(1870-1937) Austrian psychologist who saw the “will to power” as more influential in accounting for human behavior than the sexual drive. A dispute over this theory led to the dissolution of his ten-year collaboration with psychiatry’s founder Sigmund Freud. The concepts of inferiority complex and overcompensation originated with Adler.
Born and trained in Vienna, Adler was a general practitioner and nerve specialist there 1897–1927. By 1902 he had made contact with Freud. He played a major part in the development of the psychoanalytical movement, and was president of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society. But by 1907 he had shifted his theory away from Freud's emphasis on infantile sexuality toward power as the origin of neuroses; in 1911 Adler, and a number of others, left the Freudian circle and founded the Individual Psychology Movement. He moved to the US 1935.
Adler held that much neurotic behavior is a result of feelings of inadequacy or inferiority caused by, for instance, being the youngest in a family or being a child who is trying to compete in an adult world. In an attempt to overcome these feelings the patient overcompensates, often at the expense of normal social behavior or, as Adler put it, “social interest”. Adler’s belief led on to his idea that a person can realize this ambition alone, which affects the way in which a psychiatrist helps a patient. Although his psychology made good sense, it lacked adequate definition and rigor of method.
Adler’s works include Organic Inferiority and Psychic Compensation 1907, Understanding Human Nature 1927, and Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology 1927.

Of, relating to, or being a theory and technique of psychotherapy emphasizing the importance of feelings of inferiority, a will to power, and overcompensation in neurotic processes.