The drive for self

by Edward Hoffman

As the founding father of Individual Psychology, ranked alongside Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as one of the world's most inspired social thinkers, Alfred Adler fashioned a new understanding of personality that took the search for self out of the shadows of Freudian gloom and placed it firmly in the hands of the individual. Here at last is the first major biography of a man who has had a profound influence not only on modern and popular psychology but on the very way we think about ourselves. From Adler's early life in fin de siecle Vienna, to his break with psychoanalysis and later life in America, The Drive for Self offers a compelling portrait of both the man and his times. An early intimate of Freud and his inner circle, Adler was one of the original four participants in the Wednesday Psychological Society that became the nucleus for worldwide psychoanalysis. Impressed with Adler's brilliance, Freud referred many patients to him, including his own brother-in-law and by 1910 Adler wa