Alfred Adler

((1870 - 1937), Adler was the father of what is known as Individual Psychology which focuses on the entire person as opposed to just one single part of their personality.  Adler's principles of individual psychology were adopted and then furthered by one of his most loyal students Rudolf Dreikurs.

Adler was born in Vienna and educated at Vienna University.  He studied for a short time with Sigmund Freud but left because he disagreed with Freud's belief that human behavior was driven primarily by sexuality.

In Adler's investigation of individual development, he emphasized the feeling of inferiority, rather than sexual drives, as the motivating force in human life.  According to Adler, conscious or subconscious feelings of inferiority (to which he gave the name inferiority complex), combined with defense mechanisms, are the basic causes of psychopathological behavior.  The function of the psychoanalyst is to discover and rationalize those feelings and break down the will for power that they produce in the patient.