World War I and Adler's Concept of Community Feeling

(Excerpts from the writings of Henri F. Ellenberger and Alfred Adler)

"Contrary to common assumption, neither Adler nor Jung is a 'psychoanalytic deviant,' and their systems are not merely distortions of psychoanalysis. Both had their own ideas before meeting Freud, collaborated with him while keeping their independence, and, after leaving him, developed systems that were basically different from psychoanalysis, and also basically different from each other.
". . . . Adler is concerned with the field of Menschenkenntnis, that is the concrete, practical knowledge of man. The interest of individual psychology is that it is the first recorded, unified, complete system of Menschenkenntnis, a system vast enough to encompass also the realm of neuroses, psychoses, and criminal behavior. . . .
". . . . When World War I broke out, the forty-four-year-old Adler was still young enough to be mobilized as a (p. 571) military doctor and was able to acquire a direct knowledge of war neuroses. . . . The years 1920 to 1932 were, in spite of political upheavals, the years of Adler's greatest achievements. But he did not wait for Hitler to come to power, and emigrated to the United States in 1932. Black clouds were gathering over Europe when he suddenly died in 1937 two and one-half years before the catastrophe he had foreseen" (p. 572).

"In 1934 the Social Democratic party was suppressed in Austria. The Nazi menace became increasingly ominous. Adler had foreseen the catastrophe that was soon to break over Europe, and he thought that the future of individual psychology depended upon its implantation in North America (p. 590).

"It would seem that war events brought forth a remarkable metamorphosis in him. . . .
"More and more he had become the apostle of an ideal, which for him was the only salvation of the world, and for whose propagation he fatally overworked himself" (p. 591).

"Those who have known Adler agree that he possessed the gift of Menschenkenntnis (intuitive practical understanding of man) to a supreme degree. . . .
"Adler possessed the same foresight in regard to political events. As we have seen, as early as 1918 he predicted that the Bolsheviks' use of violence would unleash a counterviolence that would attempt to conquer his first putsch, and as the years went by he clearly predicted the catastrophe of the Nazi invasion and World War II" (p. 594).

"After World War I, Alfred Adler reconsidered and reformulated his psychological system. The notion of community feeling (Gemeinschaftsgefuhl), which had been implicit in his previous theory of neurosis, was now designated by that term and brought into the foreground. The new system was expounded in 1927 in the clearest and most systematic of his books, Understanding Human Nature" (p. 608).

"The dialectics of the interrelations of human groups was approached by Adler in other publications [than The Nervous Character]. We remember how in 1918 and 1919 he tried to elucidate the phenomenon of war and explained it by the criminally irresponsible attitude of those in power and the helplessness of the people when they become aware of the deception. War can be thus considered as one of the forms of mass psychosis provoked by a few men in search of power in their own selfish interests. Adler, however, did not consider that striving for personal power as a primary drive, but as the result of a false guiding ideal that could be replaced by that of community feeling, hence the paramount importance of education in the prevention of war" (p. 611).

"The primary source of any creative man is his own personality. His [Adler's] personal reaction to World War I and his experience as a military physician could have inspired in him the concept of community feeling" (p. 626).

Ellenberger, Henri F. (1970). The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History
and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, Inc.

"Between both editions of this book [The Neurotic Character] lies a world war with all its consequences, lies the most terrible mass neurosis to which our neurotically diseased civilization, eroded by its striving for power and its policy of prestige, has resorted. The gruesome course of contemporary events confirms in a frightening way the straightforward reasoning of this book.
"A course that reveals itself as the demoniac work of the striving for power that has been let loose everywhere, throttling or cleverly abusing the immortal community feeling of humankind (Adler, 1911/2002, preface to the 1919 edition, p. ix).

"The viewpoints of our Individual Psychology demand the unconditional dismantling of the striving for power and the development of the community feeling. The solution it proposes is the 'fellow-man,' the adoption of an attitude of fellowship among human beings towards the immanent demands of society" (Adler, 1911/2002, preface to the 1922 edition, p. xi).

"The psyche cannot always account for fictional goals, and so this child may appear to have broken away from its final goal, to put his disposition for sports and gymnastics in the service of other tendencies that serve the feeling of self-worth more or less in the same way as our modern states are preparing for war without even knowing the future enemy" (Adler, 1911/2002, p. 89).

Adler, Alfred. (1911/2002). The Neurotic Character: Fundamentals of a
Comparative Individual Psychology and Psychotherapy. Translated by
Cees Koen. Edited by Henry T. Stein. San Francisco, California:
The Classical Adlerian Translation Project, Alfred Adler Institute of
San Francisco.

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