Adlerian Therapy: Study for CA MFT Licensing Exam

- A co-founder of the psychoanalytic movement as a core member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
- Student of Freud but broke away from psychoanalysis to form a school of individual psychotherapy and personality theory
- Main player in starting the Child Guidance Movement and organized child guidance clinics in Vienna

- Birth order
- Individual life styles
- Social interests
- Concepts pertaining to inferiority and superiority as principle components of personality

- Encouragement
- Positive reinforcement

The level of social contribution beneficial to the greater community

Mistaken beliefs

- Bring about an increased social interest
- Modify self-destructive behavior
- Solve problems more efficiently

- Immediacy
- Encouragement
- Acting "as if"
- Spitting in the client's soup
- The question
- Homework
- Avoiding the tar baby
- Therapist/client agreement of goals

- Focusing on the immediate here and now
- Reorients clients into a position conducive to a greater understanding of their situation

- Builds rapport between therapist and client - Helps assess client lifestyle to provide tools for overcoming inferiority and low self-concept

When a client pretends to act "as if" his or her fantasy or wish were real

- Therapist counteracts a client's maladaptive attempt to get his or her needs met by confronting the client and elucidating what price the client pays by maintaining the behavior
- Makes maladaptive behaviors less attractive to the client

- Deliberately constructed questions that test the client in order to identify the existence of a psychological problem
- If the client makes a connection between the answer to the question and another problem altogether, the therapist then presumes the root of the illness is to avoid the problem connected by the client

Therapist avoids falling in the trap of responding the the client's transference in the same emotionally destructive ways that others in client's past have done

The inferiority complex

- A feeling that one is inferior to others in some way
- Can arise from an imagined or actual inferiority in the afflicted person
- Often subconscious
- Drives afflicted individuals to overcompensate
- An advanced state of discouragement