Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [122]
Alfred Adler came to believe that the main factors affecting the child’s development had to do with his or her position in the family and the parents’ child-rearing practices. When these were pathogenic, they created in the child an “inferiority complex,” leading to behavior that sought to compensate for it. Adler was critical of Freud’s ideas about the role of sexuality in character development and the neuroses, arguing, for instance, that women’s character is shaped not by the lack of a penis so much as by envy of men’s social position and privileges, and that the boy’s conflicts at around age five stem less from Oedipal desires than from the conflict between his competitive urges and his feeling of powerlessness. After a prolonged struggle with Freud, who tried unsuccessfully to harmonize Adler’s views with his own, Adler and a group of his followers resigned from the Vienna society in 1911 and formed one of their own.
Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, disagreed with Freud’s central doctrine of the sexual origin of the neuroses. He interpreted them as manifestations of current maladjustment, not as disorders arising from traumas in infancy or childhood. Jung also held religious and mystical convictions, and a belief in the “collective unconscious,” a psyche common to all individuals; these doctrines were a source of contention between him and Freud. After having been an enthusiastic follower, Jung gradually drew away from Freud, and in 1914 he formally broke with the Freudian movement and founded his own.
Otto Rank, a faithful disciple and close associate of Freud’s for many years, slowly developed a theory of his own in which the chief source of anxiety is the trauma of birth, and the male sexual urge is a desire to return to the mother’s womb. Efforts by Freud to reconcile Rank’s views with his own failed; the relationship grew strained and finally ended in 1926.
Once, when the subject came up at dinner in the Freud home of his inability to hold on to his followers, an aunt of Freud’s spoke up: “The trouble with you, Sigi,” she said, “is that you just don’t understand people.”63
Remarkably, Freud remained immensely productive through all these stressful developments, the deprivations and social disruptions of World War I, which caused his practice to dwindle alarmingly, and the postwar inflation, which wiped out his life savings.
He continued to develop psychoanalytic theory through his clinical work with patients and to share ideas with a number of fellow analysts by letter and at conferences, although he never again collaborated with anyone as he had with Breuer and Fliess. Until his later years he did not cease extending and adding to his body of psychological theories in an outpouring of articles, case histories, and books.
Freudian psychology is, of course, only a part of human psychology, as Freud himself recognized.64 It has little to say about all those conscious processes of learning, reasoning, problem solving, and creativity which seem the peak achievements of evolution and culture, and nothing whatever about behaviorism, the strictly external approach to psychological research that swept through university psychology departments in the United States by the 1920s and that Freud dismissed in a footnote.65
Freud’s psychology was and remained entirely inward-looking and seemingly timeless, in contrast to so much that was happening in the world around him. Electricity, internal combustion engines, the automobile and airplane, the telephone and radio, were radically altering daily life and social patterns; wars and revolutions were dismantling empires and breeding new democracies and dictatorships; class structures and the Victorian