アドレリアン第 15 巻第１号（通巻第 35 号）

2001 年７月

講演記録

Fundamentals of Adlerian Psychology
A Presentation by Dr. Bernard H. Shulman
to the 17th Annual Conferenceof the Japanese Society of Adlerian Psychology,
Tokyo, October 200
Transcription by

Ichiro Kishimi, Diane Rimmer,
Tomoko Sakai, Miyoko Yamauchi

要旨
キーワード：

I think it’s time for me to speak. I’m at a disadvantage because I don’t know what has been
said up until now. However, I want to tell you I am happy to be here, I am honored to be here,
I am so pleased to be here and to see all of you here. Your country is delightful. Your city is
awe-inspiring. Your city is so complicated that only the most intelligent can survive in it. All of
the people are so courteous that I think that they have all studied with Dr. Noda.
Dr. Noda has asked me to talk about Individual Psychology. I asked him at what level should
I talk, who will be in the audience. And he told me that you were all very sophisticated and that
I should talk at a high level, leaving time for questions. I will talk to you about Individual Psychology in a general way because it is a large subject and such a large subject would take days
and days to cover completely.
Individual Psychology is almost one hundred years old. Any theory that could last for one hundred years must have been something good to begin with. There have been changes in the theory,
which are actually developments in the theory. For example, if we were to start developing thetheory today, we would not use the same language. The name Individual Psychology is a very
bad name for this psychology. This is a psychology for the human individual in human society,and this psychology says that you cannot separate the individual and the individual’s behavior
from its social setting. Therefore, in some sense, it is a social psychology. The individual is seen
as being a member of a group.
Individual Psychology is largely a psychology of normal people. Psychopathology is seen as a
mistake. Let me make it clear, I am not talking about all forms of mental illness, because someforms of mental illness are caused by disturbances within the body. I’m talking about disturbancesof the "psyche."

The word "psyche" in Greek originally meant soul. I do not know if there is aconcept for soul in the Japanese language. In America, where religion is not what it used to be,
the word soul is used mainly in a religious sense, not in a psychological sense. So that the word－1－

"psyche" really refers to, or it means, disturbances in the mental functioning －－－ in the functioning of the mind. When I use the term psychopathology, I mean disturbances in the functioning of
the mind that are not caused by recognizable illnesses of the soma or the body.
As the theory has developed there have been arguments about what the fundamental aspects ofthe theory are. Adler began the theory many years ago by talking about "organ inferiority," namely, that if there was a defect in some part of the body, the whole body would try to compensate
for the defect. Later, Adler expanded the idea to the concept that any feeling of inferiority would
set into motion some form of compensation. If we were developing the theory today, I would not
use the term "feeling of inferiority." I would use the concept of a "self." Self is actually a difficult construct to explain, although when I speak about a "self" everyone seems to know what I
mean. Each person is able to experience himself or herself. In English it is very easy for us to
use words like myself, yourself, himself, and what we are doing in using the word that way is
speaking about an "identity." The concept of an identity is a kind of common experience, so that,
nobody has really tried to identify it in a scientific way until recently when trying to study theself or do tests on the self we’ve had to ask ourselves －－－ our selves: What is the self ? What
do we measure when we measure a self ?
I would like to describe how an Adlerian thinks about the self by comparing it to the psychoanalytic point of view. In psychoanalysis, there is a concept called "primary narcissism." Primary narcissism refers to the fact that the newborn infant seeks to satisfy some of its own "needs" or "drives" －－－ I am using the language of psychoanalysis when I speak that way. In psychoanalysis,
the satisfaction of the needs of the infant is often in conflict with the demands of the socialgroup. This lead Freud to develop a theory of repression and lead him to write a book called Civilization and its Discontents. Adlerian theory leads us to a different conclusion. Adler struggled withthis because at that time there was not yet really language available to describe what he was trying to formulate. There is a very important sentence in the book What Life Should Mean to You. It
is the first sentence in chapter six. It says: From the moment of birth the infant is trying to establish a relationship to the mother. In Individual Psychology there is no primary narcissism. The infant is immediately trying to form an attachment.
The human being is a social animal. Human beings live in groups. The infant is unable to carefor itself and requires a long time to develop into an adult. Only insects spend more time in thelarval stages than in the adult stages. In mammals, the time spent being a child is short; the adult’slife is longer. A human being spends 20% to 25% of its life before it becomes an adult. Therefore, the period of rearing the young is the longest among the animals. I think only the elephanttakes as long to come to sexual maturity as does the human. Since the infant needs the parent
for such a long period of time, bonding is necessary for the survival of the species. It is this concept that lies at the basis of the theory of Individual Psychology and it is, of course, why thename Individual Psychology is a mistake.
The human being is basically social, fundamentally cooperative, learns to get along with the parent. The attachment is sought by the infant. Notice the important difference between this principle
and Freud’s "pleasure principle." The human being, of course, is able to experience pleasure andpain, has a built-in program －－－ I find computer language sometimes useful －－－ is hardwired,
has certain instinctual programs which we can observe. The human infant will, of course, try to
avoid noxious or painful situations. But the main thing that the human infant can do is to commu－2－

