Turn of the century Vienna was fertile ground for the birth
of psychoanalysis. The city was home to some of the most influential intellectual
minds of history. It was there that Sigmund Freud established his practice of
neurology and became infatuated with the theories of a discipline he eventually
christened psychoanalysis. In 1900, when Freud published his first full book,
The Interpretation of Dreams, he was widely regarded as a crackpot expounding
ridiculous theories. There were, however, some men in the city who felt that
Freud's analysis of the unconscious and its effects on conscious behavior were
not only not ridiculous, but sheer genius. One of these men, Alfred Adler, would
become Freud's strongest supporter - and eventually, the father of his own school
of psychoanalysis.
A Meeting of Minds About Minds
On Wednesday evenings, a group of Vienna's brightest minds gathered at Freud's
home for conversation and debate. It was there that many of them began to hammer
out their own theories of the mind and its development. For eleven years, Adler
was part of Freud's inner circle, a distinction he shared with another well-known
name in the history of psychoanalysis - Carl Jung. Freud, Adler and Jung are
unequivocally the most influential figures in modern psychology. And while Adler
and Jung each put forth deeply differing views of psychological development,
it was Freud's theories of the id, the ego and the superego that underlay them
all.
A Schism of Betrayal and Trust
Eventually, the differences in philosophy between them and Freud's inflexibility
in accepting the ideas of his students drove a wedge between the men. Freud's
insistence that sexuality lay at the root of nearly all behavior and psychological
organization became a bone of contention with both Adler and Jung. Adler left
Freud's Academy of Psychoanalysis in 1911 to establish his own psychological
society with its own journal. Jung's disagreements with Freud began earlier,
but it was not until several years late, in 1914, that Jung too dissociated
himself from his teacher and established his own theories and beliefs. Jung,
Adler and a number of psychologists who came after them are collectively known
as the Neo-Freudians.
