TRAINING FOR ALL

Greymouth Evening Star, 25 June 1937, Page 10

TRAINING FOR ALL

ALDER EXPLAINS THEORIES LONDON, May 26. Alfred Adler, the short, tubby Viennese-born 66-year-old psychologist who invented the over-worked term, ‘inferiority complex,” stood in Stationers’ Hall and said that 70 per cent, of internal diseases and SO per cent, of infectious diseases needed psychological treatment. Speaking in a deep voice, thick with German gutterals faintly overtax! vyith American —he lives in the United States now —Dr. Adler dealt one blow at heredity, another at environment, and reduced the. human soul to a single entity which must be trained for life.

As he spoke, it seemed that all the problems that vex humanity were capable of swift diagnosis and swift cure. The drunkard, the pervert, and the neurotic need only see a psychologist, talk to him, listen to him—and they will become temperate, normal, healthy. Given enough psychologists working on the right lines —Dr. Adler’s lines' are summed up in a body of thought called “Individual Psychology”—there would, it seemed, be no failures in life.

For failure, says Dr. Adler, comes when a person—usually a child —is confronted with a problem he cannot solve. The problem is a shock Io him. The shock throws him off his balance. It is the task of psychology either to maintain that balance or, if it be lost, restore it. He believes that mankind is not degenerating, although there are more neurotics and abnormal people in the world than ever before. He ascribes the fact to the complication of human civilisation.

The great difficulties in the way of universal psychology he defined as twofold—the bulk of people who prided themselves on saying "No” to modern thought and modern c iscoveries, and the fact that psychology was in fact basically simple.

CRITICS ANSWERED “I am told my theories are superficial, that they are too easy to understand, that they are shallow,” he said. “I could make it difficult: if I wanted to. believe me!” He stood up in a grey suit, pincenez perched on his nose, for all the world like an American business man addressing his board. Only the grey spats and the thick accent betrayed the Coin mental. T believe in preparation for the human soul, preparation for the problems it must face.

“You < annoi expect a child to pass a histor} examination without training. Why should you expect, it to solve other problems unless it. has been trained?

"Fifty per cent, of the people in prisons are drawn from the ranks of unskilled labour. Why? They have no preparation for life, not. even for their job.” It is not only children IT (lessor Adler would teach, but their parents, their teachers, their pastors and masters. Il is his deepest conviction that one is never too old. never too ruined by bad heredity or bad environment, to learn.

Introducing Dr. Adler, the Duchess cf Hamilton and Brandon, flowing in black and silver, said that, her own early notion that one should have an experimental family to make one's m’stakes on before taking on the job of being a member of a real family was an early hint of the individual psychology advocated by the great Viennese.