Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler (February 7, 1870 - May 28, 1937) was an Austrian medical doctor, psychologist and founder of the school of Individual Psychology. In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement. He was the first major figure to break away from psychoanalysis to form an independent school of psychotherapy and personality theory. This was after Freud decided Adler's ideas were too threatening to his own efforts to tolerate coexistence and issued an ultimatum to all members of the psychoanalytic society (which he shepherded) to drop Adler or be expelled (Makari, 2008). Following this split, Adler would come to have an enormous, independent effect on the disciplines of counseling and psychotherapy as they developed over the course of the 20th century (Ellenberger, 1970). He influenced notable figures in subsequent schools of psychotherapy such as Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis. His writings preceded, and were at times surprisingly consistent with, later neo-Freudian insights such as those evidenced in the works of Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm