Joining us today I have the honor and privilege of speaking with Dr. Eric Monsager.
Eric obtained his bachelor's degree in humanities from St. Thomas Theological Seminary in Denver
and his master's degree in counseling from the University of Arizona.
He completed his doctorate in depth psychology specializing in the psychology of religion
at the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium.
Dr. Monsager completed the America's Institute of Adlerian Studies program for professionals
and is a certified classical Adlerian depth psychotherapist from the Adlerian Institute
of Northwestern Washington.
Eric is also certified as a training analyst for the classical Adlerian depth psychotherapist
institute.
Eric presents at national and international venues.
He is a past president of the North American Society of Adlerian Psychology and he is in
a diplomat of Adlerian psychology.
His numerous publications include journal articles, books and book chapters, training
manuals and monographs.
He has been the guest editor of the Journal of Individual Psychology for four special
issues including spirituality, LGBT affirmation, social justice and the classical Adlerian
depth psychotherapy institute and has written extensively on their critical collaboration
between psychology and spirituality.
I have asked Dr. Eric Monsager here today to talk with us about Adlerian theory, about
Adler and about himself.
So Eric thank you for joining us today.
A pleasure Daniel.
I've been looking forward to it.
I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
I discussed a little bit with you earlier but I recently discovered Adler and I've
read a couple of his works and I want to know more and I kind of want to introduce him to
the audience.
But before we get into that can you kind of give us your background and tell us a little
bit about who you are?
Sure.
Good job.
You did a good job on the overview.
I guess I still have interest to me is my spirituality focus on things.
I studied to be a Catholic priest as you noted and it was there that I ran into Adler for
the first time.
I was doing an internship during the summer in Wyoming, in Torrington Wyoming in a little
orphanage that had just taken on the name of Children's Home actually, St. Joseph's
Children's Home.
It was being run by Mickey Gamble, a really creative man who had himself been introduced
to Adler through the book Children the Challenge, which is still a classic and has been kind
of the core of a whole lot of parenting programs, positive discipline, active discipline as
a video based program.
There's a lot of programs that are spun off of this book and its theory.
It was written by Dreikers, whom I'll talk about a little bit later, but being there
at the internship and learning this idea of helping the kids by cooperation and encouragement
was really a thrill for me.
So much so that, I guess I shouldn't blame the book, but that was my senior year at college
and I decided to run for my wife, if you don't mind me being a little personal there.
I thought I heard a voice that said, at any rate, I left the studies and went to the University
of Arizona where I had the pleasure of meeting Oscar Christiansen, who was the man who had
taught Mickey Gamble in a summer program about Adler and about Children's Challenge.
So I felt I'd come like full circle and did my master's there under Chris and his colleague
Betty Newland and was introduced to Robert Powers and Jane Griffith, who ran the America's
Institute for Individual Psychology.
I just couldn't get enough of Adler at that time.
I was so touched that there was a way, I hadn't abandoned altogether the idea of ministry
and this idea of interacting with people on a socially focused basis.
As I'll say later, one of the principles Adler helped us understand was the idea of
Gemeinschafts, community, gefühl, a feeling, a feeling of being in community with people
as kind of the measure of mental health.
I thought that had been altogether missing in my studies.
Maybe I overlooked it, I don't know, but I was thrilled to do my master's and go to work
in child protection and a small private practice and the like.
And then I got a hankering to complete my studies with a doctorate and already at the
seminary I'd been introduced to the theology of a Catholic theologian from Switzerland,
here where I live, now recently deceased just half a year ago or so, Hans Kung was his name.
He was an expert in humanistic and ecumenical theologies.
And when I started reading him already in the seminary, it didn't quite make sense to
me then until I got out and studied Adler and then it was like, oh, I get it, I get
what he's talking about now, cooperating and also encouraging people and helping them understand
a larger world and how we all interact and the more we cooperatively interact, everybody
benefits from it.
So I wanted then to do a dissertation, something, a deep dive into what I considered Adler and
Kung's parallels, well, it grew and it ended up being a general psychological critique
of Kung's theology where I found roots of Freud and Jung and Adler there, all three
of which I believe as much as I've seen in other theologians, he grasped the core of
each of them and dealt with them respectfully.
And so that was my time in Belgium.
My first wife, who has since passed away, and I were in Europe with her two young kids
at the time.
And so I was able to study in Louvre.
But I also was doing work with the American military at the time, drugs and alcohol.
So from child protection to drugs and alcohol and adolescent work and family work, I just
kind of grew in this interest always with Adler and at my elbow, so to speak, trying
to figure out how to work with people and I'm thrilled whenever I have a chance to talk
about it.
Do you have a question, a specific question, or shall I roll on a little bit?
Yeah, just kind of a side question.
What is it that, so you went to training to become a Catholic priest, and then that's
where you kind of found Adler and you got your interest switched and you ran for your
wife, right?
What was your interest in becoming a priest?
What was your drive for that?
Yeah.
Well, my mom was Irish Catholic and my dad a convert because he'd fallen in love with
his Irish Catholic from mainline Lutheran, which was very strict in their beliefs.
So I think just between the two of them, the idea of a pretty rigid religious framework
came to make sense to me.
And I'll talk a little bit about lifestyle, is Adler's term for the personality.
It's a euphemism because we style our own life, is Adler's point, and it's not imposed
on us by nature or nurture.
It is something we creatively grow in by means of our nature and our nurture.
So my mom and dad gave a pretty solid framework for us.
I'm one of six kids, as my testimony is from a Catholic family.
I'm the fifth of six, actually, and my older brother was the first one to attempt the seminary.
He said, that would have left the dentist or the doctor to me.
I don't know.
But anyway, he didn't go on with his studies either.
And at the time, so there was kind of a gap that I thought, well, I can do that thing.
And I mean, in my young life, I had been involved in the Catholic youth groups and the like.
So the idea of ministry or being with young people and talking about values and care for
one another, I think that was a basis.
And then when you learn about Adler, I mean, many people are religious and love Adler,
and many people are a-religious and love Adler because he has a value structure that is not
hidden nor is it declared as the correct values.
It's just that it's concerned for humanity.
And so that internship that I talked about at St. Joseph's was really a point of change
for me because I saw I could minister in a sense.
I could be caring and give to people without the strictures of the church, which also included
celibacy, which was an issue.
But until I met Kuhn, kind of a restrictive theology for me, no objection.
That's yeah, I'm not criticizing.
I'm just saying for me, the transition over to Adler made all the sense in the world.
I wasn't quite sure how I was going to do it.
My master's thesis, in fact, was an original study about Catholic priests and their self-actualization
by Schostrom's personal orientation inventory.
Because I thought I could find the lifestyle, the personality type that could make a good,
happy priest.
That's what I was after.
And I failed at that, but I found out a lot of other information.
And that is that at least in this rather large population that I was allowed to draw from,
from the local bishops I was involved with, said that all the priests, whether actualized
or not actualized, fell in a broadband of what Adlerians would call the need to be right,
broadband category, the need to be superior or the need to be good.
And there are others, there's rebels and other things like that.
And the priests distribute all the way across it, but they're clustered in this area.
That was pretty interesting to me.
I've learned much more about that and how I would work with it now.
I have worked in fact with priests and nuns, but that's not my specialty any longer.
It's really family therapy and adolescents were struggling to become adults, which is
tough for a lot of kids.
Yeah.
I think probably especially today.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yes.
Please continue.
So what came after that?
I think, I mean, my first wife and I, we lived in Arizona, we'd both grown up in Arizona.
We moved to Germany, as I said, I went to school in Belgium.
We came back to America and she became ill.
She passed away actually after the plans were made to move over here.
The kids were out of the house.
So I came over here and began work with my wife who had started just, she became my wife.
She started a family counseling services.
And then I was picked up by Webster University to teach with them because in the past I had
been at North Dakota universities.
That's a little complicated affair.
North Dakota University and St. John's Seminary.
So I had actually got to teach.
I was a professor or instructor and the head of their psychological services at St. John's
and Camarillo, California.
Anyway, so we got all over here.
We got to open up finally and do the work with depth psychotherapy.
So I had finished my master's and that allowed me to do psychotherapy counseling.
And I'd done in the institutes, the Edelman Institute, the American Institute.
So I had kind of my credentials, if you'll sit that way.
And then I was introduced to classical Edelman in depth psychotherapy, which had become my
love.
And what I wanted to talk about and I think you first ran across my name.
Because it seems to me a completion and a deepening of Adler.
Because it really goes after Adler and what he was trying to do with his understanding
of bettering our world.
So when we came over here, we opened up our little family counseling and right away an
institute beside it to do the training to help Henry Stein, who is the founder of CADP,
to help continue the distance training.
My wife and I, Jane now, my second wife, and I both trained with Henry for a number of
years and got our certificates.
And then I went on to get my training analyst piece.
So now I help train people who are interested, that is, counselors who are already involved
in the field who want to add an Adlerian specialty to their, and a depth version of it, a psychodynamic
version of, into their practice.
Okay.
That's really neat.
You mentioned how Adler and the depth psychology training gets at the heart of what he was
trying to do, which is to help the human family.
And one of the books that I read in preparation for this was What Life Should Mean to You.
And the dedication in that book is, he says, this book is dedicated to the human family
in the hope that its members may learn from these pages to understand themselves better.
And I just thought that was, that's just beautiful and succinct.
So maybe can you kind of talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, yeah, I'd love to do that.
I'll first give what, if anybody knows Adler at all, and few of those probably do, but
that's okay, I'm over here.
But they will have heard this first series of things I'm going to share with you.
And then I'd like to contrast it with the psychodynamic approach of the classical Adlerians,
okay, and explain that a little bit.
Because like other dynamic schools, especially Freud's and psychoanalysis, there are several
schools within it.
We also have that phenomenon.
But what probably characterizes Adler's approach most popularly is birth order, that he had
an early understanding of how a family constellates as if it were, could be seen into a certain
picture or something like that, the way that they interact with one another as the stars
in the sky would be.
That first born children who are followed quickly by a second born tend to have certain
characteristics, and then the second born follower has certain characteristics.
I think it's less important, although I'll be happy to share those kind of details.
He had described quite accurately what typically happens to a first born, second born, third
and fourth.
That would be first, second, with, pardon me, a third, which makes the second a middle
child, the pressures of a cute little baby and a competent big sibling.
Also though the only child, that he was concerned about because they didn't have peers readily
available as other sibling group would.
So he learned to see a typical pattern in these people.
Never have we been taught to impose this on ones, but it gives us a first ballpark if
we find problems going on to see, do they fit the mold, so to speak, or have they rejected
the mold?
Either of those are quite legitimate, and it serves as a beginning point to say Adler's
individual psychology was always looking for the individuality in the person, not the way
they conformed to a type, as a matter of fact.
So there's birth order and consolation is part of it.
Lifestyle I have already mentioned, because Adler saw us as both the artist and the artwork
of our personalities.
And a lot follows from that, that our problems in life are, of course there are exogenous
outside factors such as trauma, which I'll talk a bit about, that form certain, or at
least influence certain ways we look at the world.
But Adler would say in the end they're influences, they're not determinations.
So this idea of a lifestyle, which is impacted by the birth order I just mentioned, it's
impacted by our physical nature, it's impacted by the environment of our family, a famous
saying we use, a familiar saying to us is every child alters the family by entering
it.
So no child has the same family constellation, everyone is, you know, looking around something.
It's very interesting to see that and can account well for why you have such disparate
personalities in a family raised by the same parents.
And then early recollections is a technique that is very commonly attached to Alfred Adler.
And yeah.
Yeah, I was reading, I don't know if you've heard of Dr. Nancy McWilliams, but I was reading
one of her books.
And she said in there, we can often tell, I'm paraphrasing here of course, but like
we can often tell a lot by simply asking for first memories.
And she kind of just lifted at that.
And I always thought it was interesting.
And then I found out it came from Adler.
So yeah, I would like to hear some about that too.
That would be another great interview.
Very sharp in the psychodynamic and very humanistic in her approach to things.
But the idea of the early recollection is that thousands of things happen to us, you
know, in a lifetime.
And even in our childhood, you could probably count them in the hundreds or tens of hundreds,
if not thousands of incidents that take place.
But we tend to hold on to only a couple hands full of them, maybe a dozen early recollections
before the age of five.
Some people can't remember anything before the age of five that has its own implications.
But generally we look for around the age of five because Adler believed that once the
implicit stage of our childhood was over, around two and a half or three, and the brain
ripened so to speak and the amygdala already online starts cooperating.
Pardon me, the emotional center starts with the hippocampus.
The hippocampus helps us make thoughts and memories and direct these kind of things.
Once it crystallizes, we have the job in front of us as little humans to figure out how does
life work?
Big question mark.
And somewhere in the ensuing years, between three to five years old, we figure out, ah,
this is how life works.
And we're not scientific at the time.
We don't stop to compare it or anything like that.
We see it in front of us and our siblings and our parents and the like.
And we just determine that this is how I fit into it.
Adler called it like coming into a play in a third act and trying to figure out the ending
before you get there.
How we often feel about it.
So anyway, this idea in childhood is that we organize our lives in a way to make ourselves
fit in and to compensate for what we feel are a negative standing in the world or a
feeling of inferiority, he called it, or a feeling of insecurity, we generally call it
today.
Or apropos in the literature is the idea of vulnerability, perfectly right term for the
inferiority feelings that Alfred Adler talked about.
So the idea here is that, I'm trying to pull together some of these concepts of Adler,
that the inferior feeling spawns from it very naturally a compensatory movement to overcome
that feeling.
