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Just what prompted Dr. Adler to call his conception of human behavior Individual Psychology is hard to say, for in it the individual receives but scant recognition. The whole scheme of human existence is blocked in with large strokes and individuals are loosely fitted into its superstructure. In this scheme the “human soul,” “psychic life” are spoken of in a seemingly substantive sense and generalizations about the individual and the community are bandied about freely, generalizations to which most anthropologists, philologists and psychologists would take exception.
It would seem that the psychological insight which informs the best of modern literature is superior to much that goes for current psychological formulations. The objective literary critic makes the valid point that no composite picture of bourgeois prejudices for example, focussed in a type, ever becomes a convincing flesh and blood figure, and rightly insists on the psychologic uniqueness of each person. One hopes to find this general attitude—namely that every individual is a unique fact of nature—among the more advanced psychologists of the day, even though one may not agree with the precise cast of their thought. One certainly has the right to expect it in a book whose “attempt is to acquaint the general public with the fundamentals of Individual Psychology.” If the term “individual” here does not mean to point out the absolute uniqueness that characterizes each individual then precisely what does it mean? And if it is intended to indicate the unique psychologic equipment that each organism builds up then how is it possible to make the wholesale assertion, almost dogmatic in tone, that “In all these mechanisms of isolation (timidity, frigidity, anxiety, etc.) we find an undercurrent of ambition and vanity. These people attempt to raise themselves above others by accentuating their differences from society”? (P. 234.) Without dissecting the postulates that are implied in such statements, even a super