Dr. Adolf Adler is recognized internationally as the founder of the Individual psychology. Adler was born in Vienna on February 7, 1870 to Jewish parents. His father, Leopold Adler, was a grain merchant. He received a medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1895. During his college years, he joined a group of socialist students, among which he met his future wife, Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein. She was an intellectual and social activist who had come from Russia to study in Vienna. They married in 1897 and soon after Adler converted to Protestantism. Two of their four children became psychiatrists.
Adler began his medical career as an ophthalmologist, and then changed to general practice. He became interested in psychiatry and was able to join Dr. Sigmund Freud’s group. He was a member of Sigmund Freud’s discussion group known after 1908 as the Vienna Psychoanalysis Society (1902-1911), President of Psychoanalyst. Soc. and Co-editor of Zentralblatt fuer Psychoanalyse (1910-1911). Adler made the earliest synthesis between Marxist and Freudian thoughts (1909).
During his relationship with Freud, Adler began to form his own ideas regarding aggression. This eventually led to his breakup with Freud and he formed his own group, The Society for Individual Psychology. The “Individual Psychology “was based on premise of individual’s aim of self-determination, future orientation and his “will to power” against basic feelings of inferiority. Adler diminished the importance of intra psychic phenomena and stressed the importance of social factors in the neuroses development. That year he founded the Society of Free Analysis, which he renamed a year later as the Society for Individual Psychology. He also founded the first child guidance clinic that was connected to the Viennese school system (1919).
During World War I Adler served in the Austro-Hungarian Army as a physician. Following the war, he was involved in various projects, including clinics attached to state schools and the training of teachers. From 1924 onwards, Alfred Adler was a much-appreciated lecturer. In 1926, he went to the United States to lecture, and accepted a visiting position at the Long Island College of Medicine. In 1934, he and his family left Vienna. His lecture tours included many institutions: Pedagogical Institute, Vienna (1924), Columbia University in New York (1927), frequent lecturing tours to the U.S.A. In the later decades of the twentieth century, there has been an increased interest in the western world in the Psychology of Adler and various schools or societies for Adlerian Psychology were established.
On May 28, 1937, during a series of lectures at Aberdeen University, Scotland, he died of a heart attack.