Alfred Adler

Born February 7, 1870, Alfred Adler was known as a medical doctor, psychotherapist and founded the school of individual psychology. He defined the inferiority complex and his psychology was titled Individual Psychology. He emphasize the importance of environment in the adjustment processes of an individual.
Adler worked with Sigmund Freud to fund the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He believed everyone is an indivisible whole as well as connected to the world around them. Freud and Adler parted ways, but Adler still holds enormous influence on the disciples of counseling and psychotherapy.
Adler gained a medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1985 and married Raissa Timofeyewna Epstine in 1987. They had four children including writing Alexandra Adler, psychiatrist Kurt Adler and writer Valentine Adler plus Cornelia Adler.
Adler lectured on his unique personality theory of psychotherapy for over 25 years. He build a movement that rivaled Freud's theories. He served as a doctor in the Austrian Army during WWI and after the war he developed child guidance clinics and clinical treatment methods for adults that are designed to uncover the hidden purpose of symptoms. He discarded the popular analytic methods of having patients lie on a couch and used two chairs plus face to face interviewing.
Adler's The Neurotic Character defines his key ideas in psychology. Human personality can be explained teleologically or parts of the unconscious work to convert feelings of inferiority to superiority. He used humor, paradoxical injunction and historical instances as therapeutic tools.
His later works, Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind (1938) uses metaphysics with evolutionary holism to define societies. Adler published over 300 books and articles in his lifetime. He passed away at the age of 67 in Aberdeen, Scotland May 28, 1937.