Word: adlerian
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...best known "defectors" were Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. Adler, a Viennese physician and socialist, developed his own psychology, which stressed the aggression with which those people lacking in some quality they desire--say, manliness--express their discontent by acting out. "Inferiority complex," a much abused term, is Adlerian. Freud did not regret losing Adler, but Jung was something else. Freud was aware that most of his acolytes were Jews, and he did not want to turn psychoanalysis into a "Jewish science." Jung, a Swiss from a pious Protestant background, struck Freud as his logical successor, his "crown prince...
Adler's liberal education began at 15 when he discovered Plato while reading John Stuart Mill's Autobiography. In his own autobiography appearing next month, Philosopher at Large (Macmillan; $12.95), a chatty, often charmingly self-deprecating memoir of Adlerian triumphs and misadventures, Adler reports that Mill persuaded him to sample some of Plato's Dialogues...
...describes him as a Chekhovian figure, but in truth he is a little vague to the reader, and perhaps to her. She doesn't even know whether he is Freudian, Jungian or Adlerian. He is the name of what she clings to. Sarah understands her problem with merciless clarity: she yearns. "Yearn," she writes. "That is a word of such strength it makes me afraid." The specialty of the mediocre neurotic writer is to frighten a reader with his act. Sarah Ferguson does something far more subtle, far more relentless. She makes a reader enter not so much into...
Gentle Persuasion. The Berkowitz-Newman brand of wisdom is vaguely Adlerian (Berkowitz attended the Alfred Adler Institute after taking his Ph.D. at New York University). Adler invented the term inferiority complex, and the book is aimed at people with shaky selfesteem. As Adler did, it recommends strengthening the ego and urges self-determination. Sometimes, at least. Actually the authors want to have it both ways: "When you try to do it all out of will power, you are not treating yourself with respect. You are making the assumption that change has to be imposed from above, that your self doesn...
Theodore and the Talking Mushroom by Leo Lionni. Unpaged. Pantheon. $3.95. A mouse with an inferiority complex uses a mysterious mushroom for an Adlerian power play that fails. Leo Lionni is a well-known designer and ex-art director, whose collages, this time out, would scare a hoptoad. But anyone who figured that a talking mushroom would just naturally say "quirp" isn't to be lightly overlooked...