Part II    Psychodynamic Theories74
Biography of Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler was born on February 7, 1870, in Rudolfsheim, Austria, a village near 
Vienna. His mother, Pauline, was a hard-working homemaker who kept busy with her 
seven children. His father, Leopold, was a middle-class Jewish grain merchant from 
 Hungary. As a young boy, Adler was weak and sickly, and at age 5, he nearly died of 
pneumonia. He had gone ice-skating with an older boy who abandoned young Alfred. 
Cold and shivering, Adler managed to find his way home where he immediately fell 
asleep on the living room couch. As Adler gradually gained consciousness, he heard a 
doctor say to his parents, “Give yourself no more trouble. The boy is lost” (Hoffman, 
1994, p. 8). This experience, along with the death of a younger brother, motivated 
Adler to become a physician.
Adler’s poor health was in sharp contrast to the health of his older brother 
Sigmund. Several of Adler’s earliest memories were concerned with the unhappy 
competition between his brother’s good health and his own illness. Sigmund Adler, 
the childhood rival whom Adler attempted to surpass, remained a worthy opponent, 
and in later years he became very successful in business and even helped Alfred 
financially. By almost any standard, however, Alfred Adler was much more famous 
than Sigmund Adler. Like many secondborn children, however, Alfred continued the 
rivalry with his older brother into middle age. He once told one of his biographers, 
Phyllis Bottome (1939, p. 18), “My eldest brother is a good industrious fellow—he 
was always ahead of me . . . and he is still ahead of me!”
The lives of Freud and Adler have several interesting parallels. Although both 
men came from middle- or lower-middle-class Viennese Jewish parents, neither was 
devoutly religious. However, Freud was much more conscious of his Jewishness than 
was Adler and often believed himself to be persecuted because of his Jewish back -
ground. On the other hand, Adler never claimed to have been mistreated, and in 
1904, while still a member of Freud’s inner circle, he converted to Protestantism. 
Despite this conversion, he held no deep religious convictions, and in fact, one of his 
biographers (Rattner, 1983) regarded him as an agnostic.
As mentioned in the chapter opening and like Freud, Adler had a younger 
brother who died in infancy. This early experience profoundly affected both men but 
in vastly different ways. Freud, by his own account, had wished unconsciously for the 
death of his rival and when the infant Julius did in fact die, Freud was filled with guilt 
and self-reproach, conditions that continued into his adulthood.
In contrast, Adler would seem to have had a more powerful reason to be trau -
matized by the death of his younger brother Rudolf. At age 4, Adler awoke one morn -
ing to find Rudolf dead in the bed next to his. Rather than being terrified or feeling 
guilty, Adler saw this experience, along with his own near death from pneumonia, as 
a challenge to overcome death. Thus, at age 5, he decided that his goal in life would 
be to conquer death. Because medicine offered some chance to forestall death, Adler 
decided at that early age to become a physician (Adler, 1947; Hoffman, 1994).
Although Freud was surrounded by a large family, including seven younger 
brothers and sisters, two grown half-brothers, and a nephew and a niece about his 
age, he felt more emotionally attached to his parents, especially his mother, than to 
these other family members. In contrast, Adler was more interested in social relation -
ships, and his siblings and peers played a pivotal role in his childhood development. 
fei75766_ch03_072-106.indd 74  02/06/20  11:03 AMFinal PDF to printer