So Adler was always very clear that inferiority feelings is a blessing of some sort.
He would say it was a God given blessing, it's a blessing for humanity because we're
always trying to overcome that and out of that has come the wheel and society and family
structures and all sorts of things like that that do that.
And I wonder, that might be enough of those things.
The early recollection was the idea that this is how I put my life together early on and
then once I figured out, Daniel, we have a sense that we promptly forget it or consign
it to what we would call the unconscious.
Some Adlerians don't adhere to that, certainly in the Freudian sense, but the idea that it
becomes kind of automatic rather than consciously graspable or even retainable, we just operate
automatically on these kind of things.
That is roughly with ideas of how the brain develops neural nets and the like.
I don't want to go too much into parallels that way.
And the style of life, so talking about early recollections, perhaps their first memories
around four or five, didn't he also talk about the style of life is usually kind of set around
four or five years old?
He called that the prototype.
That's what I'm saying about a young child figuring it out in a sense.
Perhaps an aha moment in their little lives that they just feel more confident they're
going to school now, they know who their friends are, etc.
But it doesn't get reviewed again.
And so with all the little conclusions they have made, I'm a big brother or a little one,
I'm smart or I'm not, I get praised for this and I get slapped for that or scolded, etc.
All of that becomes the little rules of my life that just become repetitious.
And they are expressed in these early memories, we would say.
The early memory that we think back on is not so much actually about our childhood but
about our current situation as we have seen it for the last number of years since we were
four or five years old and not reviewed it.
And these are the things, these patterned consistencies of trying to overcome our inferiorities
that subject us to praise and glory but also all the deepest pains in our lives.
And so from that point it becomes the depth work that I'm so interested in because from
what I've just described you can do a lot of family work and help people understand
how they fit together and you can teach them democratic tools of cooperation and respect
and the like and get very well functioning families out of which come pretty healthy
kids into young adults.
But none of us get through unscathed and we all have made in our childhood some mistakes
about the way the world works.
There are often, Adler pointed out, three primary deficits very common in life that
twist a normal lifestyle into a compensatory one that you will recognize.
One is from physical disability of sorts, different abling and how that burdens a child
more heavily than the normal child, pardon me, the non-compromised little bodies that
come in here.
And they have to somehow learn whatever the impairment is to walk or to talk or to see
or to hear better.
They have to put a lot of effort in that which skews understandably the balance of the other
skills that are developing.
So what he called organ inferiorities is one.
But then being neglected and or abused and that kind of spectrum is one that really creates
a deficit in children so that I not only feel less than in my abilities but I don't feel
quite so loved.
So there is that feeling and now I have got to compensate for that in some way or another.
The third one and it is most rampant today and I think it was most prescient of Adler
is the pampered child where things are done for the child that the child can do for the
child's self on a regular basis.
It's all right to help the kid now and then and always good to teach them and train them
to do for themselves.
But the unfortunate sense of worth that a parent gets by doing for their child nowadays
leaves the children feeling less confident in themselves and the parents more nervous
about showing a good child to the world.
And so those are the common mistakes that happen in our lives.
And when those are grown up from four years old to 40 without having been reviewed you
might see a disaster of a marriage, you know, divorce or several of them or broken relationships
or inability to maintain a job or criminal activity, you know, all these things.
Adler helped us understand is from the lifestyle that says I have to overcome my inferiorities
in this direction because that's the way the world has put it to me.
And so understanding those mistaken beliefs and trying to repair them and straighten them
out and put them in the direction of the common good is the stuff of most Adlerian counseling.
And that's the stuff of most like Adlerian depth psychology?
Depth goes a little bit more on that.
I would say if you're ready for that, I'll jump.
Well, first I wanted to I forget which book it was, but I believe that Adler said that
he's kind of the first one to talk about the Oregon inferiority and to like name that because
of this, their direction in life is going to need to have some adjustments made.
Was he also did he also is he the first one that really kind of talked about whether like
neglect or being pampered, how to play in all of this too?
I think he certainly contributed early on.
But I mean, there's a lot of good work done in the areas of even foundling homes, as they
called him and the like, you know, and the churches themselves were doing the best they
could with that.
The history of psychopathology finds Adler about midway through it, I think a couple
of years or a couple of about 100 years before him.
And we're about 100 years after him right now.
So, OK, OK, we're ready.
Yeah.
So the mainstream, I'll call it the mainstream Adlerian approach today is psychoeducational
and and directly counseling.
So by psychoeducation, we mean give people what is missing educationally in regard to
family structures or parenting issues and the like.
And they can do for themselves, just gear them up and the goodwill person will go in
the right direction.
Counseling takes another step and says the given situation, there's something out of
kilter.
This is not an Adlerian would look at it.
So let's fix a given situation, retool them a bit and let them go and they will they will
do fine until there's another issue and they can come back and get a little bit more.
But it's not it's not an ongoing therapeutic endeavor.
And the common mainstream Adlerian is very much along the lines of CBT.
We like to remind people that Aaron Beck, he didn't study direct with Adler, but he
he knew of Adler.
He may have met Adler and the cognitive behavioral thing kind of sprung, we believe, with the
help of the outlooks of Adler.
Albert Ellis and REBT was very clear about that.
He used to tussle with Aaron Beck now and again to say who is the one who brought it
forward.
Okay, good.
I read so in CBT, those of you who know there's there's the whole like your core belief, whatever
your core belief is, and then you know, the incoming information if it aligns with your
core belief, you accept it.
If it doesn't align with your core belief, you're likely to dismiss it.
There's like a whole model in CBT on that.
But Adler talked about it in one of his books.
I think it's on what life should mean to you in like the on crime and its solution
chapter.
He talks about core beliefs basically, and it was very interesting to see that.
The core belief or beliefs have themselves, they spring from an organizing principle of
life.
And this is where the the.
Tricursions or after Rudolph Tricourus, who was Adler's main American, he was Viennese,
but in America, he was a primary disciple who brought forward our national schools and
like journals and all that.
But he was the one that drove it in the cognitive areas.
There's a whole nother group.
He was in Chicago, a group in New York and some out in California who were more of the
psychoanalytic or psychodynamic at least bent.
And while they also followed Adler's educational psychoeducational movements and counseling,
they didn't want to let go of the depth part because they were dealing with people who
just suffered the horrors of World War Two and Holocaust and the like.
And they knew there was deep work to do.
And they came to the United States and they saw a lot of work to be done in that area.
So our that group includes a European cohort that was Sophie De Vries, who was a Netherlands
lady, a zisher who was Adler's right hand person in Vienna.
She ended up in California, Heinz Hansbacher from Germany, Kurt Adler, Adler's son, Alexander
Mueller, who was the first international Adlerian society president.
They all ended up in the States.
And frankly, they had some differences with Dreichers.
That's a whole nother discussion.
They kept kind of to themselves in a way, but they were they were dealing with individual
and family work, but they weren't doing the psychoeducation and the like.
