Alfred Adler Bio

Alfred Adler
Adler was born in Vienna in 1879, the second of seven children. After a severe
bout of pneumonia at the age of 5 and the death of a younger brother, he
committed himself to becoming a doctor.
He studied medicine at the University of Vienna and qualified in 1895.
In 1898 he wrote a medical monograph on the health and working conditions
experienced by tailors, and the following year met Sigmund Freud. Adler
remained involved with the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society until 1911, but in
1912 broke away with eight others to form the Society of Individual
Psychology. At this time he also published his influential The Neurotic
Constitution. Adler’s career was put on hold during the First World War, when
he worked in military hospital service, an experience that confirmed his antiwar
stance.
After the war, he opened the first of 22 pioneering clinics around
Vienna for children’s mental health. When the authorities closed the clinics in
1932 (because Adler was a Jew), he emigrated to the United States, taking up a
professorship at the Long Island College of Medicine. He had been a visiting
professor at Columbia University since 1927, and his public lectures in Europe
and the US had made him well known.
Adler died in 1937, suddenly of a heart attack. He was in Aberdeen,
Scotland, as part of a European lecture tour. He was survived by his wife
Raissa, whom he had married in 1897. They had four children.
Other books include The Science of Living, The Practice and Theory
of Individual Psychology, and the popular What Life Could Mean to You.