nicate by crying. There’s an absolute need for the parent. If we think about the survival of thespecies, the human species has been successful in surviving on this planet －－－ so far. Perhaps
we will destroy ourselves, but we have not yet. From the point of view of Individual Psychology,
mental health is the ability to fully participate in the human group. As the infant grows, the mostimportant thing that the parents can do is to nurture the child and prepare the child for adult life.
Because of the human brain and the length of time involved before adult life is reached, learning
becomes very important. This long period of learning also gives us the opportunity to learn thewrong things. Therefore, from the viewpoint of Individual Psychology, parents and teachers havevery important jobs in raising the young, in preserving the species, in preparing the next generation.
Children have the job of preparing themselves. They have to learn. Children learn the best when
they are attracted to the learning. Human beings are attracted by information. The most attractive
information for human beings is information about people. That is why people read gossip columns. That is why we want to know things about people and we talk to each other about people.
People are the most interesting things to us.
I just want to go down a side road for a moment here to talk about motivation, again using
psychoanalysis for a comparison point. Motivation in psychoanalysis comes from the energy in thedrives: the libidinal drives and the aggressive drives. Motivation in Individual Psychology comes
not from a push, but from a pull; it comes from "preferences." If one thinks in terms of preferences, then we can postulate what one pays the most attention to. Those of you that have studied
infant behavior know that the infant will look longer at its mother’s face than at anything else.
Human beings are the only animals that will sit in front of a television set for hours and look at
the faces of other people. Your dog will go elsewhere and your cat will go to sleep. This, I
think, shows the great preference for information that human beings have. All of you sitting inthis room are here because you like information. So that one of the strongest motives forbehavior for Adlerians is the "information gathering" motive; we want to know. Over two
thousand years ago there was a Greek philosopher named Aristotle. One of his books begins withthe sentence, "All men by nature desire to know."
As the child grows, the child meets challenges. The term that Adler used at that time was "tasks." The child has tasks, jobs; the child has to learn to take care of itself. When the child isyoung the parents have to provide the care-taking, the nurturing, and the security, the safety forthe child. But the child has to learn also to take care of itself. The next thing the child has tolearn is how to do things. Infants begin experimenting at an early age. If you have a child thatis a thumb-sucker, you may have noticed that at a very early age the infant struggles to put the
thumb into the mouth and eventually learns to do it. If you watch the infant who begins crawlingand begins walking, you can see that the infant is learning a skill. Learning a skill, learning a
new skill, is something that is very satisfying to human beings.
Adler gave various names to these things. He sometimes spoke about the "striving for superiority." That was a bad word, but he had already used the word inferiority so he used the word superiority －－ it’s in the English translation. The German uses different language. They don’t use
the word inferiority; they use a word which means "being of lesser value." So that not being able to
do something as well as someone else does not result in an inferiority feeling. What results in an
inferiority feeling is the feeling that one is not worth as much as the other person, that one is－3－not equal to the other person. This raises a related issue, which is the issue of －－－ when do
people feel that they are of equal worth ? －－－ which we will come to in a minute, because thisis one of the keys to mental health in Individual Psychology.
What we talked about earlier was that one of the things that the infant starts to do upon birthis to form a bond, to attach. The attachment, first to the mother, can then spread to other people
in the environment as there develops a relationship between the child and other human beings. It
is, for Adlerians, most important for this first bond with the mother to occur. It has to be formed
early because there is a time element in development that is important; certain things must
happen at the right time in development or a development does not take place right.
Those of you who are parents will recognize that there comes a time in the infant’s life when
it is about ten months old, when it begins to show what is called "separation anxiety."The infant
not only prefers the mother’s face, but vigorously resists separation from the mother. At thisstage, the infant is participating more in the human community. It is now making decisions. This
early ability of the human being to make decisions signals the later development of executive capacities. We want our adults to be able to make decisions; we want our children to learn to makethe right decisions. We start worrying when they start to make decisions before they’re really
ready to make them. That’s why adolescence is a more stormy period in our western society thanchildhood is. Because at the time of adolescence a new stage of development has been reachedand the adolescent now has a new task, which is the separation from the parents and the ability
to move into full adult life gradually, we hope －－－ not too impulsively, we hope.
The task that the child is dealing with, at this particular time, has to do with the child’s confidence. The child’s ability to learn to walk, to learn to talk, to learn to handle its own emotional
feelings, to learn how to deal with new situations, to learn how to relate to people, to learn how
to recognize safe situations and unsafe situations －－－ are all part of the preparation for adult life.
This is gradual, more and more as time goes on. It becomes less the job of the parent and moreof the job of the child to take over. So you can see again how information becomes important.
Information, as we usually talk about it today, is something that we get from outside sources.
But the most important information that we get is the information that comes from the connection
between ourselves and outside sources; our own experiences provide important information for us.
Therefore it is important for the child to have a variety of experiences.
From the point of view of Individual Psychology then, the basic motives of human behavior
have to do with the human’s membership in the social group. What moves us most of the time
are the social motives. Our behavior takes place in the social field. Now, what does all this mean?
From the point of view of human psychology, in order to successfully be a mentally healthy human being, a human being must be a participant in human society; do what children do when
they are children, do what adults do when they are adults. One of the ways that individual psychologists have of talking about this －－－ and probably Rudolf Dreikurs was most important inusing this concept －－－ that what gives the human being the feeling of belonging, is the understanding that one is making a contribution. Dreikurs used to say that if you were somebody whoneeds to get, to win, then you must repeat it every day; if you are someone who has made acontribution, it is permanent, you don’t have to do it again, you’ve done it. If you are making acontribution, if you feel and believe that you are making a contribution, it is very difficult to feelthat you are of lesser worth. To use different language, the best compensation for a feeling of in－4－

