Alfred Adler

He was called Freud's rival. He was really his opposite.

Where Freud looked inward and backward - to buried instinct and childhood conflict - Alfred Adler looked outward and forward, to the goals we pursue and the people we belong to. Breaking from Freud in 1911, he founded Individual Psychology and gave the modern world some of its most familiar ideas: the inferiority complex, the drive to compensate for weakness, and the conviction that our mental health is bound up with our connection to others.

In this concise, accessible gateway, Josh Graham traces Adler's journey from a sickly boy in the suburbs of Vienna to one of the founders of modern psychotherapy - a thinker who carried psychology out of the consulting room and into schools, families, and neighbourhoods.

Inside, you'll discover:

• How feelings of inferiority can fuel growth - or harden into the complex that stops it
• Why Adler placed "social interest" and belonging at the heart of a healthy life
• What he actually believed about birth order, and what modern research says
• His practical method of encouragement, and why it still shapes therapy, parenting, and education
• A fair reckoning with the criticisms his hopeful psychology has always attracted

More than a century before loneliness was named a public-health problem, Adler argued that a person cannot be understood - or healed - apart from other people. This is the ideal introduction to why his quiet, courageous vision still speaks to modern life.

Part of the Pioneers of Human Behaviour series: clear, honest, carefully researched gateways to the people who changed how we understand the mind.