Alfred Adler – Power and Social Feeling

Adler had been influenced by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche who glorified the will-to-power.

For Adler, an over-development of the will-to-power can become a deep seated neurosis.

Only a health balance between the forces of cooperation and the individual will-to-power can make for a harmonious individual and a harmonious society.

After 1897, he joined the socialist circles and became convinced that society helped to create the personality of the individual.

Therefore, for a health personality, there needs to be a healthy society, free from domination.

Adler also saw the need for a society based on equality between men and women, so that the personality of both men and women could develop fully.

 At the end of the World War (1914-1918) he felt that the will-to-power dominated the sense of social-feeling and cooperation.

Power-hungry leaders and groups debased mass social feeling by using it as a thirst for dominance.

The social feeling of soldiers during the war was used for battlefield goals with efforts to exclude any social feeling for the enemy.

Power-seekers transform social feeling “from an end into a means, and it is pressed into the service of nationalism and imperialism.”

The only way to counter this neurotic sense of power-seeking is to develop preventive methods by developing social feeling and cooperation.

Adler stressed the need for the development of social feeling by developing new, cooperative forms of childhood education within the family and schools.

By 1934, Adler saw that the sense of togetherness in Germany and Austria was going to be used again to create togetherness among a small circle and subverting the use of social feeling by making it a facade for nationalism, racism and imperialism.