feriority is to make a contribution.
This brings me to another term in Individual Psychology that is unfortunate. The term in English
is "social interest." Use this as a technical term. It has nothing to do with either "social" or with"interest." The German term is Gemeinschaftsgefuhl which, German being the kind of language it
is, tends to combine several words into one big word. But what Gemeinschaftsgefuhl means is a "sense of being a part of the group," or a better English translation would be a "sense of togetherness." To use the language of metaphors, which of course provides pictures and is usually muchbetter than ordinary words, it is the sense that "we are all in the same boat." There must be a
Japanese equivalent ? The feeling of "we’re all together in the same boat" is a feeling that brings
people together rather than separates them. It permits us to see things through the eyes of the other. It reduces the feeling of strangeness, of alienation. Here, I am using English and I don’tknow what the proper words would be in Japanese. It is a feeling of understanding and of being
understood. And you can see a feeling like that makes it possible for people to cooperate witheach other. It makes it possible for us to think in terms of the welfare of everyone. This is what
is called "social interest."

The very label itself is going to be greatly misunderstood because thelanguage is wrong.
Attempts have been made to measure social interest and there have been disagreements among
the testers as to which tests are valid and which ones are not. One of the tests measured theneed for approval from others. Another test measured the need to please others. Neither test measured social interest specifically, because social interest is the concern with the welfare of others,
not necessarily pleasing others.
Now, as the human being develops, what one can see, examining different people at different
ages, is that social interest develops later than some of the other motives. In Maslow’s study on
basic needs, it isn’t until later on in life that the person’s needs become much more toward integration and the philosophical approach to life. The same is true in Erik Erikson’s discussion of
the stages of development. And in the studies by Piaget on children, a sense of morality really
does not begin to develop until adolescence. So that at different ages, human beings have different "preferences." I prefer the word "preferences" to the word "needs." I can measure a preference bymeasuring how much attention is paid to it.
What I have been doing so far is going step by step, building a theory. I’ve tried to explain
who human beings are and where they’re going. I think this would fit in with what Dr. Noda
calls the non-theistic approach. This is part of the theory. We can speak about the developmental
stages; we can speak about motivation itself. We can speak about specific types of behavior andhow to understand them. We can speak about pathological or aberrant behaviors. We can speak
about methods of intervention to health or to change behaviors. We can speak about individual issues and group issues. We can also speak about other aspects of life that we haven’t covered thistime. We have not talked about sleep, dreams, the emotions themselves, anxiety, or love. We
have not talked about all of the different things that can happen in the relationships between people. As for Adlerian Psychology, people are people, they are not objects －－ unlike object relations theory or Kohut’s self-object.

People are people, never objects.

－5－Question posed to Dr. Bernard H. Shulman－－－What/who are human beings, where did we come from, where are we going－－－ what does this have to do with social interest?
I’d like to think that human beings are a species of animal. I hope I don’t offend anyone bydescribing human beings as a species of animal. In the past I have been criticized for comparing
human beings to animals by people who told me that human beings have souls and animals don’t
have souls. I’m not an expert in that field. If I compare human beings to other species of mammals, I see the human species as one that is motivated as I have described before. We are as loyal to our groups as the gorillas are to their own groups, or as a wolf is to its own pack. We areomnivorous. Therefore, we have a greater range －－－ we can live in more places in the world
than most other animals. We move across the world more easily. We are the most dangerous toother species. We have the most control over the environment. We started out in small groups
and we formed tribes. And in early history, the tribes fought each other. Eventually the tribes
stopped fighting with each other; instead they began to trade with each other and to intermarrywith each other. And eventually they began to learn from each other.
Over the centuries of our existence, we have gradually moved towards something that nowadays
is called "globalization." For people who are not accustomed to this, it is difficult because it
often seems like a threat to the tribe. With the increased ability to move, families have becomeless coherent. People do not stay together as they used to. It is possible that we, as a species,
will not be able to tolerate globalization.
Tests on the cognitive ability of people show that the human brain can only deal with a certain
amount of complexity. The tests however don’t tell the whole story. Ordinarily, if you say tosomeone, "I’m going to name five objects for you and I want you to repeat them," the person
will be able to repeat the five objects. One of the signs that a person is having difficulty withmemory is that the person cannot repeat the five objects. The usual maximum for human beings isseven objects and yet, people can train themselves to remember fifty objects. So that, it is fairly
obvious that most of the time we are not using all of the brainpower that we have, or we havenot learned how to do it yet.
One statement that I made earlier was that children needed to have a variety of experiences.
Children learn best when they are feeling secure and supported. If you tell a child, "Yes, you cando that," the child is more likely to be able to do that. So I suspect that it is possible for humanbeings to deal with globalization, and a diversity of people, customs and cultures －－－ but it willtake time and it will take training. And people who do not have the training will feel threatenedby this change.
In the language of George Kelly’s theory of "personal constructs," the threat will be that they
will have to change the way they look at the world. If the way you look at the world now is untrue and you don’t have another way of looking at the world handy to use, then all of a sudden,
you don’t know what’s going on in the world. That’s another way of saying that we are threatened when we do not have the information we need. So I believe that there will be difficulties
but that we will eventually become one world. But we will still want to preserve certain smaller
entities for our loyalties. The feeling of belonging and making a contribution to the whole world－6－

