On October 16th we will begin a discussion of The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, Volume 9, Case Histories, Chapters III & IV. The following chapter summaries were prepared by Manu Jaaskelainen.
Ch. III, Deficient Social Feeling, Masculine Protest begins with some initial considerations of some basic ideas of IP. Adler says that "what we call social feeling in IP is the true and inevitable compensations for all our natural weaknesses. Even from the biological standpoint, the human being is clearly a social creature, needing a much longer period of dependence upon others before its maturity than other animals; the human mother is also more dependent before, during, and after giving birth." All actions on the useless side can be traced back to a feeble social feeling. Inferiority feeling is a basic concept in IP. The goal of superiority is often identified with the masculine role-taking. However, Adler presents a case of a 26-years old lady who wanted to be a boy. As a child, she had hated dolls, and preferred to play with toy railway-trains. Later on, she had many male friends, but was never in love. She was very sporty. She felt that she had been betrayed by her father who had married again after her mother died, and, later on, by her lover who had deserted and left her alone. In order to safeguard herself against new disappointments, she developed a fiction that it is impossible for a girl to keep a man's love. Her idea was based on cultural stereotype: that the female person is of second rate importance and therefore not really valuable. It is this illusion that, according to Adler, leads often to unhappiness in love and marriage, and is the basis of masculine protest.
Ch. IV, Problems in Love and Marriage is a study on some very widely-spread questions of human social life. Adler does not accept the idea that only sexual impulses and/or their sublimations important here, although they have a definite place in study of these difficulties. Love and marriage are normal responses to the sexual question. Well-prepared people do not find these responses difficult. Courage, optimism, common sense, and the feeling of being at home in the world will enable him/her to meet all problems successfully. If the social contact is poor, difficulties follow. Adler takes up again the notion of masculine protest and writes that a wrong kind of striving to superiority may produce great difficulties. - Adler presents a case of a man 23, who wanted to dominate his environment with his drinking. He was a spoiled child who had lost his father, and was pampered by his mother. When he married, his attitude was one of constant criticism, jealousy, and advice. The client behaved like he had earlied behaved to his mother and his elder sister when they had refused to fulfill his wishes. Now, after scenes with his wife, he drank heavily and came home intoxicated. Just as a child, he became a tyrant of the house, dominating and humiliating his wife.
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