Adler being grouped, along with Sigmund Freud, as a

“bourgeois” theorist and the fact that Vygotsky called Adler’s psychology

“revolutionary,” which was contrary to the ideals of the Soviet state which proclaimed

that “only Russian Marxist ideas could be truly revolutionary.” Thus, in later

republications of Vygotsky’s work “The dynamics of child character,” Adler’s name was

expunged, as was Freud’s in later editions of Vygotsky’s work Thinking and Speech. The

Nazis were not the only ones in the process of revising psychological texts, theory, and

practice to conform to party ideology.

Europe, Seif had also been responsible for training the British novelist Phyllis Bottome,

Adler’s unofficial biographer, who seemed only able to recall pleasant interactions with

the stoic German psychiatrist. Seif, a precise and by-the-book clinician, seemingly

embodied the principles of Adlerian psychology and lived according to them. When

Bottome and her husband, Alban Dennis, arrived in Austria, they sought out Adler, eager

to learn more about Individual Psychology. However, Adler wrote the couple, informing

them, “If you want to really understand Individual Psychology, do not come to me, since

I live too far off from you in Vienna, but go to my colleague [Leonhard] Seif in Munich.

He will give you all you want to know.”

141

Adler possessed a great deal of trust in his

German colleague and believed that his psychology was well-represented in Germany by

socially interested practitioners.

Bottome and her husband traveled to Munich to meet with Seif and studied under

him. “We formed a great relationship with him, and felt that Munich would make an ideal

spot for continuing our experiment with young people, especially those who needed

character training as well as our language.” After spending enough time in the intellectual

community in Munich, Bottome and Dennis decided to stay there and begin their lives

anew. “We gave up our mountain chalet and took a flat at Munich, prepared to settle

down there for life. Our plans and our hopes expanded together until the shadow of the

Nazi regime fell upon us. We remained as long as we could after the rise of Hitler, but we

soon saw that it was impossible to continue a psychology that taught individual freedom

and the love of our neighbor, under a regime which turned its citizens into State slaves;

141

Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom, 243.

and tortured its minorities—Jewish, Catholic, or Liberal.”

142

The divide between

Adlerian psychology, an altruistic psychology oriented towards humanistic values, and

the Third Reich’s demands for racial Germans’ undying allegiance to the party and state

appeared too enormous a gap to reconcile. As polarizing as Adler’s psychology was to

Freud’s, any relationship between Individual Psychology and Nazi philosophy is

unimaginable. Yet, history would prove how dramatically ideas can change when

confronted with the hard pressed realities of life.

As conditions in Europe deteriorated, Adler appeared to distract himself with

work and lectures. But on occasion, newspapers asked him for comments on Nazi

Germany, Hitler, and fascism, and Adler would provide a candid analysis. Papers would

then run headlines such as, “Hitler Called Diplomat—Waiting to Choose Allies, Dr.

[Alfred] Adler Says,”

143

or “[Alfred Adler] Says Hitler Shrewd.”

144

In the article released

by the Lincoln Journal Star, the story told its readers, “Adolf Hitler, in the opinion of Dr.

Alfred Adler, world famous psychologist and psychiatrist, is shrewd, patient, cold-

blooded and a better diplomat than Mussolini.” Adler further expanded by commenting,

“Hitler is waiting to see which European country is the stronger, and nobody, not even

Hitler, knows what he will do after that.”

145

Adler may have described Hitler a diplomat,

and a better one than Mussolini, but his comments should not be seen as praise for the

dictator, whom Adler recognized as an individual without social feeling and striving for

superiority to compensate for his felt inferiorities.

142

Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom, 244.

143

“Hitler Called Diplomat—Waiting to Choose Allies, Dr. Adler Says,” Lincoln Star

Journal, March 12, 1936.

144

“Says Hitler Shrewd,” The Kearney Daily Hub, March 12, 1936.

145

“Hitler Called Diplomat—Waiting to Choose Allies, Dr. Adler Says.”

In a series of lectures that started in the Netherlands and carried over to Scotland,

Adler’s 1937 lecture circuit would take him to England and conclude in France, where he

was to meet his wife, Raissa, and daughter, Alexandra. Tragically, he would never make

it to Paris. He died on May 27

at the age of sixty-seven. The combination of the physical

toll brought on by intense travel overwhelmed the Viennese psychiatrist, who had been

dealing with recent heart problems. Moreover, Adler’s attention was fixated on his oldest

daughter, Valentine. Like her mother, Valentine devoted herself to the socialist cause,

opting to move to the Soviet Union with her husband, Gyula Sus. At some point, Alfred

and Raissa’s letters to Vali, a tender nickname, went unanswered. Alfred feared the

worst, knowing that the Stalinist regime was just as radical and unstable as Hitler’s in

Germany. After his lecture series, he planned to travel to Russia and retrieve his

daughter. These plans ultimately went unfulfilled. The truth eventually came to light,

with help from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and Albert Einstein, who acted as an

intermediary for the Adlers, that Valentine had been taken as a political prisoner and died

in a Siberian gulag.

146

For all Raissa’s past praise of the Soviet Union and equating its

mission with her husband’s psychology, this was a cruel twist of irony.

In the 1930s, Adler described the world as enveloped in Weltschmerz (world

pain).

147

He despised war and more-so the use of psychology to condition men to fight

for causes they might not normally defend. Nonetheless, Adler did not believe it possible

for individuals to be manipulated by a perverted community seeking to misuse its

146

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

329.

147

Marina Bluvshtein, “Individual Psychology as a ‘Living Force of Progress,’” Journal

of Individual Psychology 76, no. 1 (2020), 13.

population as a means to an end. He asserted in a 1933 session of the Vienna Medical

Society for Individual Psychology:

The concept of community and community feeling can also be abused. But

one who has properly understood knows that in the nature of community

and community feeling rests an evolutionary factor which turns against

everything which resists this direction. He will be able to avoid the abuse

of the concept of the community or to let himself be abused by others in

its name.

148

[Emphasis Added].

Gemeinschaftsgefühl was not a fascistic philosophy designed to trick the people into

serving of a totalitarian state. Those who truly understood this concept would not mistake

its elements for Nazism or Stalinism. They would recognize the metaphysical properties

inherent to this idealistic idea that Adler insisted was an apolitical idea devoted to the

well-being of all peoples. It is because of Adler’s awareness of the dangers and

implications of socially engineering a “community” (Gemeinschaft) that he limited

himself to an ambiguous discussion of “community feeling” (Gemeinschaftsgefühl). If

the ideal community could not be created on this earth, then perhaps the striving for it

would be enough. Adler, later in life, turned to metaphysical explanations of

Gemeinschaftsgefühl.

Social feeling means above all a struggle for a communal form that must

be thought of as eternally applicable, such as, say, could be thought of

when humanity has attained its goal of perfection. It is not a question of

any present-day community or society, or of political or religious forms.

On the contrary, the goal that is best suited for perfection must be a goal

that stands for an ideal of society amongst all mankind, the ultimate

fulfillment of evolution.

149

148

Alfred Adler, Superiority and Social Interest, ed. Heinz Ansbacher and Rowena

Ansbacher (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979), 38.

149

Alfred Adler, Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind (Mansfield Centre: Martino

Publishing, 2011), 275.

Thus, increasingly when Adler spoke on community and community feeling, he was no

longer talking about a community achievable on this earth, but an ideal community that

exists outside the realm of history.

Individual Psychology did not have the cure for neurosis, but it did provide a

framework people could understand and use to make rational choices in a not-so-rational

world. Adler affirmed as much when he wrote of Individual Psychology: “it takes the

blame from the individual’s shoulders and assigns it to the failures of our civilization, in

whose imperfections all of us are implicated, and it demands cooperation for their

removal.”