－－－ not many people can feel that. So we need always the places to which the person can feelbelonging and can feel loyalty －－－ perhaps, the college that we attended, the city in which welive, the baseball team －－－ these are all places where we can still feel loyalty and feel belonging. To our families, to groups; human beings will always need a defined group. I can’t feel belonging to the whole world because I don’t know the whole world. But my experiences changed
me. This is my first visit to Japan. Japan is no longer strange to me. When I spoke to people in
Chicago who had been to Japan, all of the people said to me, "You will like it." They were right!
I now have a different sense about Japan than I had before because I have had an experience.
So there is always the possibility for a greater and greater feeling of belonging, and we can belong to more than one group. I think that human beings will always look for small groups to belong to. I think that is good because human beings need to belong. But the ideal, the goal, where
we are going, is expansive. The species is spreading over the planet. Some of us feel that theplanet would be a lot better off if we left. Some people feel that there are too many human beings on the planet already. But this is where the human species seems to be going and whether
we will learn to reduce the number of our species is something that I don’t know －－－ I don’t
think we will. At any rate, I believe that this is who we are as a species. I think that as each individual develops, grows older, the older individual can think in terms of the future of the species.
When you have children, when you have grandchildren, you can think further into the future andask yourself what it will be like. I think that is a developmental stage in life.
The question was: What does this have to do with social interest?
by theSocial interest is considered

Adlerians to be an inborn potential, just as speech is an inborn potential. Speech develops inthe infant because the mother talks to the baby. The mother looks in the baby’s face and makes"mother noises" and the baby looks back and smiles, and makes "baby noises." The two of themboth enjoy it very much. The child, the infant, learns to speak; the potential is inborn. I think
the potential to be interested in the welfare of the human species is inborn. I think it’s hard to
think about the welfare of the human species if you have to think about your own survival; if
you are surrounded by enemies, especially human enemies; if you are miserable or your life ismiserable. I think it is easier to speak about the welfare of the human species when you feel
good about yourself and other people.
In my professional capacity in Chicago, I have had the ability to meet a large number ofwealthy people. Some of them were born into wealth, others were very successful business people. I
noticed a very important difference between the people who were born into wealth and the people
who had made the wealth themselves. The people who were born into wealth did not give as
much to charity as did the people who had made the money. The people who had been personallysuccessful enjoyed contributing. They were much more generous than were the people that wereborn into wealth, they were also nicer people. They were people that had been successful. I also
met people who had been financially successful, but socially not. Other people were not pleased
with them. Even when they gave to charity, other people still would not accept them. And the difference seemed to be that these less-acceptable people were giving to charity in order to win acceptance, not in order to contribute. I took all this to mean that being able to make a contributionthat made a difference to the lives of other people was a very satisfying thing to do. I think thatthe ideal future of the human species would be one in which every human being has the opportunity to make a contribution and would be recognized for the contribution that one has made. And－7－

I know you didn’t think my answer would be that long !

－－－Why was the German term "Gemeinschaftsgef･･uhl" given the translation "social inter~est?"
I asked the same question myself. At one time, in the English language, the word "community
feeling" was used. I don’t know if this is true or not, but I was told that in America "community
feeling" sounded too much like communist. There was a strong anti-communist sentiment in America, and most of the Individual Psychologists in the 1930s were immigrants that had come from
Europe and they were afraid of being considered communists. There was a reason for this. Adler
was a member of the Social Democrat Party in Vienna. Adler’s wife was a communist. Adler’soldest daughter and her husband had gone to Russia. And at that time, in the United States, it
was dangerous －－ not dangerous, but inconvenient －－ for anyone to have any kind of communist connection, especially if one were an immigrant and wanted to get a job. This is what I wastold －－ maybe it’s true. It’s still a bad label. It doesn’t tell us what Gemeinschaftsgefuhl reallyis.

－－－Could you explain a little more about what you mean by "people are people, notojects."I made the statement that "people are people, not objects." What I was referring to was the language that the object relations theory uses and that Kohut uses in talking about people. The object
relations people use the word "object" to describe other people. They have certain reasons for doing that. For example, when a baby has a blanket that it loves, the blanket is spoken of as a "transitional object." It’s not a parent, it’s something else that is used for soothing. Adlerians don’t use
the term "transitional object" because they don’t think that the blanket replaces the mother at all－－－ they think that the blanket is just something that the baby likes the sensation of. I don’t
think the blanket has any more meaning than the way a dog likes to sleep in a certain place. I
don’t feel that you have to think in the terms of a "transitional object." Now, if the "transitional
object" happens to be a doll, then there perhaps seems more reason for thinking of a doll or
stuffed animal as something that you can imagine is a living thing and the child can talk to it.
The child knows it is not a living thing. The child is playing with it. The child knows the difference between what is real and what is unreal. So again, I see no reason to talk about this interms of object theory.
These objects, dolls and other items, can be thought of as self-soothing items. Human beings
are not the only animal that has habits. They like to have things in a certain way. They like torepeat the same sort of things over and over again. Your child will like to hear the same story
over and over and over again and will correct you if you tell it wrong. This creates predictability.
It is a source of information for the child. So, whether the child has a stuffed animal, or whether
the child is a thumb-sucker, or the child needs to have a certain type of blanket or pillow, or
peels the wall paper from the wall, or pulls the threads out of the curtain of the window, or－8－whatever it is －－ this is repetitive behavior which feels good. It does not have to have any other significance. It is what animals do as well. If you ever watch an animal building its own nest,
you can see it does the same thing over and over again. This is, for me, a built-in form of human behavior.
A wife who is a housekeeper, who takes care of the home, will polish the same thing over
and over again even when it doesn’t need polishing. A person who collects coins will count thesame coins over and over again. It can become a ritual form of behavior. When carried to an extreme, we call it compulsive behavior. We call some of these things compulsions if the person becomes anxious when these cannot be done. There is a part of the brain where this type of activity
is taken care of. If it becomes too disturbing, then there are medications available to calm down
this part of the brain. My son, who knows more about psychopharmacology than I do, will bewilling to explain that to you further.
I would like to add one thing. This type of activity, which seems to be very private and it is
not something that we really talk about －－－ children don’t say to each other "I suck my thumbat night, what do you do at night ?" －－－ this type of self-soothing activity is the most enjoyable
when it is done in a group. People enjoy singing in a group much more than they enjoy singing
alone. People like eating in groups more than they like eating alone. All of this underlines mystatement about what type of animal the human is.
One more use of the word object is found in the Kohut "self psychology," where he uses theterm "self-object." A self-object seems to be another person who can be used to provide something
for the self; such as someone who will admire me, someone who will serve me, someone whowill nurture me. Such relationships are relationships in which the person who provides the service
is a self-object rather than another person. Now, self-objects are nice to have, everybody shouldhave a dozen or so self-objects, but then you’re obliged to be a self-object yourself for other people. For example, a successful marriage is likely to be a marriage in which each person is able to
do something important for the other person.
Clinical Features of Individual Psychology
I’ve been asked to speak on some of the clinical features of Individual Psychology. I would
like to start out by talking about understanding behavior. I myself am a psychiatrist, a physician
and thus, I also have to make an appropriate diagnosis. In my work, I have to know the rightterms, I have to fill out the right papers, I have the usual responsibility to the patient. But, that’s
not quite the same thing as understanding the patient’s behavior.
In psychiatry, there have almost always been two ways of looking at behavior. One way is tolook at the sickness or wellness of the patient; the ability of the patient to function in everyday
life, to hold a job, to live with other members of the family; what treatment to give; what complaints the patient has; －－－ the prognosis of the patient.
The second way of looking at the patient we have called understanding the "psychodynamics."
The word psyche we have already talked about today. The word "dynamic" from the Greek,means force or strength. So literally, psychodynamics means looking at the psychological forces in
the individual. Being an Individual Psychologist, I don’t look for drives. I look at "movement."
The word movement can easily be misunderstood. In Individual Psychology, movement has to do－9－with where the patient is going, or what is the patient’s intention, or what is the goal of the patient’s behavior. The psychoanalytic reaction to this was to say that the goal of behavior isalways to satisfy the instinct. Certainly it is appropriate to say that the goal of eating is not to behungry anymore. It’s also appropriate to say that the goal of eating is to enjoy food, and thegoal of eating is that you’re not going to have a chance to eat anything until you get home latetonight. So, thinking about goals can become unclear. In order to be more specific, I will either
use the word "intention" or I will specify as to whether something is a short-range goal or a longrange goal.
A short-range goal can be seen very easily in the behavior of a child. A mother who knows
her child can quickly understand what the child is trying to accomplish. Of course, sometimes themother doesn’t understand, but those mothers who have had courses in Individual Psychology havelearned to recognize when the child’s goal is to get attention from the mother, or when thechild’s goal is to win a power contest with the mother. And the mother begins to be able to see
the child’s intention in behaving in certain ways. As a physician, I can also see short-range goals
in people. Usually when a patient comes to a physician, the short-range goal is to get help, to relieve pain, to reduce a fever; or for the psychiatrist, to reduce anxiety or relieve a depression.
Those are certainly legitimate goals.
However, there are other things that the psychiatrist can understand: psychodynamics. Sometimes
the patient comes to the emergency room because she needs to get away from her family. Sometimes an old woman is depressed because her son has not called her this week. Sometimes an adolescent has threatened suicide because he’s angry at his father. So that the psychiatrist also
wants to understand the "intention" of the patient and wants to know what kind of help really is
it that the patient wants. Does the patient want me to take away the depression, or does the patient want me to be sympathetic about the depression ? Does the patient want me to be an allyagainst the husband ?
to work ?

Does the patient want me to write a letter so that he does not have to go

Understanding the intention of the behavior is one of the things that I have to do.

One thing is important to remember: the patient does not always know what the intention is.
Sometimes you can say to the patient, "Did you do such and such a thing because you were angry at your mother?" and the patient may say, "Yes, that is why I did it." The patient will recognize that this was the reason for doing it.
There are other behaviors which are learned behaviors and you can use the concept of learned
behavior or conditioning and understanding that － － and I have to tell you that some other
Adlerians were very unhappy with me when I used the concept of conditioning. But Adler
himself talks about "self-training" and training is just a kind of conditioning. An easy example ofconditioning to understand is the following. Imagine that you are watching television. You are nothungry and you’re not thinking about food. Suddenly there is an advertisement on television
which shows some food and suddenly your mouth waters. This is an example of learned
behavior. Your mouth is watering when you see the food on television. There’s no food there, only the image of food. If you can have an actual physiological change in your own body becauseof the picture you saw on television, you can imagine what other pictures may do to you.
Let us take this and apply it to a symptom such as anxiety. The person develops an anxiety
disorder as follows. I will give you an actual true example. I had a patient who was a victim ina holdup, a robbery. The holdup was at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. Do you have Ken－10－

tucky Fried Chicken in Japan?

The person doing the holdup was an employee and the girl in

the restaurant who worked there recognized him. So he decided that he had to kill her and heshot her in the head. However, fortunately the bullet glanced off of her skull. She had a concussion and she was unconscious. She woke up in the hospital with a terrible headache, but she remembered everything that happened. And the person who did the holdup was looked for by thepolice. She was actually sent to me because she had a headache and I work with headache
doctors when the patients don’t respond to the usual treatment. She tried to go back to work
after one week. She wanted to go back to work. She went to work and felt very uncomfortablein the restaurant. Her headache became worse and she went home. She expressed the fear that
she would not be able to return to work because of the headache. Then she discovered that if
she drove her car by the restaurant, it made her heart beat faster. And she felt uncomfortable andher headache would get worse. So she began avoiding the street that the restaurant was on. One
day, she drove past another Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in another neighborhood and she
had the same sensation. Now she was really upset because now she felt she was becoming a prisoner in her own house. It was at that point that she was sent to me.
Every student who has had a course in abnormal psychology will understand what happened.
This is an example of trauma. The patient’s reaction to the trauma is the experience of fear,
which is probably the way she felt when the holdup occurred. That is, the stimuli of being neara Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant or going back to the restaurant, evoked the feelings that one
sees in what we call a "post-traumatic stress disorder." The way the brain works is that if you
have the anxiety, you look for ways to avoid the anxiety. That is, the reaction to anxiety is avoidance. Avoidance behavior leads to further anxiety. The anxiety, thus, generalizes. It spreads fromthe specific to the general. This is the way the brain works. Step by step, the anxiety spreads tomore and more things.
The role that the mind plays in this is that the mind becomes alerted for the possibility of anxiety, and looks for more things to avoid. The mind sets up an early warning system. So that, inorder to protect oneself, one has more anxiety. This of course is ineffective behavior. The avoidance is carried too far and it is a wonderful example of how a post-traumatic stress disorderworks. The best time to catch it is at the beginning, before it spreads. I don’t know if thissaying is used in Japan, but in America the saying is that if one falls off a horse, one has toget back on the horse right away or one will become too frightened to ride a horse.
Knowing that this is the way the brain works, the Adlerian would then say: What is the goalof this symptom, of this anxiety?
approach to it?

It is the avoidance of the fear of danger. What is theWell, one can show that the danger is not present. Better yet, one can go withthe person through all the dangers－－－ you can take the patient to all of the Kentucky Fried

Chicken stores. You can train the person to relax and have the person do breathing exercises before going into the restaurant. Or you can use cognitive therapy and have the patient keep adiary of all of the times that she has become frightened and what she did about it. All of theseare different ways of interfering with learned behavior.
This is an example of where the goal of the symptom does not fit in with the long-range goalof a person－－－ nobody wants to have anxiety going past a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.

But imagine to yourself that this is a person who already has a tendency to look for ways of
avoiding what is difficult. Put this person in a difficult situation and the person will look for－11－

ways to avoid. How do you avoid dangerous situations ?

You stay home. But what if your con-science says, one should go to work, or go to school ?