Now, here's the difference, I'll say in a couple of strokes, is that they held on to
the concept of the fictional final goal, which is that organizing principle, the thought
that this single movement in my life will bring about a feeling of such success or accomplishment
whenever I do that, whenever I get there or close to that, that it will abolish my inferior
feelings.
It's kind of a hope and a plan that this is the way we go, says a little four or five
year old.
This is, you know, I've got to beat up my little brother.
I've always got to stand tall, or I've got to let my sister do this to me, or I must
always do that to her.
Or I'm making it simplistic now, but all a very unique way of looking at it.
And the core beliefs emanate from that.
That's what I wanted to say.
The core beliefs emanate from that.
And when Adler talked to the populace, he talked about core beliefs.
When he spoke to therapists and like, he talked about the fictional final goal.
We've got to get to that to understand where these beliefs are emanating from.
If we can, Stein would say, if we can dissolve that fictional goal that is overly compensatory,
we'll have an opportunity to let this person be free of that and redirect his or her life,
redirect their life as they would like it to be.
Yeah.
Can I ask perhaps a complicated question?
Yeah, sure, sure.
The fictional final goal.
Let's say someone's, in my mind, the core belief, let's say, is like, I'm worthless.
And from what I'm understanding that you're saying is like, that's their core belief.
And somewhere in that understanding of I'm worthless, there's a goal that they're, a
fictional final goal that they are playing out.
And if you can figure out that goal and how it's perhaps amiss, then the core belief can
shift or something.
Is that wrong or is that?
Exactly right.
That's right.
Except I would just say the core belief is not I am worthless, because that is the inferiority
feeling I would say, if you just put it out there.
The schema we use is we try to identify the core inferior feeling, could be the core belief,
and then the belief of how I get out of that.
That's my compensatory goal.
And now I hope I probably confused a little bit, but the core belief or the basic beliefs
is the Drikursians call them, is a little cluster of four or five beliefs that say,
here's how I do it when I'm with perhaps women, here's how I do it when I'm at the job, here's
how I do it when I'm on the play yard, it's like, or what I can eat.
There's a lot of unique little things that become rigid in a person's life, and they're
going after those all the time, unproductively typically, or at the expense of somebody typically,
because they're getting over it.
It's not a cooperative movement.
This is the concern in working with people that the fictional final goal itself is very
self-serving, and understandably so.
It's not a critique when I say that as much as it is, I mean, at 40 years old, if you're
still out for yourself, some would say more power to you.
We would just say, yeah, but there's probably more power if you shared it around the table,
if power is important to you in that regard.
But we believe that doing the effort, the weeks and sometimes months of work to understand
that dynamic of minus to plus, from inferior to compensatory goal, is the core vibrating
principle in these people's lives, in our lives.
And if we can help them dissolve that and not feel any longer, it feels like a driving,
but let me introduce the idea of teleology.
It's a striving, actually.
It's a picture they have or feeling sense of something in their future that they'll
know when they get there.
So they're striving for that.
And if we can undo that, then they're free not to go that rigid direction, knocking people
out of the way or walking over them or, ironically and paradoxically, belittling themselves so
somebody else will lift them up.
All these kind of dynamics can be explained or understood in this wonderful scheme that
Adler has developed.
Simple but powerful, I would say.
Do you know offhand of, you mentioned like Alfred has some collected works.
Do you know offhand of where that might be best explained?
In the collected works?
Or anywhere?
Yes.
In the first volume of the collected works, I was going to do a show and tell at some
point here.
The first volume is Adler's kind of lead book.
It's called The Neurotic Character.
He wrote it in 1912.
It was updated every year for probably 10 years beyond that.
It became the core of the understanding of Adler's theory.
I say heavy duty read, but it's lovely in what it expresses to you.
It's also in social interest.
Let me just name these four books.
You mentioned What Life Should Mean to You.
I want to mention four of them because they were all compilations of his public lectures.
They're very accessible and still good.
They vary a little bit, but all contain kind of the whole theory.
My oldest to youngest, the oldest being Understanding Human Nature.
I want to say the German title of that was Menschenkenntnis, human understanding.
The whole theme is Adler's individual psychology is trying to understand how human beings generally
move.
We consider that Adler's contribution.
He saw if Freud thought psychosexually and Jung psychospiritually might be too narrow
for Jung, but esoterically, Adler was psychosocial.
It was like society and the people and the community and how do we work.
So there's Understanding Human Nature, then there's Science of Living.
It goes by different titles.
You've seen this one before.
Then there's What Life Should Mean to You and finally Social Interest.
They're all slim volumes.
People are looking for them.
You can get e-versions of them from Able Books and stuff like that or Google Books.
They're really worth tying down.
That Social Interest, that last one does mention the fictional final goal a little bit.
In as much as he wasn't talking to therapists, you don't get the full therapeutic thrust
that we try to put out in the 12 volumes and in our institutes.
Let me say one more thing theoretically, if I may.
I've been talking about specifics of Adler configurations.
What Adler, I think, contributed to the whole line of psychopathology today, which then
was responded to by psychotherapy, are these four components, teleology, phenomenology,
holism and social interest or social focus or social justice, whatever you want to call
that.
You'll find those four components, I feel confident, in every therapy and every conception
of pathology today.
He was Adler.
He was the first to bring them together.
He wasn't the first to invent them.
That's not the point, the deep, long-lasting philosophical components, but he was the first
to find them interwoven and coordinated.
I would say we could probably draw a matrix of how the different technique therapies fall
today by adjusting those four components.
I would argue that Adler has the most balanced, so you don't just emphasize where they're
going or that it's all connected, holism, or that we must be just in our, but he sees
it all fits together, they support and help one another, which itself is a holistic concept.
Adler was thrilled when he discovered that from Jan Smuts, who has a mixed reputation.
Yeah, we got, so, trying to remember where we got off track, but...
Well that was from the Drikurajan model to our psychodynamic model.
What we do is we look for that core, but we don't do a cognitive thing with that.
We don't explain that to people.
We actually help them experience it.
This is where we feel such kindred fellows with emotion-focused and body therapies and
the like at the classical end of the Adlerian spectrum, because it's through Socratic questioning
and interacting empathetically and encouragingly with people that we can help them face their
misunderstanding of the world, not by correcting it, but by us thinking together and saying,
does it really work that well for you?
If you did it this way, have you ever tried that and do you think that might work?
Or gosh, you just told me about this instance that really worked well.
What do you think is going on there that, you know?
We also do a lot of identity imagery.
We do amounts of body work and eidetic, really focused, kind of reimagining things.
But we're not so...
I don't mean to emphasize our techniques.
It's mainly a relationship that helps people explore themselves and understand how they're
causing a lot of pain in their lives, either by running and dodging other pains, but in
the end feeling unsuited or ready for some of the daily interactions that they have to
face.
That's very interesting.
I want to...
I would like to...
From here, can we kind of take it and discuss?
