George, your thesis of a commonality between Freud and Adler, i.e., both seeking justification for moral or right behavior, seems inconsistent with Adler's comments in his article "The Differences Between Individual Psychology and Psychoanalysis," in
Superiority and Social Interest, edited by Heinz and Rowena Anasbacher, pages 205-218. Perhaps I am not seeing your point, but it seems to me that they are continents apart philosophically.
(Quoting excerpts from Adler in Ansbacher's book.)
Basic Difference
"Now I should like to show the decisive basic difference between psychoanalysis and Individual Psychology. It is not that Freud has taken up drive psychology, which was first created by Individual Psychology and was then left behind as incorrect when I brought the striving for significance to the foreground. This is not the basic difference. The difference is that Freud starts with the assumption that by nature man only wants to satisfy his drives-the pleasure principle--and must, therefore, from the viewpoint of culture be regarded as completely bad.
Concept of Human Nature
The Freudian view is that man, by nature bad, covers this unconscious badness through censorship merely to get along better in life. Individual Psychology, on the other hand, states that the development of man, by virtue of his inadequate physique, is subject to the redeeming influence of social interest, so that all his drives can be guided in the direction of the generally useful. The indestructible destiny of the human species is social interest. In Individual Psychology this is the truth; in psychoanalysis it is a trick.
Conclusion
The problem of the wholeness of the personality, which represents the essential contribution of Individual Psychology to modern medicine, appears in psychoanalysis as unessential. How this wholeness penetrates every psychological part-phenomenon and colors it individually is omitted from the considerations of psychoanalysis which, as if it were hypnotized, looks in each part for the sexual-libidinal structure. Although it would take us too far afield to prove in this paper, Freud's psychology is taken from the psychopathology of the pampered child, and describes it in sexual dialect.
Despite the many scientific contrasts between Freud and myself, I have always been willing to recognize that he has clarified much through his endeavors; especially, he has severely shaken the position of positivistically (materialistisch) oriented neurology and opened a wide door to psychology as an auxiliary science to medicine. This is his chief merit, next to his detective art of guessing through common sense. That he did not get any further is due to the limits of his personality and the limits of the personalities of his disciples.
In a future history of psychology and psychopathology Freud's doctrine will figure as the admirable attempt to describe, in the strongest expressions of sexual terminology, the psychological life of the pampered child as a generally valid psychology."