Well, you would really like to go towork, but you have developed something called "agoraphobia." The most common symptom of agoraphobia that I have seen recently in America is the woman who cannot go to the supermarket
alone to shop. If someone will go with her she can go. She can order things over the telephoneor over the Internet, but she cannot go out of the house alone. She has successfully turned herself
into an invalid. Being an invalid is a respectable role in society. This would be considered by theAdlerian as a retreat from a life task. And the treatment would involve helping this person not only to go to the store to shop, but helping this person to feel good about herself so that she
really wants to do these things; she no longer has a preference for avoidance, but has a preference
for approach.
I’ve given some examples of short-range goals or the immediate goals of behavior both in children and their relationship to parents, and in patients－－－ as we see them. We also see the im-mediate goals of behavior and we recognize it many times. We can tell when a boy is fond of agirl and is trying to impress her, or when an employee tries to make a good impression on aboss. We all recognize these social behaviors very easily. They are sometimes harder to recognize
when we are less experienced or when situations are new for us. But when we go through theusual developmental stages, we learn how people at our own age, our contemporaries behave －－－we can tell usually when they’re up to something. Generally speaking, it’s our own experience thathelps us to recognize when other people are being truthful and sincere. It’s my opinion that awoman can recognize when another woman is lying much more quickly than a man can recognize
it. And the same is true for men. Men can tell when another man is lying much more easily than
women can tell and they’re so surprised at what women are willing to believe. That reminds meof an old American song, which says, "How could you believe me when I told you that I loved
you when you know I’ve been a liar all my life ?"The people who develop the agoraphobia don’t know why they are developing it, they are notaware of what they are up to. It is not because they would be ashamed if they knew. They arereally, truly feeling anxious. They don’t understand what’s happening to them. They are not able
to say, "Oh, my anxiety is generalizing, that is the cause of a post-traumatic stress disorder."The long-range goals of behavior are the personality traits and tendencies or, for the benefit of
the psychiatrists and clinical psychologists in the audience, the axis two issues. Adler talked about
different types and Mosak liked to talk about different types according to differences in the "lifestyle."

Human beings are so unique, so different from each other, that although in many ways

they can be alike, each person is always still a little bit different. Nevertheless, if we want to talkabout tendencies and personality types, we have to talk about ways in which they seem to be similar most of the time even if it’s not one hundred percent. And so we can, in general, say somepeople have a higher activity level than others, some people are more excitable than others, somepeople can’t sit still, some people would rather rest all the time. In addition to these "dispositions,"
there are also differences in long-range goals. For example, one person is more interested in power
than another, another person is more interested in popularity than another. My son and I had a patient who’s admitted stated goal was to have more money than everybody else. He made a lot ofmoney and made a lot of enemies making the money. And because he has so many enemies, he’s
paying off a lot of money, especially to his attorneys. One academician that I know, a professor,－12－wanted to be smarter than everybody else. He wanted to know more than everybody else. He
picked a very small field of knowledge and became the world’s expert in this field.
Most people have reasonable long-range goals. Most people want to get along with other people,
be reasonably happy, to be well thought of, to be able to feel good about themselves. But people
with these reasonable goals don’t get into trouble anyway. So that the people that we are usually
taking care of are people that have made a mistake somewhere along the way. This is a very important concept in Individual Psychology. So for the Adlerian, the concept of mistaken notions is
an important concept in understanding what goes wrong. What kind of mistakes can people make?
They may be wrong about themselves. They may have a wrong idea about what other people
want. They may misunderstand what is necessary in life.
Why do people make mistakes ?

For the Individual Psychologists these mistakes are usually

made early in life, before the child is old enough to make good judgments. It may be because theparents have failed to do something. For example, the child that feels rejected may not feel welcome in this world. The child that has been overprotected may not feel able to deal with challenges and difficulties. A child may be over-ambitious. That is, the child may want to do something that truly very few people can do; it is too hard or too impossible to do. So that the childends up feeling it cannot deal with situations and becomes discouraged or pursues the wrong actions.
Now, what this means is that in the treatment of these people, the therapist’s job is to understand what the mistake is, to help the person to understand what the mistake is. This can be very
threatening because you may seem to be telling somebody, "You have been all wrong about life,
all of your life you have been wrong." It is better to do this with great tact. It is even better if
you don’t do it openly, but speak in such a way that it becomes apparent. But then, you also
have the job of re-educating the person, because you have to help the person not only see themistake, but correct it, and to go about things in a new way.
How does one discover the mistakes ?

The most common tool that I use is to look at the ear-liest childhood recollections. That’s not the only way. Sometimes I am not clever enough to pickit out from the earliest recollections. I’m sure that if you’ve been studying with Dr. Noda that you
all have some experience at looking at the early childhood recollections and trying to understandwhat they’re saying about the person. The earliest childhood recollections usually give me three
things that allow me to formulate something that we call the "life style."
I understand that this term caused some trouble because the use of the word "life" in this sense
was confusing. The German word is "style of living." The earlier Adler used an even better word,
which in German said "life plan." Because it is really the life plan that we figure out; the "style"is only something that comes out of the life plan. Do any of you remember a school called
transactional analysisd? Eric Berne, who wrote about transactional analysis, used the term "script."
Bern lived in California where a script is the plan for a movie, a film. Bern wrote about it as if
each person created his or her own script and acted it out. It is in this sense, that I think I getfrom the early recollections most of the time, a self-image and a picture of the world. I cannot really separate the self-image from the picture of the world because I cannot take the self-image out of
the world－－－ it’s always in the world. So it is a relationship between the self and in every-

thing else in the world. The German existentialists used the term Dasein. The being-there, the being-in-the-world, and the response to it: How am I going to be in this world?

That’s what I－13－think I can draw from the early recollections.

Developing Social Interest in Children
I’ve been asked to discuss: What can parents, teachers and therapists do to develop children’ssocial interest?

