ALFRED ADLER INSTITUTE IN SUISSE ROMANDE
Our Story
The Alfred Adler Institute in Suisse Romande did not emerge from a strategic plan. It emerged from a conviction - shared by three clinicians who had each, independently, discovered something they believed the world could not afford to lose.
THE FIRST GENERATION
Alfred Adler developed one of the most original and humane psychologies of the twentieth century - a vision of human beings as social, purposeful, and capable of change that was radical in its optimism and rigorous in its depth. Around him gathered a circle of remarkable thinkers and clinicians, among them Sophia de Vries, who would study with Adler directly and carry his clinical method forward with exceptional fidelity.
But history intervened. The rise of Hitler and National Socialism scattered the Viennese Individual Psychologists across Europe and North America. In the decades that followed, Adler's ideas were absorbed into the mainstream of psychotherapy - and in that absorption, something was lost. The depth, the philosophical complexity, the precise clinical method that Adler had developed were simplified, systematized, and in some quarters reduced to a set of techniques. The original Adlerian way receded.
Adler and His Circle
THE SECOND GENERATION
Henry Stein and the Recovery of the Depth
Henry T. Stein devoted his life to recovering what had been lost. Working in close partnership with Sophia de Vries - Adler's own student — he undertook the monumental task of translating Adler's essential writings from German, creating what has come to be known as the Classical Adlerian canon. Together, they articulated the true nature of Individual Psychology and the way Adler actually worked, separate and apart from what the North American mainstream had made of it.
Henry formulated Classical Adlerian Depth Psychotherapy - a rigorous, demanding training that asked for its students’ full commitment and engagement. He made no apology for the fact that few would complete it. His conviction was that depth required time, seriousness, and a willingness to be transformed by the work. His lifetime contribution was the translation, the collecting, the articulating - a body of work that made genuine Adlerian study possible for those willing to undertake it. He trained a relative few, in the guiding mentor tradition of Adler himself.
THE THIRD GENERATION
When Henry passed, having worked doggedly through his 90th year, he left behind an extraordinary inheritance - his archives, his training materials, his translations, and a small community of clinicians he had trained and certified. Among them were the three founders of the Alfred Adler Institute in Suisse Romande.
We share Henry's reverence for the depth and integrity of the original Adlerian way. But we feel a different calling in our generation. We are not content to let this knowledge remain the province of a dedicated few. While we remain committed to a rigorous, mentor-guided program in training Adlerian Depth Psychotherapists, we also believe that even a partial encounter with Adler's thinking - a deepening of clinical practice, a more coherent understanding of human functioning, a more honest engagement with how people change - is worth pursuing. We ask ourselves: what can we leave behind so that Adler, in his profoundest and truest sense, is not lost?
Our Institute’s first credo said it plainly: Living, Practicing, and Teaching Classical Adlerian Depth Psychotherapy. That remains our orientation. The website you are reading is part of it. So is the accreditation we sought, the benefactor whose generosity freed us to lower our tuition, to pursue preservation over profit, and the growing community of students and colleagues who have found their way to us.
A Different Calling
IN THEIR OWN WORDS
Our Personal Pilgrimages
For much of his career, Erik worked to bring Adlerian ideas into clinical and educational settings across the United States and Europe - integrating them into training curricula, presenting at international conferences, and teaching at universities from Chicago to Geneva. But it was a frustration, not a triumph, that proved decisive. Working with master's and doctoral students who found the mainstream Adlerian model insufficient for the complexity of their clients' lives, Erik struggled to offer something more. Then Henry Stein sent him the first volume of The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler. "My encounter with CADP," he wrote, "felt like an antidote that unblocked my frustration with a long-cherished model of healing." A decade of certification training and mentorship with Henry followed — and with it, the conviction that this could not be allowed to fade.
ERIK MANSAGER
For as long as she can remember, Jinger knew that her life's work would somehow be about healing - she assumed body, learned in time it was to be soul. She came to psychology through a growing fascination with the human spirit: its capacity for suffering and overcoming, for renewal and growth, and for the transformative role of relationship in that healing process. In her formal training she encountered Adler in the cursory form in which many master's-level students do - enough to feel the affinity, to recognize something in its positivity and unequivocal regard for human dignity, but not enough to guide her clients to lasting change. It was Erik who brought her to Henry Stein, to the genius and intensity of his training program - and with it, to the great awakening of coherence, unity, and depth. The chapter that opened for her, in her person, her relationships, and her clinical practice, was profound. She came to believe, as Erik and Jane did, that this must not be lost to the world.
JINGER HAYES
What do psychology and a larynx have in common? Well, Jane Pfefferlé's discovery of Adlerian Psychology for one thing. As a voice teacher working with singers whose damaged voices refused to heal, Jane began to notice what Adler would have called organ jargon - the body expressing what the mind could not. A woman whose mother had silenced her as a child carried that silencing in her vocal cords. As the dying woman endeavoured to learn to sing as a final act of living, Jane found herself in the presence of suffering she had no clinical language for. Still, with only her presence, Jane developed a slowly growing conviction that the voice was a laboratory for understanding the whole person. The path from teaching singing to counselling, and from counselling to Adler, was organic. When her partner, Erik, introduced her to Henry Stein's work, something fell into place - not as a new discovery, but as a confirmation, a deepening of what she had already learned to hear. His belief in her - personal, specific, sustained - lighted something within. That hunger for more, awakened by Henry's mentorship, is what connected her to the institute's purpose. Without the efforts of our Institute, her concern, and ours, is that the world loses Adler-in-depth - his complete and undiluted theory, brought to life through mentorship. This has been carried forward through Henry's own experience with Sophia, and now held in our hands.
JANE PFEFFERLÉ