Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler (1870 to 1937) was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist and founder of the school of individual psychology. Trained at the University of Vienna, he began as an ophthalmologist before moving to general practice, neurology and psychiatry, and in 1902 joined Sigmund Freud's Wednesday Society. He broke from the psychoanalytic circle in 1911 and founded the Society for Individual Psychology in 1912. He emphasized feelings of belonging, relationships within the family, birth order and social interest as the source of a person's sense of worth, and coined the term inferiority complex. His influence on schooling came after the First World War: in 1919 he started the first Child Guidance clinic in Vienna, and he and his associates went on to establish 28 such clinics, so that Vienna became the first city to give schoolchildren free educational therapy. He lectured widely in Europe and the United States, was a visiting professor at Columbia University in 1927, and took a professorship at the Long Island College of Medicine in 1934.