150

He did not prescribe a political or economic plan to accompany

Gemeinschaftsgefühl, he merely said it was what the world “wants.”

151

Even so,

insightful and pragmatic as he was, he failed to predict the scale of Nazi aspirations under

Hitler who demanded the will of its people to come to an understanding of the necessity

for National Socialism, war, and anti-Semitism. Nor would he live to see how

Gemeinschaftsgefühl was corrupted one last time for the German state under Hitler to

supplement ideology, as the remaining German Adlerians were commissioned as servants

of the Third Reich.

150

Adler, Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind, 104.

151

Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom, 120.

CHAPTER FOUR: HEALERS OF THE GERMAN SOUL

Adlerian scholars, such as Sophia de Vries, have argued that “during World War

II, Individual Psychology was dormant. Hitler had decreed that Adler’s and Freud’s

theories should not be learned, as both men were born Jewish. Only [Carl] Jung’s

psychology could openly be practiced.”

152

Ms. de Vries was not alone in her thinking.

Another scholar of Adler, Lewis Way, asserted “that in 1934 the State facilities accorded

to his [Adler’s] child guidance clinics were discontinued…Equally in Germany, the rise

of Hitler to power put an end to his work in that country.”

153

This chapter challenges de

Vries and Way’s assertions that the Nazis extinguished Jewish influences on psychology

and that Adlerian psychology in Austria and Germany ended with the rise of National

Socialism.

In 1933, Matthias Göring, cousin of the chief of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring,

was appointed director of the German General Medical Society for Psychotherapy.

Göring, an Adlerian trained psychiatrist, was taken with Adler’s philosophy of

Gemeinschaftsgefühl. He aspired to create a Neue Deutsche Seelenheilkunde, or New

German Soul Medicine, based on Adler’s concept of community feeling, and he worked

to infuse it into the National Socialist vision of the Volksgemeinschaft (people’s racial

152

Sophia de Vries, “An Introduction,” The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler,

vol. 2 (1990), viii.

153

Lewis Way, Alfred Adler: An Introduction to His Psychology (London: The

Whitefriars Press, 1956), 49.

community).

154

The hope was to eliminate the “perverse” aspects of “Jewish psychology”

and create therapies more compatible with the German mind and psyche. So Göring

announced in the first issue of the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie (Journal for

Psychotherapy), the primary publication of the German General Medical Society for

Psychotherapy, that “This Society has the task of unifying all German physicians in the

spirit of the National Socialistic government…particularly those physicians who are

willing to practice psychiatry according to the ‘Weltanschauung’ (worldview) of the

National Socialists.”

155

Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf became recommended reading for all

German therapists, as Göring celebrated the Führer’s politics as foundational to the

mission of German psychotherapists.

156

This new generation of German psychologists

would be revered as healers of the German soul.

Other German professionals voiced similar praise for the Third Reich and its

aims. Dr. Wilhelm Hartnacke, education minister for the German state of Saxony,

declared at a congregation of the German Society for Psychology:

It must become a goal of education to think along the lines of folk-biology

before we can think of formal and practical teaching. Hence science in the

service of racial heritage goes before intellectual education…May this

convention of German psychologists in the new Reich of our Führer,

Adolf Hitler, this great psychologist out of inner intuition, form a corner

stone and starting point toward the beneficial activity in the new state and

for the German people.

157

154

Geoffrey Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1985), 53-60.

155

Franz Alexander and Sheldon Selesnick, The History of Psychiatry: An Evaluation of

Psychiatric Thought and Practice from Prehistoric Times to the Present (New York:

Harper & Row, 1966), 407.

156

Geoffrey Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute, 158.

157

Franciska Baumgarten-Tramer, “German Psychologists and Recent Events,” trans.

Frederick Wyatt and Gertrud Wyatt, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 43, no.

4 (1948): 460-461.

Praising Hitler as a great “psychologist,” these men sought to ingratiate themselves to the

party and state. Yet, upon closer review of the state-recognized German Institute for

Psychological Research and Psychotherapy, otherwise known as the Göring Institute, one

finds that practitioners did not limit themselves to the works of pure German theorists.

The reality was that these German physicians and therapists coveted “Jewish” ideas such

as Adler’s Gemeinschaftsgefühl for its potential to ease the transition from Germans into

Nazis and inform citizens of the role they must play within the Volksgemeinschaft.

Akin to Gemeinschaftsgefühl, the Volksgemeinschaft did not start out as a

National Socialist ideal. Rather, as Michael Wildt notes, the Volksgemeinschaft was “an

imaginary order that had to be continually renegotiated.”

158

This worked to the advantage

of National Socialists, who could tailor ideology to the people’s desires and renegotiate

with the Volk on their role in the new world order. The Volksgemeinschaft meant

different things to different groups and individuals over time. Just as different factions

appropriated Gemeinschaftsgefühl for their own agenda, the Volksgemeinschaft devolved

into an ideological weapon wielded by men to shape their social realities. Key to the

creation of the totalitarian state, Nazi propagandists constructed campaigns that would

appeal to ordinary folk. They turned to ideas such as the Volksgemeinschaft, a notion that

appears as resonant a concept as Gemeinschaftsgefühl, with the hope of uniting Germans

and turning them against perceived enemies of the racial state. Still recovering from the

Great Depression, Germans looked to Hitler and his promises of unity, national

revitalization, bread, and work. Replicating Adler’s approach, the Nazis emphasized, in

158

Michael Wildt, “Volksgemeinschaft: A Controversy,” in Beyond the Racial State:

Rethinking Nazi Germany, ed. Devin Pendas, Mark Roseman, and Richard Wetzell

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 329.

simple language, the importance of service to the community. These simplistic

philosophies urging the people to commit themselves to the nation appealed to the

common German and were meant to restore the people’s health (Volksgesundheit). With

increasing fervor, Germans praised this new generation of patriots for reanimating the

German spirit.

The Volksgemeinschaft promised not only community but economic and social

stability.

159

It tapped into the moment when Kaiser Wilhelm II, at the start of WWI,

looked upon a crowd of citizens and exclaimed that he did not see people divided by

parties, classes, or occupation; he saw “only Germans.”

160

Through the lens of the

community, the National Socialists saw a path to eliminating their Marxist and socialist

rivals. While one aspect of the Volksgemeinschaft extolled community and comradery

among Germans, on the flip side was its element of exclusion. Those to be excluded were

Communists, Socialists, Jews, and anyone else who posed a threat to the consolidated

party, racial unity, and the state’s goals of expanding its Lebensraum (living space).

As the National Socialist government weeded out Jewish professionals, it became

necessary to reboot disciplines to match the ideology of a Germanic world order. The

Swiss analyst Carl Jung, once Sigmund Freud’s heir apparent, found success as head of

the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy in 1934. Although he

resigned in 1939, Jung’s service in the international organization marked a shady chapter

of his career when he cooperated with German psychologists under the Nazi umbrella.

159

Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 2008), 17.

160

Wildt, “Volksgemeinschaft: A Controversy,” 317.

