Adlerian Therapy

Founder: Alfred Adler (1870-1937)

This is a growth model that stresses assuming responsibility, creating one’s own destiny, and finding meaning and goals to create a
purposeful life.

Individual Psychology
- Presents an optimistic view of the people while resting heavily on the notion of social interest, that is, the feeling of oneness
with all humankind.
- Adler saw people as being motivated by social influences and their striving for superiority or success.
- Adler believed that people are largely responsible for who they are.
- Adler’s notion that present behavior is shaped by people’s view of the future.
- Adler believed that psychologically healthy people are usually aware of what they are doing and why they are doing.

View on Human Nature

- Human Behavior was seen by Adler as goal oriented and socially embedded.
- Adler’s theory starts with a consideration of inferiority feelings.
- Inferiority feelings can motivate us to strive for superiority.
- Adlerians put the focus on re-educating individuals and reshaping society

Social Interest and Community Feeling (Gemeinschaftsgefühl)

- The individual's’ awareness of being attitudes in dealing with the social world.

The Life Task

- Building friendship (social task)
- Establishing intimacy (love-marriage task)
- Contributing to society (occupational task)

Sibling Order and Sibling Relations

- Birth order is not a deterministic concept but does increase an individual’s probability of having a certain set of experience.
Have a great deal to do with how adults interact in the world.
• The Oldest Child
• The Second Child
• The Middle Child
• The Youngest Child
• The Only Child
Abnormal Development
According to Adler (1956), the one factor underlying all types of maladjustments is underdeveloped social interest. Besides lacking
social interest, neurotics tend to
(1) Set their goals too high
(2) Live in their own private world, and
(3) Have a rigid and dogmatic style of life.

The Therapeutic process

In general includes, forming a relationship based on mutual respect; a holistic psychological investigation or lifestyle assessment; and
disclosing mistaken goals and faulty assumptions within the person’s style of living.
- Psychopathology results from lack of courage, exaggerated feelings of inferiority, and underdeveloped social interest.
- Purpose of Adlerian Psychotherapy is to enhance courage, lessen feelings of inferiority, and encourage social interest.

Therapeutic Goals
- To develop the client’s sense of belonging and to assist in the adoption of behaviors and processes characterized by
community feeling and social interest.
- Provide information, teaching, guiding, and offering encouragement to discouraged clients.
- Provide clients with an opportunity to view things from a different perspective.

Application: Therapeutic Techniques and Procedures

Phase 1: Establishing the Relationship

- Therapeutic relationship and Therapeutic efficacy
- Initial focus should be on the person, not the problem
- Help clients become aware of assets and strengths rather than dealing continually with their deficits and liabilities.
- Provide a positive relationship

Phase 2: Assessing the individual’s Psychological Dynamics (An Assessment)

Aim
- To get a deeper understanding of an individual’s lifestyle

Two interview forms

1. Subjective interview
- The counselor helps the client tell his or her life story as completely as possible
- Facilitated by a lot of empathetic listening and responding
- The counselor is listening for clues to the purposive aspects of the client’s coping and approach to life
- The subjective interview should extract patterns in the person’s life, develop hypotheses about what works for the person,
and determine what accounts for the various concern in the client’s life.
2. Objective interview
- They operate on the assumption that it is the interpretation people develop about themselves, others, the world, and life that
govern what they do.
- Seeks to discover information about
a. How problems in the client’s life began
b. Any precipitating events
c. A medical history, including current and past medications
d. A social history
e. The reason the client chose therapy at this time
f. The person’s coping with the life tasks
g. A lifestyle assessment
Phase 3: Encourage Self-Understanding (Insight into Purpose)
- Interpret the findings of the assessment as an avenue for promoting self-understanding and insight
- Deals with clients’ underlying motives for behaving the way they do in the here and now.

Phase 4: Reorientation and Reeducation (The Action-Oriented Phase)

- Putting insights into practice
- Focuses on helping clients discover a new and more functional perspective
- To develop the courage to take risks and make changes in their life
- Seeks to help clients gain courage and to connect to strengths within themselves, to others, and to life.

Push-Button Technique
Goal
Is to help clients become aware of their role in contributing to their unpleasant feeling
Procedure
Clients are asked to re-create an unpleasant memory, which is then followed by recalling a pleasant memory

Acting As If Technique
- Encourages clients to begin acting as if they were already the person they would like to be
- Counselors ask clients to take a reflective step back prior to stepping forward to act “as if.”
- This process encourages clients to reflect on how they would be different if they were acting as if they were who they desire
to be.
- By using reflective questions, counselors can help clients construct perceptual alternatives and consider alternative behaviors
toward which they may begin moving.

Withdrawal
- Personality development can be halted when people run away from difficulties. Adler referred to this tendency as
withdrawal, or safeguarding through distance.
- Adler (1956) recognized four modes of safeguarding through withdrawal:
(1) Moving backward, The tendency to safeguard one’s fictional goal of superiority by psychologically reverting to a
more secure period of life.
(2) Standing still, People who stand still simply do not move in any direction; thus, they avoid all responsibility by
ensuring themselves against any threat of failure.
(3) Hesitating, Their procrastinations eventually give them the excuse “It’s too late now.”
(4) Constructing obstacles Some people build a straw house to show that they can knock it down. By overcoming the
obstacle, they protect their self-esteem and their prestige. If they fail to hurdle the barrier, they can always resort to an
excuse.

Limitations and Criticism

- Many of Adler’s ideas are vague and general ideas
- Written presentations are often difficult to follow