... Adler subordinates this sexuality to a prior and wider "will-to-power" which allies his speculations concerning human nature with a metaphysical voluntarism of the type of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Vaihinger. Both philosophers of mind differ from their metaphysical relatives in that they generate their speculative dogmas out of the material provided by means of the technique of psychoanalysis, of which both are practitioners. This technique is the common denominator of the three sects. The rest may be considered what Alder would call "arrangements" of the material drawn out by the technique. [The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology] is a redundant compilation of Adlerian "arrangements." It consists of a collection of twenty-eight occasional pieces, the earliest dating from 1911. Their sequence has been made, as nearly as it could be, logical rather than temporal, and the themes mount in technicality and range as the essays proceed. There are subjects as varied as the psychic treatment of trigeminal neuralgia and Dostoevsky; myelodysplasia and the individual-psychology of prostitution. Nevertheless, the essays do not avoid being boresomely repetitious. Dr Radin, in his work of translation, seems not to have succeeded so well as he might have in reducing the unnecessarily technical, involved, and pontificating style of the originals to a direct and readable English. Those who are familiar with Dr Adler's German will, however, not too greatly blame him. They will remember how much worse that is than even the bad German most of the German-speaking psychoanalysts seem to have fallen into. Adler calls his system of human nature the system of "individual psychology." He intends by this phrase that the psyche of each man is always to be considered an organic and indissoluble unity. It is a whole, as the Hegelians used to say, with a capital W. In every single act or aspect of a life, no matter how contradictory any may be to any other, this whole is present as the effective agent. Its essence is to be a goal, generating the means of its attainment by its reactions upon its environment; its quality is of drive or will aiming at power, at superiority over its settings. The specific conditions it reacts to will provide the instruments with which it establishes its superiority in feeling, and the moulds of character in terms of which this superiority is pursued and maintained. The process begins in earliest infancy. Indeed, the first cry of the new-born is a sign of felt insecurity; an insecurity extended and intensified by its manifold relations to the adult world on which it depends. ...