Assisting their efforts, Jung asserted in the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie (Journal for

Psychotherapy):

Freud and Adler have beheld very clearly the shadow that accompanies us

all. The Jews have this peculiarity in common with women; being

physically weaker, they have to aim at the chinks in the armor of their

adversary, and thanks to this technique which has been forced on them

through the centuries, the Jews themselves are best protected where others

are most vulnerable. Because, again, of their civilization, more than twice

as ancient as ours, they are vastly more conscious than we of human

weaknesses, of the shadow-side of things, and hence in this respect much

less vulnerable than we are. Thanks to their experience of an old culture,

they are able, while fully conscious of their frailties to live on friendly and

even tolerant terms with them, whereas we are still too young not to have

‘illusions’ about ourselves…As a member of a race with a three-thousand-

year-old civilization, the Jew, like the cultured Chinese, has a wider area

of psychological consciousness than we. Consequently it is in general less

dangerous for the Jew to put a negative value on his unconscious. The

‘Aryan’ unconscious, on the other hand, contains explosive forces and

seeds of a future yet to be born, and these may not be devalued as nursery

romanticism without psychic danger. The still youthful Germanic peoples

are fully capable of creating new cultural forms that still lie dormant in the

darkness of the unconscious of every individual—seeds bursting with

energy and capable of a mighty expansion.

161

Jung’s analytical psychology was praised for its “pure” views that aligned with

Germany’s goals to purge the Jewish character from psychotherapy. He held Freud and

Adler responsible for holding back the German race. His scathing critique lacked

objectivity and appeared as the ravings of a man convinced of a Jewish conspiracy to

derail Germany’s destiny. Nevertheless, even after Matthias Göring and Carl Jung’s

denouncements of the Jewish elements Freud and Adler brought to psychotherapy, they

failed to prevent German authors from referencing their works.

161

Carl Jung, “The State of Psychotherapy Today,” in Civilization in Transition,

(Princeton University Press, 1970), 165.

The Nazi strategy of Gleichschaltung (coordination) demanded that German

psychology match the ideology of the party and state.

162

With that idea in mind, the

relationship between the Göring Institute and Nazi Germany was defined by elements of

“continuity, compatibility, and autonomy.”

163

In other words, there was no ideological

break separating the new Nazi-minded push for German psychology. In fact, a significant

element of continuity carried over from the works of Jewish analysts like Freud and

Adler to the new generation of German practitioners. These new Nazi-minded

intellectuals made their psychological theory and practice compatible with the Aryan

state to preserve their practice. As Carl Jung remarked of conditions in Germany, “a

single stroke of the pen in high places would have sufficed to sweep all psychotherapy

under the table. That had to be prevented at all costs for the sake of suffering humanity,

doctors, and—last but not least—science and civilization.”

164

Psychotherapy and analysis

were in danger because, in the eyes of the Nazis, it was too often associated with “foreign

intellectual forces” like Freud.

165

As medicine and psychiatry moved to absorb

psychotherapy into their professional realms, psychologists like Matthias Göring and Carl

Jung, who appreciated Romantic traditions that dealt with the irrational and absurd nature

of life, fought their own intellectual wars to keep psychotherapy safe from extinction. As

such, they moved to make their therapies compatible with the aims of the Third Reich,

and the Reich granted them professional autonomy.

162

Carl Jung. “A Rejoinder to Dr. Bally,” in Civilization in Transition, (Princeton

University Press, 1970), 536.

163

Jonathan Wiesen, Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the

Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 18.

164

Jung, “A Rejoinder to Dr. Bally,” 536.

165

Wiesen, Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third

Reich, 178.

Similar to continuity in ideas, there was continuity in practitioners. One

prominent name being that of Adler’s renowned student and colleague from Munich, Dr.

Leonhard Seif. Before Hitler’s rise to power, Seif appeared intent on disseminating

Adler’s psychology without political connotations. At a lecture in 1932, Seif spoke to the

London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He understood the need for

Gemeinschaftsgefühl in clinical theory and practice and did not conflate it with Marxism

or socialism. Instead, he spoke of the dynamic relationship between the individual and

the community. Explaining how individuals can be perceived as both a unit within

themselves and as part of a greater world that extends beyond the self, Seif reasoned that

the individual and the community are partners in life; you cannot have one without the

other.

If the communal feeling of the individual is dead and there is nothing but

the will to power, the individual would be lost. If all individuals had only

that, there would be anarchy; there would no longer be cosmos, but chaos;

no more harmony, but disharmony. Conversely, if there is nothing but the

community and the child has to give up all its individuality and express

only the will of the environment, the child would give up. He would no

longer have any personal worth. He would be nothing but the shadow of

the mother and the father, absolutely subordinate, something mechanical.

He would renounce any will of his own. In reality, such a person does not

exist.

166

Seif’s knowledge of Individual Psychology appeared unrivaled by anyone in Central

Europe, aside from Adler himself. This begs the question of why Seif would choose to

work for a state that appeared so antithetical to the goals of Adler’s psychology?

166

Leonhard Seif, “Individual Psychology and Life Philosophy,” Individual Psychology

Pamphlets (1932): 97.

In the twelfth volume of the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie, a directory lists the

“Munich working group for community psychology,” and its leader, Dr. Leonhard

Seif.

167

The journal then informed its readers:

The Munich working group for community psychology maintains an

educational counseling center for children who are difficult to train.

Parents of difficult children are advised here every week. Seriously

interested people can be admitted to observe. After each educational

counseling hour, a pedagogical working group takes place, where a sub-

area is usually worked through together after the cases that have been

advised.

168

Seif not only continued applying insights from his time working alongside Adler and

Individual Psychology but also retained the structure of Adler’s child-guidance clinics

and public lectures in Vienna. But unlike Adler’s social-democratic understanding of

Gemeinschaftsgefühl, Seif quickly gained a reputation in the Göring Institute as an expert

on neurotic personalities and his attempts to create a psychology that reinforced the

people’s “courage, faith, and optimism of Hitler.”

169

On January 15, 1941, the Göring Institute celebrated Seif’s 75

birthday. They

recognized his achievements in putting the “theory of body-soul unity into practice” and

combining “medicine with the humanities.” The article also listed Seif’s intellectual

influences, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche,

and Arthur Schopenhauer. All National Socialist approved names with non-Jewish

backgrounds. Rather than omitting Adler’s influence on Seif, an article in the Journal for

Psychotherapy asserted that “as a result of” Seif’s “sociological studies,” “he got in touch

167

Matthias Göring, ed., “Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dr. Seif, München,” Zentralblatt für

Psychotherapie 12, no. 1 (1940): 6–7.

168

Matthias Göring, ed., “Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dr. Seif, München,” 7.

169

Almuth Bruder-Bezzel, Die Geschichte Der Individualpsychologie (Göttingen:

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 231.

with Alfred Adler, but an understanding never came about. From 1930 there was an

estrangement, since not only the working methods but also the views on life were too

different, above all because Seif absolutely demanded the realization of what he had

recognized in his own life.”

170

Adler was more patient with the world than Seif who

“demanded” the fulfillment of Gemeinschaftsgefühl and saw a means of achieving the

aims of Individual Psychology through Hitler and the Volksgemeinschaft. Adler later

remarked to his friend Phyllis Bottome, “I thought that this man, Seif, beyond all others,

had understood my psychology.”

171

Unfortunately, after first meeting at the International

Society for Individual Psychology in 1924 and nine years of friendship, nothing would

change the fact that Seif recognized himself as “an Aryan,” while Adler “had happened to

descend from the Jewish race.”

172

In 1936, Seif invited Adler to Munich. Promising that

“Hitler’s police would not harm him,” Adler declined the request. Had he visited Munich,

he might have been disgusted to see how Seif used his psychology to serve a state that

manipulated its citizens for sinister ends.

