When violence is to be committed, it is frequently done by “appealing to justice, custom, freedom, the welfare of the oppressed and in the name of culture.”

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.

Alfred Adler - an early feminist

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.

Will-to-power

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.

Developing social feeling 

The search for self-esteem can become neurotic as the result of brutal parents or a hostile milieu. There can be over-compensation as well as a closing in on oneself.Over-compensation can result in a quest for power. Striving for self-esteem and power is a natural process, but with over-compensation, the search for power can become the dominant aspect of the personality.

Quest for power

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.

The dominance of the will-to-power over cooperation

Alfred Adler (1870-1937) was a Vienna psychotherapist and medical doctor and founder of individual psychology.He believed that there were two decisive forces at work in world history and in the life of each individual: <ul><li>a striving for power and a social feeling. </li></ul>Both forces stemmed from man’s upward striving from inferiority to perfection.

Two decisive forces

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.

The irony of developing social feeling 

Alfred Adler was an Austrian physician and psychiatrist who is best-known for forming the school of thought known as individual psychology. He is also remembered for his concepts of the inferiority feeling and inferiority complex, which he believed played a major part in the formation of personality. 

Understand yourself and those around you.