ADLERIAN

THERAPY R E P O R T E D B Y :

C H R I S T I A N N E C . C O R R E O S

J U N E 2 0 2 2
 ALFRED ADLER
(BIOGRAPHY)
• He is born on February 7, 1870, in Vienna, Austria.
• He is the 2nd born of six siblings in a middle-class Jewish Family
• He suffered from rickets which kept him from walking until he was 4 and
nearly died of pneumonia when he was 5.
• His brother Rudolf died of Diptheria at the age of 4.
• Due to this, his early years were characterized by struggling to overcome
illnesses and feelings of inferiority. He felt inferior to his older brother,
Sigmund, and to his peers which made him compensate for his physical
limitations and gradually overcame many of his limitations.
• His early childhood experiences drove him to become a better physician and
had an impact on the formation of his theory.
 ADLERIAN THEORY OF PERSONALITY

• He stressed a positive view of human nature, that individuals have the capacity
to control their fate.
• They can do this part by trying to help others (social interest).
• Early interactions with family members, peers, & teachers help to determine the
inferiority and superiority in our lives.
• He stresses a unity of personality which states that a person can only be
understood as an integrated & complete human being.
• He emphasized that where we are striving to go is more important than
where we have to come from.
 VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
• Subjective Perception of Reality
 Phenomenological: it is an Adlerian’s attempt to view the world from the
client’s subjective frame of reference.
 This includes an individual’s perceptions, thoughts values, beliefs,
convictions, and conclusions.
 VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
• Unity and Patterns of Human Personality
 He emphasized the unity and indivisibility of the person and stressed
understanding the whole person in the context of his or her life (holistic
perspective).
 VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
• Behavior as Purposeful and Goal Oriented
Adler replaced deterministic explanations with teleological (purposive, goal-
oriented) ones.
 This idea requires a very different way of viewing humans than the idea that
behavior is “caused” by some internal or external forces or rewards and
punishments.
 Since we have evolved as social creatures, the most common goal is to belong.
 VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
• Striving for Significance and Superiority
 The recognition of inferiority feelings and the consequent striving for
perfection or mastery is innate.
Adler and others have referred to this central human striving in a number of
ways: completion perfection, superiority, self-realization, self-actualization,
competence and mastery.
 VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
Social Interest & Positive Involvement in the community are hallmarks of a
healthy personality.
 Social interest is the action line of one’s community’s feelings and it involves
being concerned about others as one is about oneself.
 Community Feeling is the need to feel belong and it manifests itself in
courage, empathy, engagement, and cooperation.
 All behaviors occur in a social context because humans are born into an
environment in which they must engage in reciprocal relations.
 Adler believed that social interest was innate but that it needed to be nurtured
in a family where cooperation and trust were important values.
 LIFESTYLE