Despite the regime’s seeming rejection of Freudian, Adlerian, and other Jewish-

informed analyses, Leonhard Seif was able to write a 1934 article that explicitly

referenced the language of Adler and Gemeinschaftsgefühl. Addressing the potential for

neurosis within the Volksgemeinschaft, Seif wrote:

Alfred Adler, in his individual psychology, this psychology of the

community, the subject of which is ‘the human being as fellow human

being’…[Reasons that] if we want to form a correct judgment of a person,

it is important to observe how he relates to his life tasks in community,

work, and love, how he behaves there. Does he join in, does he hesitate,

170

Matthias Göring, ed., “Dr. Leonhard Seif, Geboren 15.1.1866,” Zentralblatt für

Psychotherapie 12, no. 6 (1941): 321–22.

171

Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom, 181.

172

Ibid, 182.

does he only partially solve the task, does he use excuses, and does he

evade, in order to gain the appearance of personal superiority in detours

that are hostile to the community? How does he feel about comradeship,

friendship, to the other sex, to his national community, to playing along, to

cooperation, to culture, and its demands? All of these questions cannot be

resolved without a sense of community. Anyone who solves it without a

sense of community must fail, fall on the astray of neurosis, addiction,

perversions, neglect, mental illness, or suicide.

173

Seif remained committed to the principles of Adlerian psychology. However, his

approach now merged with Nazi values that he tried to reconcile with the condemned

“Jewish science.” Whereas Adler spoke of a more metaphysical Gemeinschaftsgefühl, a

feeling of community that transcended material conditions, Seif placed his faith in the

Volkish fantasy of a nationalized community free from neurosis and useless individuals

who failed to see the value of contributions to the state and their Volk. In essence, Seif’s

writings could provide the nation with a new understanding of one’s role within the

Volksgemeinschaft.

Seif did not see himself deviating from Adlerian psychology, as with those

radicals like Manès Sperber and Alice Rühle-Gerstel who had perverted Adler’s

psychology for their Marxist agenda. Instead, he believed he was carrying out Adler’s

psychology to its logical conclusion. When Adler wrote in 1933, “this community, the

power of the logic of men’s living together, blesses those who follow it and punishes the

unwilling and erring. Its growing influence in the life of peoples creates institutions to act

continuously as a goal, to strengthen the weak, to support the falling, and to heal the

173

Leonhard Seif, “Volksgemeinschaft Und Neurose.” Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie 7,

no. 1 (1934): 52–60.

erring.”

174

Seif saw this as a declaration of war to bring people into the fold of the

community. Those who dissented and fought the logic of the community were cast aside

and deemed worthless to the racial community Seif envisioned. Nazi Germany’s brand of

psychiatry and psychotherapy offered two outcomes for the mentally ill: “cure” or

“extermination.”

175

Moreover, he saw a path to realizing Adler’s aspirations of bringing

about the ideal community through the totalitarian state led by a “great psychologist” and

strong Führer, Adolf Hitler. The bureaucratized Nazi state with all its resources appeared

as a godsend to men like Göring and Seif, who saw a path to instilling “community

feeling” into the Volk. If Adler’s vision was to bring about the “ideal community,” then

an opportunity presented itself to shape the people’s social and psychological functioning

with the Reich’s seal of approval.

Where some researchers have lambasted German psychologists for ignoring “all

contributions by authors who were not ‘Aryans’” and attributing Jews’ research to

Aryans, this was not always the case.

176

Seif did not strike Adler’s name from the record,

and he appeared to pay some homage to his former mentor. But he twisted his mentor’s

work to serve a state seeking to utilize psychology as a means of conditioning its

population to support a sinister agenda. Again, it would be inaccurate to assert that

Jewish authors and their works were completely erased during the Nazi years. This is

174

Alfred Adler, “Sanctification of Human Relations,” in Superiority and Social Interest,

ed. Heinz Ansbacher and Rowena Ansbacher (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,

1979), 279-280.

175

Volker Friedrich, “From Psychoanalysis to the ‘Great Treatment’: Psychoanalysts

under National Socialism,” International Society of Political Psychology 10, no. 1

(1989): 21.

176

Franciska Baumgarten-Tramer, “German Psychologists and Recent Events,” Journal

of Abnormal Psychology 43, no. 4 (1948): 459-460.

especially true in psychology, where Aryan practitioners likely could not do without the

works of Freud and Adler. One might view this as a testament to a rigid, National

Socialist mindsight that obstructed creativity and hindered their attempts to create a new

German psychotherapy without the “Jewish” elements.

177

Working alongside his fellow Adlerians, Dr. Fritz Künkel of Berlin expressed his

desire to create a “we-psychology” with a heavy emphasis on Gemeinschaftsgefühl that

enhanced the organic connections between Germans. In 1935, Künkel wrote on the role

and responsibilities entrusted to Germany’s psychologists. He asserted: “We are

specialists in the management of transgression, and that means at the same time that we

are specialists in the care of hypocrisy, of self-deception and treason against the

Volksgemeinschaft.”

178

Copying Adler’s works in Red Vienna, Künkel and Seif believed

the most efficient way to treat individuals was through the schools and child-guidance

clinics. They worked to train therapists, educators, and counselors to bring this

therapeutic style of instruction infused with their idea of Gemeinschaftsgefühl to the

schools.

179

Adler was dead, but the Volksgemeinschaft was reinforced Adlerian

psychology and the insights brought by men trained by Adler.

On December 31, 1938, the Reichsschrifttumskammer (Reich Literature

Chamber), a division created by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to censor works

for the protection of German culture, released a newly compiled black list of banned

177

Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute, 93-95.

178

Fritz Künkel, “Die Lehrbarkeit der tiefenpsychologischen Denkweisen. (The

Teachability of Depth Psychological Ways of Thinking.” As quoted in Geoffrey Cocks,

Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1985), 55.

179

Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute, 57.

authors and works. With this new mandate, “the distribution of these books and writings

through publicly accessible libraries and through the book trade in any form is

prohibited”

180

Listed in alphabetical order along with specific books, the authors almost

seem chosen at random, with the names of acclaimed American novelists Ernest

Hemingway and Jack London appearing alongside renowned physicists like Albert

Einstein. And starting from the bottom of page one is the name “Alfred Adler.” Given the

toxic nature of his “Jewish” ideals, readers were forbidden from reading or distributing

his works, which would prove harmful to the German community.

However, an unusual pattern occurs in this list of undesirable writings. The name

of Sigmund Freud is printed only once, and next to his name is the statement, “Sämtliche

Schriften” (entire catalogue), denoting that all writings belonging to Freud are banned.

Additionally, the works of two of Adler’s radical colleagues, Otto Rühle and Alice

Rühle-Gerstel, are treated with the same prescription “Sämtliche Schriften.” Unlike the

former authors, Adler’s name is printed four times in a row, with each line dedicated to a

specific text now condemned by the Reich Literature Chamber.

181

Why wouldn’t the

Reichsschrifttumskammer ban all works by Adler, along with Freud, Rühle-Gerstel, and

Hemingway? This is an indicator that the Göring Institute was not alone in abstaining

180

Liste Des Schädlichen Und Unerwünschten Schrifttums (List of Harmful and

Undesirable Writings) (Leipzig: Reichschrifttumskammer, 1938).

