different aspects to the unconscious: the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious.
Adler, too, differed from Freud, and much more completely than Jung. He developed his own model and theory of personality which emphasized the positive motives and goals of individuals, rather than the ongoing battle between a selfish id, civilization, and an ego attempting to control the human's behavior. Adler had a fundamentally different orientation, believing that individuals attempted to be good people and that they wanted to contribute to society through their own development (Adler, 1927). There could hardly be two more different views of human nature. Freud seemed to view human nature as fundamentally tending toward the destructive, or evil, while Adler seemed to view human nature as inherently good, tending toward the constructive. His theory of personality developed through many stages, however, and we will trace some of those developments (Adler, 1924; Adler, 1927).
Adler's psychodynamic theory of personality
Adler was born in 1870, dying in 1937. He was part of the intellectual and social revolution that occurred in Europe during these decades, but it is not clear whether it was personal influences or these larger social influences that contributed most to his developing theories. Certainly Freud started him with the psychodynamic approach, but Adler moved quickly away, and beyond, Freud's theories.
One of the early personal issues that influenced his thinking was his own childhood fragility. As a child, he was quite delicate, almost dying at the age of 5 of pneumonia. Many have associated this early frailty with his development of the concept of compensation (Hoffman, 1997). This was Adler's first attempt to develop an explanation for the creation of a specific personality. He proposed that the individual's personality was shaped by that individual's unconscious and conscious attempt to compensate for ...