Understanding Human Nature

Understanding Human Nature collects the lectures Adler gave to a general Viennese audience, setting out the framework of Individual Psychology in plain terms. Adler argues that every person forms a style of life in early childhood, a fixed pattern of goals and movement that organises later behaviour. Feelings of inferiority drive the person toward compensation and a striving for significance; social interest, the capacity to cooperate and feel with others, marks whether that striving turns useful or destructive.

For the consulting room, the book gives a vocabulary for reading character as goal-directed rather than fixed by instinct. Adler treats memories, dreams, sibling position and bodily complaints as expressions of a single line of movement toward a chosen aim. He connects private symptoms to the demands of work, friendship and love, the three tasks he holds no one escapes.

Published in 1927 as Menschenkenntnis, the book predates much of what later became common ground in psychodynamic practice, and states its claims with unusual directness.