181

The four Adler books banned included: Über den nervösen Charakter (Published in

English as The Neurotic Constitution) München: Bergmann 1928; Individualpsychologie

in der Schule. (Individual Psychology in the School) Leipzig: Hirzel 1929;

Menschenkenntnis (Published in English as Understanding Human Nature). Leipzig:

Hirzel 1929; and Praxis und Theorie der Individualpsychologie (The Practice and Theory

of Individual Psychology). München: Bergmann 1930; Works by Adler not appearing on

the list, not including essays and numerous journal articles: What Life Could (Should)

Mean to You, (1931), Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind (1933), The Science of

Living (1929).

from censoring Jewish works. The Nazi state made accommodations because there was

something about Adler’s works that were deemed acceptable. This would make sense,

given that therapists from the Göring Institute were in communication with the Reich

Literature Chamber, as in one letter sent from Fritz Künkel to the

Reichsschriftumskammer on May 25, 1938, requested continued membership with the

organization, as he signed off with a “customary ‘Heil Hitler!’ ”

182

Between Göring,

Künkel, and Seif, who insisted that Adler’s Gemeinschaftsgefühl was compatible with

Volkish ideology, the Nazi state allowed some of Adler’s works to survive the purge to

see what elements could be implemented in service of the Reich.

Under the Nazis, Adlerian psychology could be used on the people, but it was not

for the people. After the Anschluss, the University of Vienna partnered with the National

Socialist government to make the study of Adler’s works “illegal.” A network of students

after the fact bravely disregarded this mandate and distributed copies of his

publications.

183

While the Third Reich tried to limit “Jewish” inspired works, Adler’s

psychology did not vanish from discourse. Leonhard Seif continued practicing Adlerian

psychology under Hitler’s rule. Between 1922 and 1939, Seif’s clinic in Munich held

“1221 counseling sessions with 470 families, 2.6 sessions per family.” In 1941, Seif and

colleagues consulted 66 families in a total of 93 sessions. Throughout this period, Seif

strengthened his connections with the authoritarian government, as his patrons and

collaborators included, but were not limited to: the National Socialist Welfare

Organization (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, NSV), Youth Assistance Program

182

Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute, 58.

183

Sheldon Gardner and Gwendolyn Stevens, Red Vienna and the Golden Age of

Psychology, 1918-1938 (New York: Praeger, 1992), 242.

(Jugendhilfe), the Hitler Youth, and the League of German Girls.

184

But he changed

Adler’s chosen label of “Individual Psychology” to “Community Psychology” or

Gemeinschaftpsychologie.

185

Seif would not have been able to practice Adlerian

psychology under the original name given by its Jewish creator.

The postwar psychologists Aenne Bornemann and Heinz Ansbacher argued that

while Seif was “never a party member,” he had “projected his own views on to Hitler,

which would of course make his situation easier.” Seif’s article, “Erziehungshilde in

München,” (Educational Assistance in Munich), appears in line with their assessment.

The German people today cannot do without anyone in their fight for

freedom, their right to life and their living space (Lebensraum). Only those

ways of educational assistance that are oriented towards the whole of life

and the national community (Volksgemeinschaft) in this sense can make an

effective contribution to reducing the asocial difficulty of bringing up

children and families and to their integration into the whole of the people

(Volksganze).

186

Nevertheless, Seif could not serve two masters. He worked under the Nazis from 1933

until their defeat in 1945, as he pulled out all the stops to make Individual Psychology a

tool for the fascist government. With the support of the German Labor Front (Deutsche

Arbeitsfront) and National-Socialist Social Agencies, which gave financial support to his

child-guidance clinics and expressed interest in “Community Psychology,” Seif trained

social workers and educators for the Nazi state.

Geoffrey Cocks, who specializes in the history of psychology, has argued that

practitioners like Seif may have renamed therapies to preserve the integrity of the therapy

184

Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute, 188.

185

Aenne Bornemann and H.L. Ansbacher, “Individual Psychology in Germany” 7, no. 1

(1949): 30.

186

Leonhard Seif, “Erziehungshilfe in München,” Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie 2.

Sonderheft (1940): 20–21.

itself from more ardent Nazis who sought to extinguish “Jewish science” from literature

and practice.

187

Cocks hypothesizes that these psychotherapists and psychologists were

not committed or ardent Nazis. He paints a picture of apolitical men who acted in their

own professional capacity. But these were not ordinary men or women manipulated by

superiors for their knowledge. Rather, these were educated professionals well-versed in

psychology, philosophy, and politics. One could argue, as Cocks does, that these men

merely rebranded theory and practice to preserve its core “Jewish” elements, but it is not

enough to explain their attempts to create a new, racially-based, German soul medicine

nor their apparent enthusiasm for Hitler.

188

Regardless of Seif’s intent, his use of Adlerian psychology under the National

Socialist government undoubtedly altered the original Adlerian doctrine. A postwar

interview with Dr. Ludwig Zeise, director of the Army Psychological testing station in

Munich, revealed that “Adlerian theory had been alive in German military psychology

from its inception in 1926, even though this was not commonly known.” Zeise himself

asserted that any personality studies for “selection purposes…‘without the inclusion of

Adlerian views was unthinkable for us.’” Psychological research and practice played

integral roles in Nazi Germany, for soldiers selected to go to the front and regulating the

health of civilians at home. A report from the United States Committee for National

Morale recognized as much in a review of “German Psychological Warfare.”

187

Geoffrey Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1985).

188

Similarly, Bornemann and Ansbacher noted in their review of Individual Psychology

in Germany that Leonhard Seif had apparently done his best to “undo and minimize the

damages and exaggerations of Nazi education, especially with regard to its theory of

heredity of personality traits.” Aenne Bornemann and H.L. Ansbacher “Individual

Psychology in Germany” 7, no. 1 (1949), 30.

The present war is in large measure ideological. Ideas are being used for

political and military purposes with greater skill and ruthlessness than

ever before. Germany has mobilized and employed the resources of

scientific psychology with an unprecedented audacity and thoroughness

which, in their view, marks the latest advance in the art of war. Equipped

with vast sums of money, full political power, and skillfully coordinated

with military action, this new type of warfare is a serious menace against

which sporadic efforts, improvisations, or the conventional applications

of force are quite insufficient.

189

German military psychology threatened the allied powers, who realized their Axis

counterparts were mobilizing psychologists and ideas to supplement their cause. Among

these several German military psychologists were men like Karl Pintschovious of the

Reich War Ministry (Reichskriegsministerium), who believed that “unity, purpose, and

community feeling (Gemeinschaftsgefühl)” would prove effective in preventing neurosis

among soldiers. Like Zeise, Pintschovious argued in favor of using insights from Adler

and the German Adlerians for “strengthening of the will” of Germany’s armed forces.

190

Under the leadership of Zeise, Pintschovious, and Seif, German military psychology and

lay psychotherapy mobilized Adlerian psychology to improve the status of military and

civilian populations.

In a study conducted by the Adlerian psychologist Heinz Ansbacher, Ansbacher

aimed to understand the ideology that undergirded German support for the Reich. Using

German soldiers taken as prisoners of war between 1943 and 1945, a questionnaire was

given with questions relating to one’s enthusiasm for National Socialism, Adolf Hitler,

and the party leadership. The study aimed to “arrive at some understanding of the

meaning of National Socialism to the Germans.” The inquiry contained some limitations:

189

“Preface,” in German Psychological Warfare: Survey and Bibliography (New York:

Committee for National Morale, 1941): i.

190

Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute, 219.

its population sample was exclusively male, “mostly under 30 years of age,” and included

only a “small proportion-if any-of the higher socioeconomic levels, since they consist

only of privates and a small number of non-commissioned officers.”

191

Nevertheless,

Ansbacher found significant beliefs shared across the groups. For example, when asked

about what kept German morale high during the war, German POWs cited “confidence in

Hitler” as a key motivating factor in the war effort. Indeed, compiled data from across the

groups over a fourteen-month period revealed that “confidence in Hitler” expressed in

percentages was relatively consistent from November 1943 until January 1945. Up until

April of 1945, confidence in Hitler remained as high as thirty percent among German

prisoners of war.

