Concepts of Adler and Horney

In a discussion following a lecture at Cooper Union last year, a group of psychiatrists and social workers in Adler's psychology expressed the view that Horney and Adler concepts were, to all intents and purposes, identical. This paper will attempt to examine the validity of such claims and to clarify the similarities and differences between the Adler and Horney concepts. The following is the development of Adler's views on Human Motivation, as he himself described it.1

In 1906, Adler published a paper entitled “The Aggressive Instinct in Life and in the Neuroses.” He states that he tried “to present in a very inadequate fashion the multifarious forms of attack and defense of modification of the self and the environment effected by the human mind” and launched on the momentous departure of repudiating the sexual etiology of mental phenomena as fallacious. In a vague way, Adler states that he saw that the impulsive life of Man suffers variations and contortions relative to the kind and degree of its aggressive power. In 1912, Adler separated from Freud after he made his diverging standpoint clear in four lectures, under the title of “Critique of Freud's Sexual Theory of Psychic Life.” In the second lecture Adler objected “to accepting the doctrine of sexual impulses in the neurotic or normal individual as the basic factor of psychic life. They are never causes, but elaborated material and a means in personal striving.” Here Adler definitely separated from Freud's theory of pansexualism. This break with Freud gave Adler the opportunity to make public his own point of view.

Adler's approach to the study of personality can be divided into two periods. In the first, he developed the theme of organ inferiority. His main idea here was to show that children born with hereditary organic weaknesses exhibit not only a physical necessity to compensate for the defect, and tend to overcompensate, but that the entire nervous system, too, may take part in this compensation. The mind,