Karen Horney prepared a list of children’s needs, which she published in about

1937. The need for warmth and affection, for support, for guidance, for safety, and what she
called "healthy friendship," the need to be able to deal with conflict as well as to have everything
go smoothly, the need to be able to be tough when necessary. Another important thing which has
also been studied by the people who study small children, is constancy. Inconsistent behavior leads
to confusion and distrust. That leads to some rules, such as: do not tell the child you will dosomething and then not do it; do not depreciate the child. If the child makes a mistake－－－

well, children make mistakes. One doesn’t depreciate the child for making a mistake; one says,"When you are older, you will be able to do it better." One encourages. One admires the childand cherishes the child, and yet is still able to set the rules for correct behavior. One disapprovesof misbehavior, but does not disapprove of the child. This behavior is called "attribution." One attributes to the child the behavior you want. One says, "I know you can do it. When you’re willing to try you will be able to do it." The child says, "I can’t do it, it’s too hard." One says, "Itrust you. You’ll figure out a way to do it." Behavior like that is encouraging to the child. "Youknow, my mother believes I can do it. Maybe I can. Maybe she’s right." Teachers do this all thetime with children. Encourage the child.
There’s a story about Alfred Adler. A teacher brought the child to Adler saying that the child
had terrible penmanship. This was back in the days when it was important for a child to havegood penmanship, to write clearly. The teacher brought the child to Adler with an example ofsomething the child had written, and of course the child was ashamed. Adler took the writing andlooked at it and said, "Now that, that is a very good ’L’ right there."
One teaches best through encouragement, not by discouragement. Children want to do the thingthat pleases. Small children love to be praised by the teacher. Adolescents are different because atthat stage, the adolescents have already put the teacher into a different category; the teacher’s
opinion no longer counts. So, you help adolescents by helping them to achieve recognition fromtheir peers, not from the teacher. In each case, understanding what the needs of the child are andbehaving in ways that take care of these needs is important. In essence, being a good friend, aloving parent, a kind authority, consistent, trustworthy, something that is solid in the world, andpresenting the world in an interesting way to the child. Last, and important, is giving the childan opportunity to make a contribution and feel worthwhile through making a contribution.

Question posed to Dr. Robert B. Shulman－－－ Robert, would you like to tell us a little about what Dr. Shulman was like as afather?

－14－

I’ve been looking through a viewfinder for the last three hours. So I was not prepared for this,however I am always prepared to speak of my father. I actually feel very privileged to have had
Dad for my father because I realize what a contribution he has made himself. When I was ayoung child, I would go to Adlerian meetings and see how he was treated. It seemed to me he
was always well thought of and respected, and he seemed to have this benevolent influence onothers. Now when I was a small, small child I knew that, even though Dad was not "old," thatwhen he set policy, it was set, it was important. I never felt that he was practicing at homewhen he talked. It seemed natural. Mom would yell and Dad would calmly state how things were
to be. And as I grew up I could always argue with Mom, but with Dad it was "discussion." Andwhen he set policy, I had to respect it.
In my own life I actually spent some time away from home. I left for college at eighteen andlived 2000 miles away － － I believe much to the regret of my parents. I sort of knockedaround without purpose for a number of years and felt unfulfilled. When I realized that I needed
to do something more productive in life, I was finally able to say that it was OK to go homeand become a doctor. Subsequent to that decision, everything has been much easier in life for me.
It really has been a tremendous honor to be able to work with my father. In my training I had
exposure to the leaders of the psychoanalytic movement, the Kohutian movement in Chicago.
Their language was foreign to me of course. But after seeing the psychoanalytic masters, I
believe they couldn’t hold a candle to Dad. Maybe again it was a question of language, but I
felt that Dad was able to understand the human condition much better than anyone else I had
ever seen in action. Now when we work together －－－ we share the patients we have in the hospital, we both take turns seeing them on different days －－－ Dad is universally beloved by them
all and I am of course scorned as the younger, immature doctor －－－ but that’s OK.
Again, being able to see the contribution that Dad has made, and I have seen it in America.
In my career now I teach other doctors, I give talks on certain subjects and invariably there will
be someone who had been a student of Dad’s at some point. They always come up afterwards
and say nice things. Now I see what a student of Dad’s, Dr.Noda, has done here, and the lines
of contributions become treelike. When I was small, my Dad with Dr. Dreikurs and Dr. Mosak,
were building the Adler School in Chicago. They have students all over the United States. And I
see Dr.Noda doing that here for Japan. I can see how the lines of descent occur. I talk of Dad
as being in direct lineage to Alfred Adler and Dr. Dreikurs. I think through this lineage, throughDr. Noda, Japan has benefited from this direct lineage right back to Alfred Adler.
Growing up, the Adlerian terminology was second nature to me. I see myself as the prototypic
Adlerian middle child, with a strong sense of fairness. But when I decided what I needed to doin life, it had to do with being productive and making contribution. At the time I did not identify
this as an Individual Psychology precept, but clearly Dad had taken those ideas and managed to
instill them into my "psyche" －－－ if you will －－－ as a child. Overall, I like to think he did agood job.

Comment on Robert's Response by Dr. Shulman
I want to straighten some things out. I think Robert is very modest. I think it is my privilege－15－

to work with him. I am very flattered that he wants to work with me. He could have worked
with anybody he wanted to. He is already the best young psychiatrist in our office, in our area.
Everybody comes to him for advice. He is good at politics too. And I am very, very proud of
him.

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2012 年 12 月１日

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