The “Un-understood”: Adler’s Grasp of Unconscious
The “Un-understood”: Adler’s Grasp of Unconscious
The Journal of Individual Psychology, Vol. 76, No. 1, Spring 2020
The authors expound on Alfred Adler’s understanding and use of “unconscious” in his construction of the dynamic personality. Adlerian constructs are used to illustrate the unity of personality and the role of unconscious in the human psyche. This article concludes by asserting the importance of understanding the “un-understood” in an Adlerian therapeutic process, accompanied by the application of insights.
Keywords: fictional final goal, holism, inferiority feeling, lifestyle, optimal growth, unconscious
Concepts such as the unconscious are understood differently across various schools of psychology. An example of this is Adler’s holistic view of human personality, which is unique in the field of psychotherapy. The goal of this article is to present Adler’s theory with a specific focus on his understanding and use of the unconscious.
Unlike other psychodynamic theories, Adler saw the unconscious as that which we have not yet understood about ourselves:
The unconscious is nothing other than that which we have been unable to formulate in clear concepts. It is not a matter of concepts hiding away in some unconscious or subconscious recesses of our minds, but of parts of our consciousness, the significance of which we have not yet fully understood. (Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956, p. 233)
This is in keeping with Adler’s view that the personality is a complete unity. In contrast to more traditionally Freudian hypotheses that have divided the individual into dynamic parts in constant conflict with one another, Adler understood the personality as whole, unified and without contradictions.
Adler’s Construction of the Dynamic Personality
During infancy, children experience implicit feelings of inadequacy and a sense of helplessness owing to their dependence on adult caregivers and/or older siblings. The feeling of inferiority is experienced by the child as intolerable and stimulates compensation to overcome the inadequacy.
By the third year, the child is cognitively able to strive toward an imagined situation in the future that would bring total relief from this felt sense of inadequacy. Endlessly striving for better adaptation, the child initially creates an ideal goal of perfect adaptation: a vision, however vague, of mastery over the inadequacy. This imagined final position, which is formulated without words in early childhood, represents the pinnacle of the law of psychological movement as Adler understood it: the individual moves along a continuum from feeling inadequate in the face of life’s challenges toward a sense of feeling adequate to them. Ignorant of its fuller meaning, but guided by the feelings it generates, the entire inner life of the child points toward and grows in the direction of its unique fictional final goal, which promises safety and power. In the normal individual, this involves interdependence with others; in the unhealthy individual, it is a self-focused goal promising personal safety and power over others.
The fictional final goal is a dynamic organizing principle, subordinating an individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to its guiding direction. The characteristic manner in which the individual pursues this goal, manifested in the repetitive answers given to the situations faced, constitutes the individual’s unique style of life.
Unity of Personality and the “Un-understood”
Adler’s holistic assessment was such that he conceived the individual to be indivisible: as he saw it, the mind could not be split into the conscious mind and the unconscious—“as if they were two antagonistic halves of an individual’s existence” (Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956, p. 233). Instead, both consciousness and unconsciousness are guided by the fictional final goal. The seeming opposition of conscious and unconscious impulses may be understood as an antithesis of means only, with both conscious manifes.tations of the psyche and the unconscious striving of the individual pointing toward the final purpose of enhancing the self by attaining the goal. Adler saw no need to make a clear distinction between the conscious and unconscious. Rather, his insight into the fluidity between the levels of awareness is such that what seems to be unconscious may be raised to consciousness, that is, direct awareness—by effective therapy. Once understood, the unconscious tendency has already become conscious.
Sophia J. de Vries, a student of Adler, said that “there are so many things that remain unconscious, because we do not need them to be conscious at the time, but we can make them into conscious phenomena when necessary” (as cited in Stein, 2013, p. 88). Given the general human tendency to consider only that which advances our position, we tend to lay aside that which obstructs our course. For Adler, “conscious becomes what encourages us; unconscious remains whatever might disturb our viewpoint” (Stein, 2013, p. 87). To the extent that the individual’s lifestyle is focused narrowly on the individual goal—and thus opposes reality or deviates from common sense—it must remain unconscious and not understood. Were the individual to become conscious of the final goal, his or her constantly self-serving pursuit thereof would be rendered impossible by the admission of having an antisocial tendency.
