Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler was born February 7, 1870, in Austria and trained as a medical doctor before turning to psychotherapy. He founded the school of individual psychology, breaking from Freud and their shared circle by centering feelings of belonging, family relationships, and birth order as the engines of personality. He coined "inferiority complex" to describe the isolating weight he believed shaped development, and argued that contributing to others—what he called social interest, or Gemeinschaftsgefühl—was how a person feels worth and place in society. Adler treated the human being as an individua…