So I know that there are...we've discussed some of the basic principles.
I'm also thinking of how Adler talked about the three problems of life are social, occupational,
and love and marriage.
Those questions are asked of everyone.
Your style of life is how you answer those questions.
And tie that into...
Okay.
So that, along with...you talked about the experiential part.
Is this working for you, avoiding pain, or are you causing more pain?
The problems of life resulting in...if someone is unable to answer that, maybe symptoms arise
and then an attitude might be formed, and then how you work yourself out of that attitude
and get back on the side of life.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
You want me to say how that might work?
Yep.
Oh, wow.
You did it very well.
So try to put some...So life comes at us, we believe, in these three big chunks, as you
just mentioned, that I have to do something about...because I am in association.
I'm born in association with my mother.
I'm raised in association with a biological family or an extended family of sorts.
Okay?
It's all about association.
And at a certain point, I learn that I can contribute to that.
Why would that come to me?
I can tell you a little bit of a sequence, and I'll try not to lose track of where we're
going here.
But one of Adler's contemporaries suggested this.
His name was Wexford, that first a child mimics, and one might say it's instinctual.
That's an argument that is still happening today, but a child can mimic a person.
And later on, they will actually, rather than mimic a smile and the like, they will participate
in and try to grow, respond to a smile.
When they finally can respond, they will do other things, like imitate.
Okay?
Now, it's a conscious activity of imitating.
And at a certain body strength and agility, they will unwittingly contribute.
They'll do what other people are doing.
Besides imitating, they're actually doing it, and they practice, and then they get skillful
at it.
So it's a natural sequence that can easily be interrupted by a lot of unfortunate things,
but it's kind of built into the human system.
So it's that movement that allows us to say, at a certain point, I will do my fair share.
I will choose an occupation among my fellows and do what I can give to them as I am receiving
from them as well.
And at some point, some people, not all, believe they want to partner.
The biological issue of partnering is to continue the species.
But we know that there's lots of different ways to do that, from in vitro to natural
childbirth and like, but it's no longer, as Adler once believed to be an issue between
a man and a woman, although that still is the biological source, of course, of our children.
But the raising of the child into a contributing person is no longer a man-woman thing solely.
It's also well done there.
So I just try to weave in this idea of I'm associated, I work to give back, and I have
some stance toward continuing the species.
And my lifestyle, as you noted, is my patterned way of responding to the world set what Adler
calls softly determined because of the way we were raised, not that we're locked into
it, but we've decided this is the way it works, and we're going to hold on to that.
So now, as an adult, if I have been pampered, I look for other people to do my work for
me because I feel somewhat entitled.
It came to me easier when I was a child.
Why doesn't it come easy to me now?
If I was neglected very often, I had to take it when I was little, and I guess I have to
take it now.
Or a neglected, abused child can also have a sense that I've had enough of that bad
stuff, I want you to serve me now.
And there are a good number of all these people who would say, never mind that stuff, I just
need to get about life and contribute myself, of course.
We would say that is a function of a mitigation against those negative things in their life
by someone who loved them and showed them how to love, showed them the power of love.
And that's the source of the Gamainshasker field, the sense of I belong here, and I want
to do my part.
So you had mentioned how you then do the...
So then out of that, then you develop symptoms, and then let's say the person has symptoms,
they go to a therapist, and then how do you get them back on track?
Yeah.
I could take a symptom path maybe and share it with you.
I see it most often in couples, it's most dramatic there because the symptom list coordinates
itself between the two, so that the symptoms kind of play off of one another.
And might have, I think, psychologically to do with why we're attracted to people, quite
frankly, because they look like a type that will continue the way I have been having to
interact with the world by looking like it or seeming like a sibling or a parent or something
like that.
But a symptom, a person might come in chronically unable to hold a job.
And when you look into it, it's because we'll say they're generally nervous, and when they're
asked questions about why they did a job a certain way, they become agitated and they
start, you know, they kind of lose it and they get themselves fired because they're
too crude or too mean.
What might you call that?
Diagnosing is another thing that we're taught that we try not to do generally.
Now, a person like that could understandably find solace in a partner who, ironically,
was not altogether accepting, but could talk to them in a way that says, well, if you just
did it this way, maybe it wouldn't be so bad.
They like that because it's not a critical approach.
And so they might then up the ante in their symptom cluster because they want a reaction
from their partner that will keep them bonded.
Now in a number of ways of doing this, this means one person, the agitation would crank
up after a while to see how much my partner could take, and eventually my partner can't
take it anymore and it ends up doing just like other people do and breaking away or
saying I can't put up with this anymore.
So instead of losing the job, they lose the partnership.
Okay.
Now, what about us working with the symptoms in that regard?
If one was just to give anger management to this person, show them how to control it,
that would not, we would say, meet the longing of this person to feel that they have a good
relationship with this person tested by a certain level of feedback.
And we would say if they learned to control their anger in one way so they weren't hitting
anymore, they could still jack it up in an argumentative way perhaps.
Or they could even do it in a passive way where they're not cooperating at all and
it still brings out an aggravation or a critique in the partner.
So in that sense, that symptom is locked into another symptomology list of the partner and
it doesn't go away until we resolve how come they're doing the, you know, which would have
to do with their sense of inferiority and how they're compensating for it.
And one could say, I'm sorry.
Okay, thanks.
I was going to paint it out probably too simplistically, but a person who is agitated easily may well
have found when they were a child, if they got aggravated, mom would say, stop that,
get out of here.
And they got out of the job that was supposed to have been done there and it's left to other
people to do it, who then become the siblings, the critic of this person.
So they become very familiar with this kind of dynamic, you know.
And this might be why they're attracted to, you know, a partner.
And in this case, it's not that they want to get out of the relationship.
It's just that that's how they relate in conflict.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
We go into it thinking, finally I can have a good relationship.
Because all that other stuff is in the back of their operating system.
And so how would you approach that, especially you mentioned earlier about experientially?
I think I tend to think insight, like if they found out, oh, this is why you're doing this,
and it might lead to this, and that's not what you're looking for.
But how would you approach that?
We certainly don't have anything against insight.
But we believe the deeper insight comes from not telling, but asking.
And let the person engage in that and come up with their own answers and their own words
to a schema we might have in mind.
But in the dialogue, it actually straightens itself out in a very lovely way that allows
the client to understand themselves and us thereby to understand the client better.
So we work on that stuff together.
I'll give an example, just try to stay with the same case.
That now, I'll start back a little bit.
The person who has gotten out of jobs by becoming a cranky kid has grown into an adult who never
felt they had to finish anything.
They would get either thrown out or pout themselves out and somebody else would finish the job
for them.
Not without some critique, but that was the price they'd pay for getting out of that thing.
We would suggest, and I think this is Freud's term for it actually in the psychodynamic
arena, there is a compulsion to repeat this behavior until it works for them.
A repetition compulsion.