192

Since the end of the war, the question of why millions of Germans bought into

National Socialism has troubled historians. Was it coercion or consent that incited

Germans to come to the aid of Hitler and the Nazis? Ansbacher hoped to find answers in

the responses given to him by Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces) and Schutzstaffel

(S.S.) troops.

To us, the term National Socialism stands primarily for the ideology of the

master race; a policy of militarism, conquest and suppression; persecution

and atrocities. If this was the primary meaning to the Germans who

supported it, then they would indeed have been guided by a set of motives

dangerously different from that of other people. In the following, we shall

examine whether this is so or not, whether National Socialism meant the

same to them as it does to us.

193

191

Heinz Ansbacher, “Attitudes of German Prisoners of War: A Study of the Dynamics

of National-Socialistic Fellowship,” American Psychological Association 61, no. 1

(1948): 4.

192

Ansbacher, “Attitudes of German Prisoners of War: A Study of the Dynamics of

National-Socialistic Fellowship,” 11.

193

Ansbacher, “Attitudes of German Prisoners of War: A Study of the Dynamics of

National-Socialistic Fellowship,” 24.

Regarding positive attitudes held toward National Socialism, Ansbacher and colleagues

asked prisoners to answer the question, “What did you like best about National

Socialism?” Overwhelmingly, responses favored the social and economic benefits of

National Socialism, as matters of “National strength and the more specific aspects of

Nazi ideology were mentioned less than half as often as the social features of the Nazi

program.”

194

While “Economic benefits” received twenty-seven percent of votes from the

population and “Social benefits” garnered twenty-four percent of the vote, a third

category with ten percent of the vote was the category listed as “Volksgemeinschaft.”

Entailed within this construct were such expressed benefits as “communal feeling,”

“cooperation,” and the “social idea.”

195

Ansbacher, a psychologist trained by Adler

himself, must have been intrigued by how much of his mentor’s psychology sustained

German soldiers and citizens who fought for an imaginary community. It is interesting

that attitudes expressed by Germans from 1943 to 1945 contained perspectives, whether

consciously formed or latent manifestations, of a social psychology inspired by

Gemeinschaftsgefühl. If only Ansbacher had used this construct as a measure to examine

the bonds formed between soldiers or Germans during and after the war, we might have

gained a better sense of the influence of Adlerian psychology in Nazi Germany.

194

“Economic benefits” comprised the following: No unemployment; procurement of

work; work and bread; higher standard of living; economic revival; planned economy;

stable prices; higher wages; economic security; etc.

“Social benefits” included but were not limited to: Care of the little man; social care of

the people; advocation of the social interests of the masses; social welfare institutions;

social reconstruction; health services; housing and parks; etc.

195

Ansbacher, “Attitudes of German Prisoners of War: A Study of the Dynamics of

National-Socialistic Fellowship,” 25.

Overall, a number of Germans sampled seemed to think that National Socialism

was a good idea but poorly executed. Ansbacher summarized his study in saying,

The least popular aspects [of National Socialism] were lack of freedom,

the party itself, imperialism and war, anti-Semitism, religious compulsion-

all aspects intrinsic to fascism. From this we must conclude that the

majority of Germans we have studied did not differ in their basic motives

from other nationals. The realization of democratic goals was satisfying,

the use of fascist means frustrating.

196

Nevertheless, like the party’s manipulation of the Volksgemeinschaft, the Göring Institute

and Adler’s former disciples chose to appropriate Gemeinschaftsgefühl and deprived the

broader public of Adler’s original writings and thus the opportunity to interpret his ideas

for themselves. The National Socialists drew support from a section of psychologists and

psychiatrists so inspired by Volkish ideology they did not seem bothered by the “fascist

means” used to elevate their own standing and practice in German society. Adler knew

the risks and potential of an idea as expressly simplistic as “community feeling.” From

the radical Marxists to the National Socialists, Adler’s common sense psychology was

corrupted in favor of more radical projects that transformed the course of history.

We have sufficient evidence to assert then that the Nazi party and state dedicated

resources to subordinate Adlerian psychology to the Nazi worldview. Seif, Göring, Zeise,

and others were familiar enough with psychological theory and methods to understand

that if the Third Reich wished to enhance elements of the German community feeling and

spirit, it would be easy enough to integrate elements of Gemeinschaftsgefühl into the

socially engineered Volksgemeinschaft. Paradoxically, a new and strange sociology

informed by a banned ‘Jewish science’ fused with a wholly German racialized construct

196

Ansbacher, “Attitudes of German Prisoners of War: A Study of the Dynamics of

National-Socialistic Fellowship,” 32-33.

of community. It is somewhat humorous then to imagine these German professionals

voicing their commitment to an Aryan world order while building on the works of Jewish

scholars whose methods they used to select only the finest recruits for service to the

Fatherland. As much as they tried to eliminate the “Jewish science” from psychology,

these German analysts found themselves unable to create a New German Soul Medicine

and, knowingly or unknowingly, preserved these frameworks in practice and writing.

Though never Adler’s intention, we see how ideas can be easily manipulated,

abused, and implemented into an agenda, regardless of one’s position on the political

spectrum. Adler never clearly defined the parameters of Gemeinschaftsgefühl or to what

extent community needs come before individual goals and desires. As such, we are left

with a construct that leaves room for a fascistic interpretation of his philosophy. How

different then is the Adlerian worldview from the National Socialist? The two were

indeed similar in the call for one’s subordination to the community. In a world of

Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz (Community need comes before individual need), examining

civilization through the Adlerian scope or the National Socialist lens would procure

similar results and proclamations: that one who refuses to submit to the needs of the

community and seek goals beyond his self-interest could be written off as asocial,

atypical, or neurotic, an invalid who has lost his way and can only find himself through

the community. Ultimately, Gemeinschaftsgefühl would experience a rebirth in a purely

National Socialist sense. The Nazi agenda corrupted Adler’s vision of community and

related virtues. Even after the war, Adler’s writings were difficult to reintroduce into the

public domain due to concerns over the similarities in structure and vocabulary.

197

Adler

never intended for Gemeinschaftsgefühl to become a nationalist slogan. Yet, it is not

surprising that some Germans after the war might have associated the word and its

implications with subservience to the state and racial community.

Amid the war, reports about concentration camps trickled through the Individual

Psychological news bulletin. One report released in 1940, written by Carl Fürtmuller,

who twenty years prior had introduced Adler to Otto Glöckel, the socialist Viennese

Minister of Education, relayed the news of Dr. Alexander Neuer. Dr. Neuer, a longtime

member of Adler’s circle since their meeting at the Café Central in 1916, where Adler

first unveiled Gemeinschaftsgefühl to his colleagues, was brilliant, possessing doctorates

in philosophy and medicine. Now, however, Carl Fürtmuller bore the burden of relaying

to his fellow Adlerians that Neuer had perished in a French concentration camp in

November 1939. “The pain he suffered was immeasurably increased by the hardship of

the concentration camp life. Nevertheless, amidst the many people complaining bitterly

of their fate, he always the smiling, comforting comrade. Thus, he not only worked and

thought, but also lived in the spirit of Individual Psychology.”

198

Though Fürtmuller and

his wife, Aline, managed to escape to the United States, poor Neuer became a martyr to

Adler’s psychology.

Nazism forced individuals to establish new modes of dealing with the modern

world, especially for those who remained in Austria and Germany, who had to make

197

Birger Sachau, “Individual Psychology in the Teaching of Foreign Language and

Literature: A New Approach in Foreign Language Pedagogy and an Adlerian

Interpretation of Selected Works by Theodor Storm,” (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State

University, 2004), 46.

