Once upon a time there were three musketeers but instead of fighting the bad they tried to help us understand the bad and others better to understand the bad in ourselves better to understand ourselves better in general in order to become better people to live more meaningful lives and to become a better society as in any good trauma at some point the three musketeers had a conflict and after some time and disagreement both cal young and Alfred Adler distanced themselves from freud and his psychoanalysis leaving freud quite bitter to be exact in this video i would like to give you a little introduction into Alfred Adler's psychology he called it individual psychology and to be honest i'm quite a beginner in this myself. My name is Alina, I'm a graduate student of clinical psychology and while i studied a lot about psychodynamic theory both privately and at university Adler's psychology is quite new to me but it is incredibly interesting and i hope that i could just take you along with me to learn with me as i learn about it myself so today i would like to give you a very brief introduction into his basic assumptions and especially into why he was different from freud now freud was very much about where are we coming from he was very much focused on the past and Adler was much more concerned with the question of where are we going what are we striving for and he was thus much more focused on the future than the past the issue that both Jung and Adler had with Freud that Freud took the sex drive very literally for Adler and Jung it was a way of understanding people more like using it as a metaphor than using it literally but freud was very much interested in the sex drive as a biological drive you might remember from the last two weeks i talked about Freud's personality structure the id super ego and especially the aid that is involved in the internal conflict is very much driven by a biological drive especially by the drive for sex and aggression now Adler replaced the sex drive with the masculine protest he kind of replaced freud's kind of biological external causal explanation with a much more psychological internal and subjective explanation and this was exactly the part where Freud and Adler split. Adler explains the essence of being human as the essence of striving for something we want to go from minus to plus if you look at any graph in case you studied business like i used to in any graph we want to go from the bottom left corner to the upper right corner it is always about striving for something greater it is always about having goals and in Adler's words being human means to strive to go from inferiority to superiority i mean in the striving process there are two points we need to understand what exactly is inferiority what exactly does it mean to feel inferior are there good and bad sides to it and we need to understand what is superiority what are we actually striving for and for Adler those two are very very individual and very very subjective the strive for superiority is always based on a very individual and unique feeling of inferiority that usually develops quite early on and of course i'll acknowledges that there can be biological influences influences from the environment that shape what you strive for but in the end you're striving for self-ideal and that is subjective it's made up it's fiction and this is especially the point where Adler sees the person much more positively than freud did because the fact that you create the goals you strive for yourself also means that you have the responsibility and the possibility to change by changing the goals you strive for you can change the entire psychological processes that are attached to them and of course this understanding also changes how Adler sees the unconscious in comparison to Freud for Adler the unconscious is not really like a separate part a separate entity but it is the unknown part of your goal it is basically that part of the striving that the individual does not understand now because every human being strives to go from inferiority to superiority and reach their goals Adler sees the personality in that way as well so personality or as he calls it lifestyle or style of life is a self-consistent organization of everything all the psychological processes that we need in order to reach a certain goal and this lifestyle or personality structure is established very early on and in case you sometimes feel like either your own behavior or the behavior of others doesn't make sense it is simply because they try using a different means to reach the same goal so in this case for Adler it is very clear that the past doesn't determine the future as Freud would have it but it is the goals that we set the past can only make certain things more probable but it doesn't determine what is going to happen with the rest of our lives now Adler calls his approach Individual Psychology and i feel like this can be a bit misleading because it's actually not just about the individual separated from everything else but Adler always talks about the individual in the social context we simply cannot separate the individual from the social context from social factors and from social values Freud would then say well the individual has to repress certain things in order to fit in in society in order to adjust but Adler says that we actually have a very innate human ability to adjust and be part of society and this is something that we just have to develop and this inner ability for every being to socialize is called social interest or social feeling and now social interest is absolutely crucial to adjustment in order to be a fully functioning part of society male adjustment on the other hand can then be spotted on well not fitting in not adjusting this can be either because you have a very high feeling of inferiority so you feel worse than everyone else and therefore you're not a part of society it can be that you just don't have a social interest so you have no desire to adjust yourself or it can be that you strive for goals that will want to make you feel better than everyone so you have an increased need for superiority that is at odds with fitting in into society and being a healthy part of it now from these kind of basic assumptions ada develops a huge and very very interesting idea about what it means to be human what it means to live a good life what tasks do we need to fulfill in order to be part of society how can we differentiate between seeing others as enemies and seeing the others as comrades how can we actually succeed in the big life tasks that we have to fulfill in in love in relationships in work especially what excuses which he calls life lie what excuses do we use in order to avoid big life tests to be part of society to see others as equal and not as better or worse how can we develop a healthy sense of inferiority and how can we use that healthy sense of inferiority to strive for superiority that is not at odds with being a social creature and living in harmony with other people so as you can maybe tell i'm incredibly excited about this if you're also excited to learn more about Alfred Adler his key concepts and how you can actually apply them to your own life to identify better goals and actually reach them then feel free to subscribe hit the bell button if you want to be notified when I upload new videos and I'm very much looking forward to seeing you next week thank you so much for watching bye!