And we recognize that as trying to get the fictional final goal met.
Once and for all, I'm doing this thing.
It's not a conscious activity, but if we were to design for this agitated person what his
inferior feeling is, it might be, I can't do it unless somebody does it for me and they
won't do it for me until I get angry about it.
So I am bound to always be ready with the anger to get people to do things for me.
And as long as they do that, everything is going to be just fine.
Now, that's put in words.
That's nothing that they're carrying in their head and they're not consciously responsible
for it.
And the others say they're not responsible at all for it until it becomes conscious.
And so bringing it to consciousness with a sense that I can do something about it is
part of the art of therapy.
Not to bring it out and throw it on their lap and say, look at you, what are you going
to do?
What can you do without the proper cushioning for it?
Okay, so this person wants to get something out of this.
And our idea would be, I'll go with the eidetic image, if this person came from a family,
he's the only boy and he's got an older sister and a younger sister.
In such a case, we would do an age regression, perhaps, and have him remember the three siblings
when at the youngest age at which he could walk and be mortar involved with them.
And maybe that means his little sister is just in a crib, but the older sister showing
her competency in every way.
And we would take perhaps an early recollection he shared with us.
And eyes closed, breathing successfully calmed, and imagining this, that the early recollection
where they got into a fight and the sister took over and he went away crying but happy
that somebody did it for him.
We reframe that and see very clearly as he's looking in his sister's eyes, I don't have
to do it this way.
I can do it another way.
Maybe this idea comes, or maybe it comes as a feeling.
No, I want to take that back from her and complete it myself.
And we guide him through where the sister feels the tug, perhaps, of him trying to take
it back and says to him, which she has never heard in his life, oh my gosh, would you like
to do this yourself?
Here, let me put it over to you.
How does that feel?
And the idea is to make it so crystal clear to him that he can feel the tug, he can feel
the texture of whatever he's tugging on.
He can hear her voice resonate in his ears.
It feels good.
We have redone it enough times so it feels soothing to him.
And even encouraging in that regard because now he's got the thing and he doesn't know
what the heck to do with it, but it's all right.
Big sister's going to show him how.
Try it yourself.
No, you can do it.
And after, I mean, it could be a half hour, 45 minute exercise in which he has had a first
experience of success in doing something differently in this regard.
That if we've targeted it right and the like, it's not going to undo everything, but he's
going to put it in his knapsack, I guess, of new understandings of the world that he
no longer has to get himself cranked up and angry, he can actually find out a little earlier,
maybe I should try that thing I did in the imagery and just see what happens.
We try to weave that into their daily life, you know, and that might be a way forward.
Yeah, that's really neat.
And if we're working with couples, Daniel, we would be doing that each way for several
months, usually two to three months, we'd work with the couples individually and then
we bring them back together with the skill base starting so they can help encourage one
another in interacting differently.
I really, I really appreciate how you said help encourage one another.
And I hadn't really thought about that word, encourage much until reading Adler and he
talks a lot about either people lacking in courage or trying to give them courage.
And I think like as in courage literally means to like, give someone courage.
And I really like that.
I had a friend that I told about Adler and he's been reading him as well lately.
And he sent me a quote about and he said, I would love if each of my clients walked
away having more courage than when they came in to see me.
And I think that that's a really neat idea.
I wanted to ask, oh, go ahead.
Sorry.
I was just saying encouragement can be a word and encouraging work.
We believe it must always be candid and kind.
So you can't say, boy, you did a good job.
You got to point out to them what was good about that job or what you enjoyed about that
or how they're feeling different about something.
So they really have something to hold on to.
You can't be as clients.
Some of them want it.
You still can't get them to others are suspicious of it.
Therefore you mustn't give it to them.
And if they're skeptical of you, you say, why don't you believe me?
I've got warrant.
I showed you this.
I saw you do it differently, et cetera.
And you build from the inside that way that they can do things and they can feel good
about those things.
Yeah, that I don't believe it's from Dr. Nancy McWilliams, but she talked about she
talks about realistic and reliable self-esteem.
And it's different than just trying to build self-esteem through like inflation.
Yeah.
And real downfall.
Since the 90s, they say I think they trace it back where everybody gets an award and
everybody gets this and that.
Oh, yeah.
It's a real unfortunate thing because people just expect now.
It's a little bit like a pampering instead of showing the effort that not the one them
a prize, by the way, but the effort that felt so good even before they got the prize.
The problem with behavior mod, we believe, is it interferes with the internal reward system
that is built into us and growing.
And it's hard to re-institute it once it's been sacked by M&Ms and stickers and things
like that.
That makes a lot of sense.
We are just a class that we're having right now.
It was talking about how internal or inherent motivation is more like more robust than an
external source of motivation.
And if you are inherently inclined to do something, but then you're rewarded for it, then you
lose some of the inherent inclination and you can prove it every day with kids in schools
who are being rewarded for being quiet or holding their hands in their lap.
And they go like, where is the M&M?
Where is the M&M?
And then they put the sticker.
Anyway.
So, was Adler, so Adler was more social oriented, was he also more, like not, he wasn't a child
psychologist, I don't think that you would say, but was he, or a lot of Adlerians also
very interested in the education system and child psychology and that.
Yeah.
That's a big thing in the mainstream of Adlerian psychology, which we're very proud of there.
Even over here, I'm thrilled about, there's a positive discipline group that goes in and
trains in the schools, so it shows teachers how to interact with kids in this internal
reward system rather than the external one.
So it's really lovely.
But that's very popular because it went with kind of the coaching areas and helping parents
just straighten out a few of their misunderstandings.
I'd say along the way we also found that it doesn't always work and that's where the counseling
would have to be coming to adjust an outlook of a parent.
And in rare instances, but unfortunately brutal ones, therapy is needed to undo the knots
from traumatic childhoods of their own.
Yeah, but Adler was what I guess he'd qualify as a child psychologist.
There's still some longstanding statistics about the Vienna school systems that existed
before the rise of national socialism.
During national socialism, what was going on in school systems and the long years after
that.
And one of the statistics that they had tracked in this regard was the lack of violent acts
in the school systems around Vienna.
And they have never been as low as they were during something like 1927 to 1935 period
when Adler's 32 child guidance centers were running all around Vienna school.
Very interesting.
Unfortunately speaking, you know, for the population.
He and his followers would have open forums once a week where the teachers and the psychologists
of the school would bring cases forward to him.
He would consult with them.
Then they'd bring the child in.
Adler would speak with the child and the teacher and then they would go away with a plan.
It was a lovely kind of model that the Adlerians in the states have utilized.
We're trying to get it started here.
We call it open forum counseling where parents come and talk generally about an issue they're
having with their kids and we invite a dozen more families with similar kids to watch in
and see what's going on.
Everybody can learn on the days and we help them out that way.
Has it really caught one?
Not over here.
Not yet.
It reminds me of, I forget where I read this.
I forget which European Scandinavian country maybe.