198

Erwin Wexberg, “Alexander Neuer,” Individual Psychology News 1 (1940).

decisions imperative to their survival. Such was the case for Viktor Frankl, Adler’s

“excommunicated” pupil, who stayed behind in Vienna until his deportation to

Theresienstadt, a Jewish ghetto in Czechoslovakia, and later transferred to Auschwitz. In

his work, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl recounted his suffering in the camps and

attempts to find new meaning in life after losing his parents, brother, and wife. Frankl

applied what he called “logotherapy,” a “meaning-centered psychotherapy” that “focuses

on the meaning of human existence as well as on man’s search for such a meaning.”

199

a heroic tale of how one man overcame the horrors of Auschwitz, Frankl described how

one could transcend his circumstances via a search for higher meaning or purpose.

Using a phenomenological understanding of the world, Frankl argued that it does

not matter how others see or interpret the world; the individual’s perspective trumps all

others. He tried to give the world an impression, not only of the life of a “concentration

camp inmate,” but of a human being capable of transcending his circumstances and

finding meaning in life in spite of all the world’s malice and horror.

Does man have no choice of action in the face of such circumstances? We

can answer these questions from experience as well as on principle. The

experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action.

There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that

apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a

vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence and mind, even in such

terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.

200

Adler did not live long enough to see the death camps, nor did Freud, but if they had, one

wonders what they might have said of the countless atrocities committed by the Nazis.

Where Adler extolled the values of communal life, Frankl’s Holocaust experiences drove

199

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 92.

200

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 61.

him to an individualistic philosophy that emphasized man’s strength to overcome

daunting circumstances. He emphasized “private logic,” in contrast to “community

feeling,” believing that it was the self who was ultimately responsible for coming to

understand the meaning of life. Perhaps, he did this out of his realization that he could not

save everyone in the camps, grimly remarking that “the best of us did not return.”

201

labeled his approach the “Third Viennese school of psychotherapy,” with the first two

being Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s Individual Psychology. Regarding these two

schools of thought, Frankl reduced them to their most basic tenets. The former was

explained by a “will-to-pleasure” and the latter by a “will-to-power.” For his own

psychology, Frankl described it as emphasizing the “will-to-meaning.” Ultimately, Frankl

rejected Gemeinschaftsgefühl, which he could only perceive as an authoritarian-like

framework meant to reduce the individual personality to a mindless cog in a cold

machine.

Adler was right when he wrote about community feeling in 1933, “Even here

abuse occurs readily, be it by opponents or adherents of Individual Psychology.”

202

When

men like Göring and Seif began manipulating his works in the interest of the Nazified

community, Adler expanded on his fears for the abuse of Gemeinschaftsgefühl.

What does seem to me dangerous is to misuse the idea of social

feeling in this way, viz. by taking advantage of the occasional

uncertainty of the path to social feeling in order to approve socially

harmful ideas and ways of life, and to force them, in the name of

salvation, on the present or even on future society. Thus, capital

punishment, war, and even the killing of opponents occasionally

201

Ibid., 5.

202

Alfred Adler, “Sanctification of Human Relations,” in Superiority and Social Interest,

280.

find adroit advocates. Moreover, these persons always drape

themselves in the cloak of social feeling.

203

Adler, not naïve to the potential for such exploitation, warned of the potential for such

deceit. Tragically, his warnings were never fully appreciated by audiences in Europe. For

a time, Gemeinschaftsgefühl did exist in the collective imagination. Nevertheless, there

was likely never a pure or true Adlerian doctrine in all its forms. Far too many layers and

interpretations have been added to the surface of his work, thus obfuscating true

understanding. Adler’s voice has by and large been ignored in favor of figures arbitrarily

deemed more integral to the course of twentieth-century events. For historians concerned

with the change of ideas over time, Adler’s conception of Gemeinschaftsgefühl may help

us understand the unique ideological, social, and cultural facets of everyday life in the

Volksgemeinschaft.

203

Adler, Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind, 105.

100

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Adler, Alfred. “A Doctor Remakes Education.” The Survey 58 (1927): 490–95.

Adler, Raissa. “Child Guidance in the Soviet Union.” International Journal of Individual

Psychology, 1931, 297–309.

Adler, Alfred. “On the Psychology of Marxism.” Edited by Herman Nunberg and Ernst

Federn. Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society 2 (1909): 172–78.

Adler, Alfred. Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind. Mansfield Centre: Martino

Publishing, 2011.

Adler, Alfred. Superiority and Social Interest. Edited by Heinz Ansbacher and Rowena

Ansbacher. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979.

Adler, Alfred. The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler- Journal Articles: 1898-

1909. Edited by Henry Stein. Vol. 2. The Classical Adlerian Translation Project,

2002.

Adler, Alfred. The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler- Journal Articles: 1910-

1913. Edited by Henry Stein. Vol. 3. The Classical Adlerian Translation Project,

2003.

Adler, Alfred. The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler- Journal Articles: 1931-

1937. Edited by Henry Stein. Vol. 7. The Classical Adlerian Translation Project,

2005.

Ansbacher, Heinz, and Rowena Ansbacher, eds. The Individual Psychology of Alfred

Adler: A Systematic Presentation in Selections from His Writings. New York:

Basic Books, Inc., 1956.

Adler, Alfred. The Science of Living. Mansfield Centre: Martino Publishing, 2011.

Adler, Alfred. “Ueber Vererbung von Krankheiten.” Der Kampf 1, no. 9 (1908): 425–30.

Adler, Alfred. What Life Should Mean to You. London: Bishop & Sons, Ltd., 1932.

101

Ansbacher, Heinz. “Attitudes of German Prisoners of War: A Study of the Dynamics of

National-Socialistic Fellowship.” American Psychological Association 61, no. 1

(1948).

Baumgarten-Tramer, Franciska. “German Psychologists and Recent Events.” Translated

by Frederick Wyatt and Gertrud Wyatt. Journal of Abnormal and Social

Psychology 43, no. 4 (1948): 452–65.

Beck, Samuel. “European News Letter.” The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 4, no.

3 (1934): 421–28.

Bornemann, Aenne, and H.L. Ansbacher. “Individual Psychology in Germany” 7, no. 1

(1949): 30–32.

Bottome, Phyllis. Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom. London: Faber and Faber Limited,

1938.

Bottome, Phyllis. “Frau Dr. Adler (Mrs. Raissa Adler).” Journal of Individual

Psychology 18, no. 2 (1962).

Farago, Ladislas, ed. “German Psychological Warfare: Survery and Bibliography.”

Committee for National Morale, 1941.

Frankl, Viktor. “Psychotherapie Und Weltanschauung: Zur Grundsätzlichen Kritik Iher

Beziehungen.” Internationalen Zeitschrift Für Individualpsychologie 3 (1925):

250–52.

Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by James Strachey. W.W.

Norton & Company, 1930.

Freud, Sigmund. On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement. Translated by Joan

Riviere. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1966.

Göring, Matthias, ed. “Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dr. Seif, München.” Zentralblatt Für

Psychotherapie 12, no. 1 (1940): 6–7.

Göring, Matthias, ed. “Dr. Leonhard Seif, Geboren 15.1.1866.” Zentralblatt Für

Psychotherapie 12, no. 6 (1941): 321–22.

Hitler, Adolf. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939. Edited by Norman

Baynes. London: Oxford University Press, 1942.

Jung, Carl. Civilization in Transition. Princeton University Press, 1970.