• Lifestyle: it is our perceptions regarding self, others, and the world including
the connecting themes & rules of interaction that give meaning to our actions.
It is the characteristic way of thinking or feeling.
 4 areas of lifestyle
a. The self-concept: the conviction about who I am.
b. The self-ideal: convictions about what should I be.
c. The Weltbild / “picture of the world”: convictions about the not-self and
what the world demands of me.
d. The ethical convictions: the personal “right-wrong” code.
 THE LIFE TASKS
• Adler taught that we must successfully master 3 universal tasks: building
friendships (social tasks), establishing intimacy (life-marriage task), and
contributing to society (occupational tasks).
• Each of these tasks requires the development of psychological capacities for
friendship and belonging, contribution, and self-worth.
• Impairment in any of them is often an indicator of a psychological disorder.
 BIRTH ORDER AND SIBLINGS’ RELATIONSHIP
• Birth order is not a deterministic concept but does increase an individual’s
probability of having a certain set of experiences.
• Because Adlerians view most human problems as social in nature, they
emphasize relationships within the family as our earliest and, perhaps, our most
influential social system.
• Birth order and interpretation of one’s position in the family have a great
impact on how adults interact with the world.
 BIRTH ORDER AND SIBLINGS’ RELATIONSHIP
• The following description of the influence of birth order is based on Ansbacher and Ansbacher
(1964), Dreikurs (1953), and Adler (1931/1958).
a. The Oldest Child
 Receives all the attention and during the time he/she is the only child, he/she is spoiled as
he/she is the center of attention.
 Tends to be dependable, hardworking, and strives to keep ahead.
 When a new brother or sister arrives, she finds herself/himself ousted from her favored
position and feels she/he is no longer unique or special.
 She/he may readily believe that the newcomer (or intruder) will take away the love of their
parents.
 Most often, she reasserts her position by becoming a model child, bossing younger children
and displaying a high achievement drive.
 BIRTH ORDER AND SIBLINGS’ RELATIONSHIP
b. The Second Child
 From the time she/he is born, she shares attention with another child, she/he
shares attention with another child.
 The typical second child behaves as if she was in a race and is generally under
full steam at all times.
 He/she wants to surpass the older sibling
This competitive struggle between the first two children influences the later
course of their lives.
 BIRTH ORDER AND SIBLINGS’ RELATIONSHIP
c. The middle child
 The middle child often feels squeezed out.
 This child may become convinced that of the unfairness of life and feel cheated.
 This person may assume a “poor me” and can become a problem child.
 In conflict, the middle child may become the peacemaker, the person who holds
things together.
 If there are 4 children in the family, the second child will often feel the middle
child and the third will be more easygoing, more social and may align with the
firstborn.
 BIRTH ORDER AND SIBLINGS’ RELATIONSHIP
d. The youngest child
 Always the baby of the family and tends to be the most pampered one.
 Because of being pampered or spoiled, he may develop helplessness into an art
form and become an expert at putting others in service.
 The youngest children tend to go on their own way, often developing in ways
no others in the family have attempted and may outshine everyone.
 BIRTH ORDER AND SIBLINGS’ RELATIONSHIP
e. The only child
 Shares some characteristics of the oldest child (for example, a high
achievement drive),
 She may not learn to share or cooperate with other children.
 She will learn to deal with adults well, as they make up her original familial
world.
 Often, the only child is pampered by her parents and may become dependently
tied to one or both of them.
 She may want to have the center stage all of the time, and if her position is
challenged, she will feel it is unfair.
 THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS
• Therapeutic Goals
 The main aim of the therapy is to develop the client’s sense of belonging and to assist in the
adoption of behaviors and processes characterized by community feeling and social interest.
 It offers an optimistic perspective that people are creative, unique, capable, and responsible.
 It focuses on providing information, teaching, guiding, and offering encouragement to
discouraged clients. Through encouragement, it will help the person build his or her self-
confidence and will stimulate courage.
 Adlerian counselors provide clients with an opportunity to view things from a different
perspective, yet it is up to the clients to decide whether to accept an alternative perspective.
 THERAPIST’S FUNCTION AND ROLE
• Adlerian therapists realize that clients can become discouraged and function ineffectively because
of mistaken beliefs, faulty values, and useless or self-absorbed goals.
• Adlerians operate on the assumption that clients will feel and behave better once they discover and
correct their basic mistakes.
• A major task for the therapist is to make a comprehensive assessment of the client’s functioning.
• Therapists often gather information about the individual’s style of living through a questionnaire
on the family’s constellation which includes parents, siblings, and others living at home, life
tasks, and early recollections.
• Early recollections are specified incidents that clients recall along with the feelings and thoughts
that accompanied these childhood incidents.
• Lifestyle Assessment is the process of gathering early memories. It involves learning to
understand the goal and motivation of the client.
 CLIENT’S EXPERIENCE IN THERAPY
• Clients in Adlerian counseling focus their work on desired outcomes and a resilient lifestyle that
can provide a new blueprint for their actions.
• In therapy, clients explore private logic, the concepts about self, others and life that constitutes
the philosophy in which an individual lifestyle is based. It includes our convictions and beliefs
that get in the way of social interest and do not facilitate useful, constructive belonging (Carlson,
Watts, & Maniacci, 2006).
• A lot of time spent in therapy is spent on understanding these emotions and cognitions and
reorienting the client towards effective ways of being.
