Alfred Adler and Sigmund Freud

Alfred Adler and Sigmund Freud are two great figures in psychology that have left a profound impression on theorists today. Both of them are from Austria and lived through the same time period, Adler was born in 1870 and died in 1937, and Freud was born in 1856, died in 1939. Each one has researched and developed their own concepts on mental behavior, and both have achieved great recognition from this. Adler and Freud are two psychologists that share the passion of the mental well being, but they have quite different theories that make their stand significantly stronger than one another: they each had their views on the development of personality, the level of emphasis on human sexuality, the motivation factor between past experiences and future expectations, and the overall basis of mental development.
Adler’s chief concept was the creative self. He said heredity and environment furnished the building material of personality, but each of us is our own architect, freely deciding how we wish to use the building materials. “The creative self gives the qualities of unity, consistency, and individuality to the personality� (Nordby/Hall 8). He saw this as the active principle of human lif

Since both Adler and Freud disagreed on whether personality came from nature or nurture, meaning the genes we were given or the environment we grew up in, the overall basis on mental development was expressed quite different between the two of them. Freud created five psychosexual stages, developed three systems of personality, identified and made key assumptions about defense mechanisms, and viewed consciousness as having three levels. All of them were his basis on mental life and how it came together. His concepts were very in-depth, making a complicated outlook on the human mind. However, Adler’s point of view on things were very simple. There were no psychosexual stages or systems of personality, but there was creative power, style of life, and unity of personality. He brought all of the simple elements of feelings together and analyzed them simply, without extra confusion. His primary hold on life was viewed more social than sexual. These psychologists are different for the concepts they have,

even though they both studied close together in most of their work at the beginning of their research.

act, with sexual and aggressive desires weighed against the demands of society, and the person attempting to satisfy both” (Lefton/Brannon 410). By way of contrast, Adler saw sex as an attempt to obtain power over another person and felt people are motivated or energized by natural feelings of inferiority , which leads them to strive for success. Feelings of inferiority come from a sense of incompletion or imp