The Invisible, Revolutionary, Prophetic Alfred Adler: A Personal Journey

Abstract:This article follows the author’s personal process of discovering the relevance of Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology for the creation of existential-humanistic self-development theory (DeRobertis, 2012, 2017; DeRobertis & Bland, 2020). The article begins by noting a prolonged period of fundamental unfamiliarity with Adler due to his conspicuous absence from the author’s formal education. It then highlights the myopic coverage that he was exposed to from secondary sources, which was subsequently outmoded by exposure to the works of Hall and Lindzey (1978), Ansbacher (1971, 1990), and Adler himself. The author discovered that his developmental viewpoint owed much to Adler’s work on the social conditions of development, the language of the body, creative power, final fiction, and Gemeinschaftsgefühl. The article concludes with signposts for future study, some of the ways Adler’s views have proved ahead of their time, and a call for psychologists to recognize the contemporary significance of Individual Psychology in a contentious cultural climate.