• Throughout the therapeutic process, the client will discover that he or she has resources and
options to draw on in dealing with significant life issues and tasks.
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THERAPISTS AND CLIENT
• Adlerians consider a good client therapist-relationship to be one between equals that is based
on cooperation, mutual trust, respect, confidence, collaboration and alignment of goals.
• From the beginning, the relationship is a collaborative one, characterized by two persons
working on a common goal.
• At the outset of the therapy, client should begin to formulate a plan or contract, detailing what
they want, how to plan to get where they are heading, what is preventing them from
successfully attaining their goals, how they can change non-productive behavior into a
constructive behavior and how they can make use of their assets in achieving their purposes.
APPLICATION OF THERAPEUTIC TECHNIQUES AND
PROCEDURES
 PHASE 1 : ESTABLISH THE RELATIONSHIP
• The Adlerian practitioner works in a collaborative way with clients, and this relationship is
based on a sense of interest that grows into caring, involvement, and friendship.
• Adlerian therapists focus on making person-to-person contact with clients rather than starting
with “the problem.”
• During the initial phase, a positive relationship is created by listening, responding,
demonstrating respect for clients’ capacity to understand the purpose and seek change, and
exhibiting hope and caring because when clients enter therapy, they typically have a
diminished sense of self-worth and self-respect.
• At this stage, the counselor’s function is to provide a wide-angle perspective that will
eventually help the client view his or her world differently.
 PHASE 2: ASSESSING THE INDIVIDUAL’S
PSYCHOLOGICAL DYNAMICS
• During this assessment phase, the focus is on understanding the client’s identity and how that
identity relates to the world at large.
• 2 interview forms: Subjective Interview and Objective Interview
• Subjective Interview: Active listening (followed by a sense of wonder, fascination, and
interest) to help the client tell their story completely as much as possible.
• Objective Interview: it seeks to discover how problems in the client’s life began, any
precipitating events, and medical history including past and current medications, social history,
the reason for choosing the therapy, coping skills, and a lifestyle assessment.
• The lifestyle assessment starts with an investigation of the family constellation and early
recollections.
 PHASE 2: ASSESSING THE INDIVIDUAL’S
PSYCHOLOGICAL DYNAMICS
• Family Constellation: Adler considered the family of origin as having a central impact on an
individual’s personality. He suggested that it was through the family constellation that each
person forms his or her unique view of self, others, and life.
• Early Recollections: it asks the client to provide his or her earliest memories, including the
age of the person at the time of the remembered events and the feelings or reactions associated
with the recollections. Early recollections are one-time occurrences, usually, before the age of
10, that can be pictured by the client in clear detail.
• Adlerian therapists use early recollections as a projective technique to (a) assess the client’s
convictions about self, others, life, and ethics; (b) assess the client’s stance about the
counseling session and the counseling relationship; (c) verify the client’s coping patterns; and
(d) assess individual strengths, assets, and interfering ideas.
PHASE 3: ENCOURAGING SELF-
UNDERSTANDING AND INSIGHT
• Adlerian therapists interpret the findings of the assessment as an avenue for promoting self-
understanding and insight.
• When Adlerian speak of insight, they are referring to an understanding of the motivations that
operate in a client’s life. A special form of awareness facilitates a meaningful understanding
within the therapeutic relationship and acts as a foundation for change.
• Interpretation deals with clients’ underlying motives for behaving the way they do in the here
and now.
• Through this process, both counselor and client eventually come to understand the client’s
motivations, how these motivations are now contributing to the maintenance of the problem,
and what the client can do to correct the situation.
PHASE 4: REORIENTATION AND REEDUCATION
• This phase focuses on helping clients discover a new and more functional perspective. Clients are
both encouraged and challenged to develop the courage to take risks and make changes in their life.
• Clients figure out how to reorient their current style of living to the useful side of life, increasing
their community feeling and social interest.
• Reorientation involves shifting rules of interaction, process, and motivation.
• Encouragement means “to build courage.” Therapists help clients focus on their resources and
strengths and have faith that they can make life changes, even though life can be difficult.
• Change and Search for new possibilities: During the reorientation phase of counseling, clients
make decisions and modify their goals.
• Making a Difference: Adlerian practitioners focus on motivation modification more than behavior
change and encourage clients to make holistic changes on the useful side of living.
 AREAS OF APPLICATION
• Application to Family Counseling: Adlerian working with families focuses on the family
atmosphere, the family constellation, and the interactive goals of each member. The therapeutic
process seeks to increase awareness of the interaction of the individuals within the family system.
Those who practice Adlerian family therapy strive to understand the goals, beliefs, and behaviors of
each family member and the family as an entity in its own right.
• Application to Group Counseling: The group provides the social context in which members can
develop a sense of belonging, social connectedness, and community.
• Strengths from a Diversity Perspective: Clients are encouraged to define themselves within their
social environments and to understand how those environments influence their lifestyle and health.
• Shortcomings from a Diversity Perspective: The Adlerian theory has some potential drawbacks
for clients from those cultures who are not interested in exploring past childhood experiences, early
memories, family experiences, and dreams.