Creative Power, Nature, & Nurture

Gil,

Personality development is influenced somewhat by the training and challenges of the environment as well as the assets and liabilities of heredity; however, the strongest influence is the creative power of the individual. This premise is reflected in the potential of Classical Adlerian psychotherapy to stimulate a client into choosing a new direction in life (giving up a life style and compensatory fictional goal originally chosen in childhood).

In the early 1900's Adler recognized the impact of organ inferiority on the formation of the personality. He even hypothesized an inferiority of the CNS in most cases of schizophrenia. Yet he also pointed out the potential of productive over-compensation in certain organ deficiencies, (i.e. Beethoven's deafness & Demosthenes' stuttering).

A negative environment does not always lead to problem children, nor does a positive environment guarantee happy, cooperative children. The decisive factor is what the child makes of his situation when, after trial and error, a choice is made that seems to promise security and significance. Without the critical capacity to foresee later consequences, many errors are possible.

In Adler's own words: "It is neither heredity nor environment which determines the individual's relationship to the outside world. Heredity only endows him with certain abilities. Environment only gives him certain impressions. These abilities and impressions, and the manner in which he "experiences" them-- that is to say, the interpretation he makes of these experiences--are the bricks which he uses in his own "creative" way in building up his attitude toward life. It is his individual way of using these bricks--or in other words, it is his attitude toward life--which determines his relationship to the outside world."

At the beginning of Adler's first book, THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION, we find one of his favorite aphorisms: "Omina ex opinione suspensa sunt." (Everything is subject to one's opinion of it).

Henry

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Re: Creative Power, Nature, & Nurture, by A.B., 6/21/99

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