102

Levy, David. “‘Individual Psychology’ in a Vienna Public School.” University of

Chicago Press 3, no. 2 (1929): 207–16.

Liste Des Schädlichen Und Unerwünschten Schrifttums. Leipzig:

Reichschrifttumskammer, 1938.

Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. New York:

International Library Publishing Company, 1904.

Rühle-Gerstel, Alice. Der Weg Zum Wir. Versuch Einer Verbindung von Marxismus Und

Individualpsychologie. Dresden: Verlag Am Anderen Ufer, 1927.

Rühle-Gerstel, Alice. “No Verses for Trotsky: A Diary in Mexico,” 1937.

Seif, Leonhard. “Erziehungshilfe in München.” Zentralblatt Für Psychotherapie 2.

Sonderheft (1940): 20–21.

Seif, Leonhard. “Individual Psychology and Life Philosophy.” Individual Psychology

Pamphlets, 1934, 93–104.

Seif, Leonard. “Volksgemeinschaft Und Neurose.” Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie 7, no.

1 (1934): 52–60.

Spiel, Oskar. “The Individual Psychological Experimental School in Vienna.” American

Journal of Individual Psychology 12, no. 1 (1956): 1–11.

Strasser, Josef. “Schwäche Als Entwicklungsfaktor.” Der Kampf 1, no. 3 (1907).

Veer, René van der, and Anton Yasnitsky. “Vygotsky in English: What Still Needs to Be

Done.” Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 45 (2011): 475–93.

Vygotsky, Lev. “Fascism in Psychoneurology,” 1934, 327–37.

Wexberg, Erwin. “Alexander Neuer.” Individual Psychology News 1 (1940).

Zweig, Stefan. The World of Yesterday. Translated by Anthea Bell. London: Pushkin

Press, 1942.

Newspapers

Arbeiter-Zeitung. “Die Kundgebung Des Geistigen Wien.” April 20, 1927.

Lincoln Star Journal. “Hitler Called Diplomat—Waiting to Choose Allies, Dr. Adler

Says.” March 12, 1936.

103

The Kearney Daily Hub. “Says Hitler Shrewd.” March 12, 1936.

New York Times. “Austria Resists Anschluss,” March 1, 1938.

New York Times. “Mental Hygiene Lecture Dates Set.” December 26, 1926.

New York World. “Mussolini Spurred to His Fight for Power by Pique Over Inferiority as

a Child, Says Dr. Alfred Adler.” December 26, 1926.

The Detroit Jewish Chronicle. “Dr. Alfred Adler at Town Hall in Cass Theater on Feb.

28,” 1936. The Detroit Jewish News Digital Archives.

“Washington Jewish Mirror.” The Detroit Jewish Chronicle, August 16, 1929. The

Detroit Jewish News Digital Archives.

Time. “Medicine on Long Island,” October 10, 1932.

Secondary Sources

Adler, Kurt A. “Socialist Influences on Adlerian Psychology.” Journal of Individual

Psychology 50, no. 2 (June 1994): 131–41.

Alexander, Franz, and Sheldon Selesnick. The History of Psychiatry: An Evaluation of

Psychiatric Thought and Practice from Prehistoric Times to the Present. New

York: Harper & Row, 1966.

Bankart, C.P. Talking Cures: A History of Western and Eastern Psychotherapies. Pacific

Grove, 1997.

Blau, Eve. The Architecture of Red Vienna 1914-1934. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

Bluvshtein, Marina. “Individual Psychology as a ‘Living Force of Progress.’” Journal of

Individual Psychology 76, no. 1 (2020): 6–20.

Bruder-Bezzel, Almuth. Die Geschichte Der Individualpsychologie. Göttingen:

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999.

Cocks, Geoffrey. Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1985.

Cohen, David. “The Frankl Meaning.” Psychology Today, 1977, 56–62.

104

Dekker, Erwin. “The Vienna Circles: Cultivating Economic Knowledge Outside

Academia.” Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 7, no. 2 (2014): 30–

53.

Freschl, Robert. “Friedrich Nietzsche and Individual Psychology.” International Journal

of Individual Psychology 1, no. 4 (1935): 87–98.

Friedrich, Volker. “From Psychoanalysis to the ‘Great Treatment’: Psychoanalysts under

National Socialism.” International Society of Political Psychology 10, no. 1

(1989).

Fritzsche, Peter. Life and Death in the Third Reich. Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 2008.

Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Times. New York: Anchor Books, 1988.

Gay, Peter. “Introduction.” In Civilization and Its Discontents. W.W. Norton &

Company, 1930.

Gardner, Sheldon, and Gwendolyn Stevens. Red Vienna and the Golden Age of

Psychology, 1918-1938. New York: Praeger, 1992.

Gruber, Helmut. Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Hake, Sabine. The Proletarian Dream: Socialism, Culture, and Emotion in Germany,

1863-1933. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017.

Henry, Phillip. “Experimental Futures and Impossible Professions: Psychoanalysis,

Education, and Politics in Interwar Vienna, 1918-1938.” University of Chicago,

2018.

Hoffman, Edward. The Drive for Self: Alfred Adler and the Founding of Individual

Psychology. Reading: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1994.

Jahoda, Marie. “The Emergence of Social Psychology in Vienna: An Exercise in Long-

Term Memory.” British Journal of Social Psychology 22 (1983): 343–49.

Leibin, V.M. “Adler’s Ideas in Russia Prior to World War I.” Journal of Individual

Psychology 44, no. 3 (1988): 270–81.

McFarland, Rob, Georg Spitaler, and Ingo Zechner, eds. The Red Vienna Sourcebook.

Rochester: Camden House, 2020.

Pytell, Timothy. Viktor Frankl’s Search for Meaning. New York: Berghan Books, 2015.

105

Sachau, Birger. “Individual Psychology in the Teaching of Foreign Language and

Literature: A New Approach in Foreign Language Pedagogy and an Adlerian

Interpretation of Selected Works by Theodor Storm.” Pennsylvania State

University, 2004.

Sachs, Erich. “Individual Psychology and Karl Marx.” Journal of Individual Psychology

30, no. 2 (1974): 159–62.

Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon and Schuster,

1960.

Shorske, Carl. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna Politics and Culture. New York: Vintage Books,

1961.

Sommers-Flanagan, John, and Rita Sommers-Flanagan. Counseling and Psychotherapy

Theories in Context and Practice: Skills, Strategies, and Techniques. Second

Edition. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2015.

Sperber, Manés. Masks of Loneliness: Alfred Adler in Perspective. New York: Macmillan

Publishing Co., Inc., 1974.

Stepansky, Paul. In Freud’s Shadow. London: The Analytic Press, 1983.

Susman, Warren. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the

Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973.

Sicher, Lydia. The Collected Works of Lydia Sicher: An Adlerian Perspective. Edited by

Adele Davidson. Fort Bragg: QED Press, 1991.

Vaihinger, Hans. The Philosophy of “As-If.” Translated by C.K. Ogden. Abingdon:

Routledge, 2000.

Wasserman, Janek. Black Vienna The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918-1938. Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 2014.

Way, Lewis. Alfred Adler: An Introduction to His Psychology. London: The Whitefriars

Press, 1956.

Wiesen, Jonathan. Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the

Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Wildt, Michael. “Volksgemeinschaft: A Controversy.” In Beyond the Racial State:

Rethinking Nazi Germany, edited by Devin Pendas, Mark Roseman, and Richard

Wetzell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

106

Williams, Ursula. “Early Papers of Alfred Adler: The Physician as Educator and Sexual

Problems in Child Rearing.” University of Arizona, 1990.

Zaretsky, Eli. Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis. New

York: Vintage Books, 2004.