Alfred Adler, Social Interest, and Our Current Political Landscape

      I've always been disinclined to express in the public domain my political leanings.  Partly, I imagine it is because, as a therapist, we're trained to be neutral in our interactions with our patients.  More, as a financial planner working with some rather wealthy individuals, I've entertained the fantasy that many of them are Republican and might take umbrage at anything that would suggest that I had liberal, Democratic loyalties.  But I've recently been reading a great deal of the work of Alfred Adler.  As some of you may know, Adler was right there with Sigmund Freud in the development of psychoanalysis.  Classical Freudians have historically spoken of Adler, being one of Freud's disciples.  But even a superficial reading of Adler will inform you that not only did he not think of himself in this manner, but biographers who have looked into the matter, have also agreed.  From early on in his career and his association with Freud, he brought his own unique way of seeing the world psychologically.  When they broke from each other, in 1911, the issue that constituted the unbridgeable gulf between them pertained, specifically, to Adler's commitment to the future as the primary motivating force in the development of each individual's psychology.  In fact, so important was this notion, that Adler called his school, or perhaps better said, his system of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, Individual Psychology.
     In his last major and definitive statement of his position on mental health and mental healing--a book titled Social Interest--Adler asserts that the measure of the person sanity can be measured in their capacity for social interest.  This notion of social interest was developed while still a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst operating in Vienna prior to World War II.  Phyllis Bottome, one of his earliest biographers and very likely the biographer closest to Adler, takes pains in her biography to explain that social interest, as a concept, really might be spoken about as community feeling.  The essential quality of this notion is that the individual through an adequate training (first with mother) and development  comes to deeply appreciate that she or he is fundamentally dependent upon his or her community for her or his survival.  For Adler, this is no simple theoretical matter.  In The Problem Child, Adler says
   
     "What conception of the world are we going to adopt to replace the one that seems false?  In the chorus of voices you will hear advocates of conceptions of the world which are national, religious, European, or Asiatic.  We are not prejudiced against any of these.  What we demand is that you take a form leading to a conception which include social feeling; this is the philosophical conception of Individual Psychology."

What Adler is here asserting is the belief that the measure of a person's mental health is to be found in his or her capacity to operate cooperatively and collaboratively with all the humans.  The problems that children have, as detailed in his little book on problem kids, all point to some disturbance in the child's capacity to take another person's point of view into consideration.  Certainly one can see that, taken to an extreme, Adler is talking about individuals who developed narcissistic personality disorders.  But he also includes individuals who have a variety of organic disorders that might color how they see the world as oppressive, and thus, take a stand against a world filled with oppressors.  And then obviously, Adler includes children who are hated or, who discover themselves as ugly or deformed.  For these children, Adler held that in discovering that the world rejected them – – that is, had no social interest in them – – they in turn, would stand in opposition to that world.

     Adler, while always pointing to the developmental history of children as the base from which he made most of his assertions about human psychology, saw himself as a person who had to live out his theory and not to just talk about these ideas.  Today, we take public health, mental health and child guidance clinics as simple matters of fact.  Few know how central Adler's work in Europe was in starting this movement and fostering its evolution.  From early on, even while sitting at Freud's table, Adler was a social democrat.  For Adler, being a social democrat meant carrying one's beliefs about the community feeling into action.  And he was forever preaching the gospel of individuals' actions over individuals' words.  With this as our preface, let us turn now to our current political landscape.

     In many ways, the contrast between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama is simple and clear.  Romney sees himself, philosophically, as a capitalist.  Obama, though there are 50 shades of gray here, operates as a community organizer.  This is not to say that Romney doesn't have an altruistic bone in his body.  Some of the stories that came out during the Republican convention about his work with individuals certainly suggests the quality of social interest we have been speaking about here.  But the point I might suggest is that we are looking at individual acts of charity directed largely to individuals and families belonging to his Mormon church.  On the other hand, Obama's life work suggests that his fundamental orientation is about building communities that work.  When some analysts has looked at the contrast between Obama and Romney on international matters, they will characterize Obama as wanting to develop stronger ties with the various European counties.  Clearly we see that this was his preferred strategy in responding to the spring uprisings.
     And in a more recent episode, where Romney was secretly taped speaking of Obama loyalists as being individuals looking for a handout rather than a hand up, we again see the stark contrast between the capitalist and the 19th century notion that we pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.  And in many ways, 20th century America was largely built, ideologically, by the advertising industry, which very much wanted to foster the notions of individual satisfaction, even at the expense of ignoring the social consequence of discarding a community orientation.  Adler points to a way of being that provides a natural bridge between the capitalist worldview and the community organizer.
     On every page of Adler's writings, we discover that the base of all of his thinking is this clear recognition that human beings, tooth for tooth and claw for claw, are the weakest creatures in nature.  Our everyday language, which owes its origin to Adler's thinking, speaks of how human beings must, in the face of nature, assess ourselves as among the weakest creatures on the planet. Human beings, to survive, developed a high-capacity for creativity, language and community feeling.  Adler  sees this human capacity for creativity as the arena in which we might give full expression to our competitive nature to strive for the ideal form, be it a tool, a quality of life, a sports team or company.  He then goes on to say that the litmus test of this ideal form must always turn back and look at the community.  Will what I am doing or creating contribute to social interest or a community feeling?  Competition, split asunder from social interest, is fundamentally narcissistic.  Social interest, divorced from competition is fundamentally socialism or the emergence of the welfare state.

     While the Democrats assail Romney for his lack of connection with the poor and middle class, the Republicans assail Obama for turning his back on competition.  What neither seemed to see is capitalism is not the problem here; only the bastardized form of narcissistic greed and avarice are.  The integration of competitive capitalism directed to the creation of and support of strong community, which ultimately must also extend to include the world community is the best path forward both for each individual, for our country and for our world. It's what the artist, John Lennon had in mind when we wrote, "imagine there's no countries.  It isn't hard to do.  Nothing to kill or die for . . . Imagine all the people, living life in peace." That's what Adler had in mind when he spoke of community feeling.