Thus, the goal of psychological movement—as well as the individual’s lifestyle and the opinion of one’s capabilities that underlies it—may be characterized as unconscious insofar as it is unrecognized or not yet understood. Indeed, Adler insisted that “man understands nothing about his goal, but still he pursues it. He understands nothing about his style of life, yet he is continually bound to it” (Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956, p. 232). In this way, the individual continues the action line toward personal superiority “without having to consciously examine, challenge, or change a path that seems essential for his self-protection or significance” (Stein, 2013, p. 88).
Adlerian Therapeutic Process Toward Optimal Mental Health
A narrow, rigid style of life, which is dominated by a self-serving fictional final goal, is bound to come into conflict with the needs of others and the demands of life. Individuals frequently come into therapy feeling caught up in their compulsive manner of dealing with daily situations, which, despite their best attempts, necessarily contains some degree of error in relation to the needs of others and cannot be redirected without dissolving their original fictional final goal.
The fictional final goal orchestrates everything and results in symptoms that excuse patients from meeting life’s common problems. It becomes the task of the therapist to help the patient understand his or her inner life in its totality, which - although unrecognized by the individual - is recognizable from its context; that is, “from his dealings and ways of behavior with regard to his fellow man” (Mueller, n.d., p. 21). By uncovering the fictional goal, to which all the patient’s actions are pointed, the therapist can call into consciousness the faulty guiding idea of greatness. By the gradual unveiling and critical examination of all components of the lifestyle, which helps the patient recognize the errors related to cooperation, the fictional goal begins to lose its influence. This is not accomplished by insight alone but by the courage of the client to take action in the direction of what hitherto felt impossible. With the help of the therapist, the client feels the difference of the new activity in comparison to the earlier avoidance and experiences this as encouragement to change. “The therapy induces the patient to give up his mistaken inferiority feeling and his unattainable aim of life and to choose instead of this the adaptation to the challenge of reality” (Nowotny, 1926, p. 648). When the goal is changed in this therapeutic process, symptoms begin to vanish and everything related to the lifestyle begins to shift.
This shift, which is actively adapted to the growing, becoming reality, involves the recognition and acceptance of the interconnectedness of all people, wherein the patient newly believes his or her major needs can be met. This active trust Adler called Gemeinschaftsgefl. The therapist aims to bring out the patient’s feelings of connectedness and courage to deal with their daily situations with the goal of achieving optimal mental health: a healthy person feels worthwhile and connected to others, cares for the self and others, believes that there are other worthwhile and reliable people with whom he or she can feel trust and feel safe, and contributes to the greater need.
References
Ansbacher, H. L., & Ansbacher, R. R. (1956). The Individual Psychology of
Alfred Adler. New York, NY: Basic Books. Mueller, A. (n.d.). Principles of Individual Psychology (Unpublished English
translation of manuscript in the archives of the Alfred Adler Institute of
Northwestern Washington). Bellingham, WA: Adlerian Translation Project. Nowotny, K. (1926). The technique of individual psychological therapy. In
E. Wexberg (Ed.), Handbuch der Individualpsychologie [Handbook on Individual Psychology] (Unpublished English translation of manuscript in the archives of the Alfred Adler Institute of Northwestern Washington). Bellingham, WA: Adlerian Translation Project.
Stein, H. T. (2013). Classical Adlerian depth psychotherapy: Vol. 1. Theory and practice: A Socratic approach to democratic living. Bellingham, WA: Alfred Adler Institute of Northwestern Washington.
Chantal Prinsloo, MA (chants2009@gmail.com), is a psychosocial counselor in Geneva, Switzerland. She received a bachelor of science with honors in the field of psychology from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and a master of arts in counseling from Webster University in Geneva. She is currently completing her further certification as a Classical Adlerian Depth Psychotherapist through the Alfred Adler Institute of Northwestern Washington.
Xiaoxuan Qu, MA (mariaqu@outlook.com), is a counselor in Qingdao, China. She received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from University of Kent in the United Kingdom and a master’s degree in counseling from Webster University in Geneva, Switzerland. She is in the midst of Classical Adlerian Depth Psychotherapy training.
This article is shared with the generous permission of its author, Xiaoxuan Qu, Ph.D., NCC.