Individual Psychology as a psychotherapy method

Individual Psychology was founded by Alfred Adler in the early 1900s. This method also deals with a depth psychological approach which means that it works with conscious, subconscious and unconscious.

Those concepts were introduced by Freud earlier and Adler tried to find his own way of integrating childhood memories into our daily experiences. After being an important part of Freuds famous “Wednesday Society” (Mittwochsgesellschaft) they separated around 1912 and Adler developed Individual Psychology.

While Freud works with unconscious drives Adler focusses on 3 main topics in life: Love, Society and Occupation. He was convinced that, if we seek for our purpose in life, we will have to deal with those aspects.

Some of his word-creations found their way into our daily life. A perfect example here is the inferiority complex.  Adlerwas convinced that our goal in life is to compensate the feeling of inferiority and to thrive for self-worth.

Another important aspect is selective perception. This states that we see the world the way we “want” to see it. There are certain experiences that shape, how we see the reality and what we perceive of it.

Like Freud Adler also worked with dreams and the interpretation of our unconscious within those dreams. For more on dreams please click here.