I think it was a Scandinavian country.
They do where they started, especially if it's a first time mother, they send nurses
and people to the home.
They do home visits for a certain period of time after the birth and make sure that the
mom's okay with postpartum depression and all that kind of stuff.
Since they started doing that, it's more about basically if we can help families now when
the child is first born and help them now, then there's going to be less long standing
problems.
There will be less crime.
I forget what it was.
No, that's lovely, Daniel.
That is one of the things that Adler was admiring about and probably one of the first people
forward to say prevention is the way.
He always had a prevention as a component of his stuff and none of the others were looking
at that.
They picked it up afterwards, both in Freud and the others.
Yeah, he was always working in the school systems.
I think because historically he was kind of locked out of the Freud ascended.
No question about that.
History is replete with the slights and the like that happened to Adler and how when Dreykos
went to America, he was kept out of the psychoanalytic therapeutic circle himself.
Really?
Yeah, I don't think it's that tough anymore because they pretty much quashed.
Nobody knows Adler, so it's not an issue very much anymore.
But Adler's issue of trying to get in since he couldn't and his people couldn't work
in the larger clinics, they went to the school clinics and established themselves there.
And when they got to America, they really infiltrated the school systems and some church
organizations as well that were educationally oriented.
That's I think how we got on the psychoeducational track as Adlerians in the United States.
You know, some of us are trying to just broaden the base and show that there's still a lot
left in Adler to apply on the depth side.
Yeah, yeah.
Two trains of thought there.
One.
What was that quote by, I think it's Ellen Berger about?
Down page 645, it would not be easy to find another author from which so much has been
borrowed from all sides without acknowledgement than Alfred Adler.
Ellen Berger, he's a, yeah.
And why do you think that is?
Why?
You know, that's a conundrum in many ways.
Hoffman, who wrote Adler's most recent biography, takes a stab at it and he saw it as a little
bit of the personality styles that came up in America that were, Dreikers included, that
were promoting something that just wasn't appreciated by the professionals.
Ellen Berger himself doesn't really answer the question.
I guess we've all puzzled with it, but let me just say my end summary on this issue,
that I mean, looking anywhere, we could point out where the Adlerian influence is, whether
it is Adler himself or the same thought process.
It comes down to this.
Don't make us a fad.
It's okay.
We don't want to be a flash in the pan.
We've been around for a hundred years.
We're going to be around, I hope, for a hundred more from beneath effervescing and in this
way that I talked about the teleology, phenomenology, holism and social interest.
Those are the kind of things that if you want to see how they really work, you'll get back
to Adler.
But you don't have to go back to Adler.
You can make them work on your own, you know, and many people are, from family constellation
systems that they have to any number of other technique-focused psychotherapies.
But they're based on this holistic understanding of our systemic intertwining.
We all do it very individually, that there is no going backwards.
We're all falling into the future.
And if we don't do it together, we ain't going to last long.
You know, it's just life.
The other train was, so you mentioned again, depth psychology.
And when I think depth psychology and when it comes to like, you know, the Trinity, Freud,
Jung and Adler, Freud and Jung, they both talked about dreams and it being like the
primary road to the unconscious and that there's a lot you can learn from dreams.
What was Adler's view on dreams?
Yeah, Adler was a great appreciator of Freud's dream theory.
It's probably how they, how he became familiar with it.
Freud wrote that in 1900.
Adler and Freud came together with two other men in 1902.
So it wasn't very, you know, it was a very short period.
And even after Adler split from Freud, he said, this was a real gift, that Freud looked
at manifest and latent content.
Manifest being what I remember, what was happening.
I went to the store and did this.
And the manifest, what's the store mean to me?
And what kind of emotion does it bring out?
Adler says, you can't beat that.
That's what dreams are about.
But he said they weren't, now Adler changes.
Okay.
Adler says it wasn't about fulfilling a psychosexual desire or need or dealing with a complex and
all the different other ways that Freud appreciated dreams and tried to understand them.
He said, dreams are a part of our conscious thinking and doing this because we can remember
them after a fashion.
And they're perfectly consistent with that lifestyle that we have formed.
And the dream says, I cannot afford to not be working out the problems of life, which
we remember are associations and occupation and intimate relations.
I can't afford to not do that for eight hours at night.
I've got to keep always working on it.
And so our dreams are about dealing with the problems that we're having in waking life
in our sleep.
And that's a pretty strong theory that is also supported today in many quarters.
It's a problem solving technique.
And this idea that Freud said, it's the man, pardon me, the latent, see, Adler also agrees
with, he says, it doesn't matter if we remember our dream or not.
What we need to cue on is the mood that we awaken in.
Because that mood is setting us forward into the day under a certain cloud or bright sunshine
or whatever that says, this is how I will accomplish that task.
It could be very specific, exams or going to work or finding a new job or another date
or paying bills, whatever it is.
But to wake in, for example, with a thunder cloud over your head or whatever one says,
it just puts you in, everybody knows to step away from you until you get done with your
task or whatever.
I don't know.
This is how I see it.
To kind of move into our closing, our outro, I guess, can you talk about what it was like
going through the Adlerian Institute?
And then I would like to have you do the show and tell.
That's such a lovely question because it's like, how would I act it out for you?
Before I became aware of Adler, I would characterize myself this way.
Not quite paranoid, but a little nervous, quite a bit nervous.
And then when I learned Adler, it was like, holy cow, you mean I can really, that's really
neat.
And then I got practiced in that and all of a sudden there was the depth approach that
I had known about for a while, but Henry Stein finally convinced me to take a deep dive into
one of the courses.
And it was like, holy cow, that was the feeling I had.
Because I loved Adler and I loved doing therapy.
And then it was like, it was just a brand new, that doesn't do it.
Because it wasn't brand new, but it was so full and rich.
And that was the sense I got.
And as people know who go through the institutes of different sorts, you're kind of picked
up and carried through while you're working on stuff.
And if you're a therapist already, you get to work on your therapy with some of the,
I consider the best supervision around.
And really, so you're helping your clients.
I was always thrilled.
It took me five years to get through, but it's a three year program.
To be able to help the clients and to see by trusting my supervisor and my analysts,
it was a delightful thing to see how people responded to what I now kind of know how to
do.
But to see that Adler's whole system held together well and was really about my feeling
better along with other people's growth and development.
Not anything else.
Was you seeing your own analysts required by the institute?
Yeah.
I had to do it for one year and it recommended two years.
And we've got three or four analysts.
We're a small institute.
We usually, there's about 50 of us worldwide and we have at any given time, three or four
students.
We have three of them now.
You know, it's a distance training program.
So Henry is retiring now.
He's reached the ripe age of 90.
And his colleague, Diane Pienkowski is taking over in the United States and I'll be taking
over here because we started our little institute.
We have summer trainings that will take place here next year and they alternate back and
forth with America and the like in the States.
Excuse me.
So yeah.
Yeah.
