Understanding Human Nature
Adlerian Psychology & Goals
In Understanding Human Nature, Alfred Adler points to our goals as the primary drivers of human behavior. Everyone has a goal from which most of our actions flow โ this is what determines a person's psychic life according to the legendary psychotherapist.
We can't think, will, or dream without these activities being determined and directed towards an objective. We might be more or less conscious of what this objective is, but it's more common that we actually don't know what our goal is. Therefore it's sometimes easier to figure out an individual's objective by looking at the results of their present actions.
Life Tasks
Healthy goals allow us to perform our Life Tasks of work, relationships, and community โ but many individuals develop warped goals as they lack the courage or psychic development to carry them out. This often stems from a feeling of inferiority and results in one of the most popular tricks of the human soul:
Clinging to excuses and alibis for not doing what life demands of us.
โญ Takeaways
- Adler was a contemporary of Freud and Jung, but is definitely lesser known. Yet his style of psychology is far more practical than his peers'.
- The many possible interpretations of experience lend themselves well to rationalization. We can bend almost any experience to fit our goals, turning it into reasons why we can't fulfill the tasks of life.
- "It's well known that those who don't trust themselves never trust others."
- If you want to understand what a person wants, observe what they do and where it takes them, rather than what they say.
Video Review
โ๏ธ Verdict
I first heard Adler's name in The Denial of Death; I got a taste of his ideas in The Courage to Be Disliked; and with this book I got a more in-depth look into his own writing. It started out slow, but it caught on, and a few chapters into it I didn't want it to end.
My favorite part was the chapters on common personality traits of impoverished psychic development โ traits like vanity, envy, and jealousy.
If you liked The Laws of Human Nature and want more โ then this is it!