Alfred Adler Began His Career As a Term Paper

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Alfred Adler began his career as a psychoanalyst as part of Freud's inner circle. However, he came to the conclusion that Freud was incorrect to place the source of all personal conflict in our sexual development. (Weider, 1995) So eventually he broke from Freud's philosophy and formed his own theory of personality development. His approach emphasizes the person as a social individual rather than a sexual individual. He put more importance on the values the person holds and the choice he makes.

He saw early childhood as crucial in later personality development. He saw individuals as constantly working for individual perfection, and he believed that as a young child we are profoundly affected by feelings of inadequacy as we compare ourselves to our parents. This has been described as an "inferiority complex," but that is an oversimplification. (Weider, 1995)

Adler emphasized individual psychology. As he looked at the individual, he maintained that "... The conscious and unconscious are not contradictory but that they form a single unity." (Adler, 1936) He believed that our feelings of inferiority while awake are revealed in our dream, and he saw this as a connection between wake and sleep states.

The inferiorities we suffer in life are also seen in dreams and thereby create a continuum between wake and sleep. (Wilkerson, accessed 2002) In recurring the dream described at the end of this work, I find myself wandering the halls of a strange building.

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The building seems to have no entrance or exit, and I don't usually know how I got there, but I'm searching. Since Adler views dreams as a reflection of conflicts going on in our real life, this could be interpreted as a feeling during real life that I feel lost and confused. In the dream, I encounter many obstacles and although I search and search, I can't find a way around them. Adler might view that as the dreamer struggling to get past some feelings of powerlessness stemming from early childhood, when we often are very powerless.

Since Adler puts emphasis on individual choice and values, he might say that this dream reflects the determination of the person to find a way past these psychological barriers. In the dream I don't have a sense of being young, small, or a child, so he might conclude that this dreamer has reason to believe he will eventually overcome the obstacles presented in the dream.

Adler (1936) said, "The methods used in interpreting the 'conscious' life may be used in interpreting the 'unconscious' or 'semi-conscious' life -- the life of our dreams. The justification for this method is that our dream life is just as much a part of the whole as our waking life-no more, no less. Only by considering dreams as one of the expressions of the style of life may an adequate interpretation of them.....

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