This is kind of a side.
I just kind of, Henry Stein, did he do some editing for like books?
Yeah, yeah.
He did the 12 volumes.
Let me do that little show and tell.
So I've got Freud and Jung's collected works behind me here, both ranging to 20 books or
so.
Henry put together the, he got a German, excellent German translator, but he just did the clinical
works.
Okay.
So the works of Freud and Jung are pretty much comprehensive.
Not totally, but pretty much.
But these are just the clinical works.
So he started with the neurotic characters, I told you, and 12 volumes later he had found
this unwritten manuscript or unfinished manuscript on the general system.
So Adler's system grew as the years and this is a lovely volume 12.
And we have much like Jung and Freud do, there's a clinicians guide, so the abstracts of all
the articles of the whole thing.
This is kind of a, I mean, it's a great book in itself because it shows you the movement
of Adler's theory.
Because there's extended, not extended, but they're deep abstracts, you know, they're
page long abstracts on all the articles.
And then, I mean, Henry did the Red Book series and these are his, you know, 40, 50 years
of 30 years sitting beside Sophie de Vries.
And then, you know, he did a five volume series of CADP, which includes theory and practice
and then case analysis, case demonstrations, child and family.
And he's just finishing now one on couples work.
So those are all available.
It's a funny thing because our institute is built on the idea of mentorship.
Sophie de Vries took Henry under her wing and they just worked and he did kind of a
field theory approach to it.
I'm the lucky recipient of his copious notes on how he was doing this.
He brings it back to Sophia and she says, no, what are you talking about?
It's more like, so he'd go back and figure it out.
But they got it all worked out, you know.
And so we do that as well.
We train one on one with our people.
The analyst does the work with the student.
That's really neat.
That's neat.
And most so going through an institute would, it includes getting your own analysis.
I would imagine reading through a certain amount of maybe the clinical work.
And then getting supervision hours.
That's kind of.
I'll say to you real quickly, there's a three tier level of theory development beginning
intermediate and advanced.
Many people start at intermediate if they have learned about Adler before.
And then there is a discussion about the modalities of treatment and what the student is interested
in.
And then after that first year, they begin their analysis.
And then as they come through, they're working on their own cases.
Pardon me, that's not true.
They're working on established cases where they learn how to apply this now, those modalities
to actual cases.
Then in the third year, they pick up the collected works and they're going deeper and deeper
and deeper on their own and applying to their own work.
That's roughly how it works.
That sounds neat.
That sounds fun.
Yeah.
And never fun.
So for example, I'm going to be in the fall of this year starting kind of seeing couples
and families, which I haven't really done a whole lot of.
Would someone like me who hasn't, you know, who's only read like two of those books, two
of his lecture series books, if I were to pick up, let's say like Henry Stein finishes
the one on couples and I was to pick that up and read it, would I be able to get much
from that or do I need a whole lot more background in all of the rest of it?
Well, what do you think?
That's a great question.
It's a fair question.
And yes, you could.
You could get a lot out of it.
I have to admit that.
But it wouldn't be what I hope I've expressed as the depth of the stuff and the whole understanding
of how this works, you know.
But Henry is an excellent writer.
He really runs away from the academic way of writing.
And I just fell in love with this idea.
That makes me happy.
He's taken to a therapist, you know, and they're really eminently applicable.
But we would never say that by even reading his five volumes, you're now a classical adlerian.
You know, that has to do with the mentor stuff because you can't get it out of a book.
You get it out of a person.
And it's to us all the time.
Heart to heart, not page to page.
With you, where is your, are you still interested in the integration kind of of spirituality
and maybe adlerian depth psychology?
And where are you with that?
And what are you kind of working on?
Well, Daniel, that's an astute question because the issue of integration is really an issue.
And we just said through ACA, I got into a dialogue with some of the people who are doing
integration work about psychology and spirituality.
And I deeply appreciate what they're doing and how they're calling it.
It's my feeling and in the direction I've been writing is that the two fields, spirituality
and psychology, should collaborate critically.
They should not integrate.
I don't think integrate is the right word.
Now I know that my colleagues have really restricted the word integration and I appreciate
that.
But I think it's a misunderstanding that spirituality is psychology and psychology can be spiritual.
And I don't, I just don't subscribe to that.
I think psychology has its limits and has to acknowledge its limits.
It can't make a pronouncement about spirituality, good, bad, otherwise.
It can and ought to when spirituality or religion starts doing mind bending stuff that isn't
healthy for people and putting rules on them or saying you owe me these things.
I think psychology has to call that out, charlatanism like it would anything else.
But it doesn't say anything about the core principles of religion.
And likewise, and this is violated all the time, religions or religionists think they
can do psychology because they read the Bible or the Quran or the Upanishads and this is
how we do it.
It's just a human map.
And I think that's not a respectful interaction.
That's why I think in terms of critical collaboration, you know, that we help each other out and
we work side by side and we figure these things out together.
I think that's a better model personally.
That makes a lot of sense.
Yeah.
I go to a I go to Regent University, which is they do they they look at like religion
in Christianity as kind of like a diversity factor.
And they talk about integrating Christianity with psychology and and vice versa.
But I've never heard about it being talked about as a collaboration versus integration.
Yeah.
So I have to think more about that.
But that makes sense.
I'll talk later.
Is there is there anything kind of closing out that you feel that we've missed or that
you would like to kind of say or.
Nothing jumps out.
I think, you know, I'd like to leave with is this idea that Adler's is a humanistic,
fully integrated, holistically focused place to care for people, to truly care, to care
in the sense that we must keep our eyes out for or heart out for.
That is beautiful saying to feel for me to see with the eyes of another, to hear with
the ears of another and to feel with the heart of another.
That is the empathy that we need in doing our our our craft.
And I think he he was sufficiently present and contemporaneous to get that across in
kind of a timeless way.
Not that everything he said was right and written on tablets, not at all, but he understood
human nature in a way that we still do well to think about and try to incorporate so that
we can be more effective with our clients.
That's what I hope for.
Well, you know, you talked a little bit about your your transformation through the Institute
and learning about Adler, and I don't I don't know you personally from before then.
But if if the way that you come across is any indication of of internalizing at theory
and thought, I'd say it's a it's a great school of thought and that I think that you
it's always a pleasure to see people like you.
I feel like you're in the exact place that you're that you need to be like you love what
you do and you have a passion for it.
And I you get a lot of meaning from it.
I can tell.
And I think that that's just it's always wonderful meeting someone who's like exactly where they
should be, you know.
Thanks.
Henry Stein used to say that you can't start studying Adler without it touching your life.
And I would say, amen to that.
Yeah.
Well, I hope I thank you again for coming on.
I hope that this is I feel like we've done a pretty good job.
And I hope that people listening, they really resonate with a lot of this stuff.
And it sparks an interest.
And but I also hope it doesn't become a fad.
Yeah.
Thank you so much for just reaching out.