1 - Unity of personality; Holism

Here is the first of a number of majorAdlerian concepts.

The central theme of Adlerian psychology is the oneness of personality, that the individual is not a collection of separate parts (Id, Ego, Superego, Libido; traits, behaviors, etc.. Adler took the Latin word individuum to name his approach: “that which cannot be separated.”

St. Paul spoke of this in his letter to the church in Corinth (12:12-19), when he compared the church to a body with many parts (a common metaphor in his time to encourage those weho felt separated from society). I’m not aware that Adler knew of or used this metaphor in any discussion of the unity of personality, but he could have:

The body is one, yet has many parts. All the parts of the body, though many, are one body. The body does not consist of one part but of many. The foot cannot say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body.” And the ear cannot say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body." Because if the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? If there were only one member, what would the body be? There are many parts, yet one body. (Emphasis added.)

Adler saw personality as integrated and self-consistent, with all aspects of a person co-existing within the larger oneness, much as Paul saw the body as having “parts” yet still being one body.

Adler’s was the first “holistic” psychology. He said, “The findings of Individual Psychology point to the fact that all behavior of a human being fits into a unity and is an expression of the individual’s [unified] style of life.”

Here self-consistency and unity of personality are tied to the person’s fictional final goal, the guiding self-ideal around which one organizes life in order to achieve the idealized or perfect solution to the one Problem that could not be solved by the child in childhood. And he said,

The unity of the personality led us to the conviction that early in life, in the first 4 or 5 five years, a goal is set for the need and drive of psychical development, a goal toward which all its current flow. Such a goal not only determines the direction which promises security, power, and perfection, but also awakens the corresponding feelings and emotions through that which it promises. Thus, the individual mitigates his sense of weakness in the anticipation of his redemption.

This provides us with the portrait of a person who (1) has a problem that cannot be solved, (2) a proposed, ideal solution, (3) an imagined way to get from the Problem to its Solution, and (4) a sense of life movement (with purpose, energy, vision) forming a “guiding line” that stretches between them like a beckoning highway.

The “problem with The Problem” is threefold:

1. The Problem cannot be solved. It is worded in such a way that the Guiding Goal can never be attained. It is in the realm of fantasy while the individual must live in the real world.

2. It assumes that the child knows what a Problem is, and what will solve it. However, the child does not realize his/her limits of skill, experience, information, and so on.

3. It becomes the central feature of the activity and purpose of personality. The child decides what is important, and spends the rest of life trying to achieve it. In this way, a person remains a child throughout his lifetime, never growing older or wiser regarding life’s real problems and purposes. He/she is committed to the Perfect Problem and its Ideal Solution.

It is this that shapes the person’s life, limits the person’s possibilities, defines the person as a human being, and around which all else revolves to create that self-consistency and wholeness that Adler described as he introduced his approach to the world in 1911.

Next time: Purpose/goal-directedness, future orientation, “teleological" psychology and psychotherapy