How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

Individual Psychology. Individual Psychology bears the same relation to older psychiatric theories that Einstein’s theory of relativity bears to Newtonian physics. All modern psychiatric theories prefer the dynamic point of view to the old static classification of neuroses according to their symptoms. Adler has pointed out that the important thing to know about any neurosis is its goal or purpose, in contradistinction to older psychiatrists, including Freud, who focussed their attention on its cause or origin. The word “ hormic ’’j1 like its synonyms conation, intrinsic teleology, or Adler’s own term “ immanent ”, or in-dwelling, teleology, is applied in modern psychiatry to dynamics of human behaviour, both normal and neurotic. To quote MacDougall,2 “ those of our activities which we can at all adequately describe are unmistakably and undeniably teleological ... we undertake them in the pursuit of some goal, for the sake of some result which we foresee and desire to achieve. And it holds that such activities are the true type of all mental activities, and of all truly vital activities, and that, when we seek to interpret more obscure instances of human activity, and when we observe activities on the part of animals that clearly are goal-seeking, we are well justified in regarding them as of the same order as our own explicitly teleological or purposive actions.” Adler was the first of the great modern psychiatrists to apply this hormic point of view to the understanding of the neuroses. We shall take the key Adler and other exponents of the hormic philosophy of human behaviour have given us, and apply it to the various forms of neurotic behaviour. We may consider the neurosis as the strategy of the evasion ot the complete solution of the three great problems of society, work, and sexual fulfilment. To understand the dynamics of this strategy we have three points to consider : the problem, the method of evasion, 1 First used by P. T. Nunn in his Education, its Data and First Principles. 2 William MacDougall, in The Psychologies of 1930.