Ricoeur and Adler

(by Bradley T. Morrison, July 1, 1992)

Introduction

It is often said that Alfred Adler is the most imitated and least recognized of all psychoanalytical thinkers. Having investigated Adler's theory of psychotherapy, I would call my own approach to psychotherapy "Adlerian." Through my first year of studies I have attempted to organize my own understanding of psychotherapy around the language philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. What I would call phenomenological or process psychotherapy, I believe, offers many late century parallels to Adler's early century theories.

A most striking parallel is found in the influence of Hans Vaihinger's philosophy of fiction upon Adler's formulation of psychotherapy. The subjective psychology of Adler is grounded in the subjectivist philosophy of Vaihinger. Though approaching subjectivity differently, Ricoeur's theory of metaphor and psycho-linguistics provides an exciting theoretical framework for psycho-therapy--perhaps more eloquent and rigorously phenomenological and existential than Vaihinger's philosophy of "as if." I believe the Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler would be better suited to the present age through a substitution of Paul Ricoeur's language philosophy for Hans Vaihinger's philosophy of "as if."

This essay will proceed with a brief explication of the parallels present between Vaihinger's notion of fiction and Ricoeur's theory of metaphor. Further, the Individual Psychology of Adler will be compared and contrasted with what I will call Process Psychotherapy. The second half of the paper will proceed with a case study using an Adlerian approach in dialogue with Process Psychotherapy.

Adler's use of Vaihinger

Introducing Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology, Ansbacher and Ansbacher note that Alder adopted the idealistic positivism of Hans Vaihinger. Put briefly, a psychotherapy of idealistic positivism postulates subjective causality within the dynamics of a client's personality while employing objective methods to observe this subjectivity (Ansbacher 18). Adler's own acknowledgment of Vaihinger's influence or affinity is noted at the time following Adler's break with Freud (Ansbacher 76). Ansbacher and Ansbacher assert that "it is impossible to gain a complete understanding of Adler's theory, especially with respect to his important concept of the 'fictional goal,' without a knowledge of Vaihinger's fictionalism" (76).

Vaihinger asserts the the human mind's inventive use of "fictions," mental structures aiding the mind's logical functions. Fictions, according to Vaihinger, may very well be general ideas with no correlate to reality; however, these fictions have great practical value in the human struggle to acquire knowledge (Ansbacher 78). Distinguishing his position from that of outright subjectivism, Vaihinger posits an "as if" world of psychical constructs--the world of the "unreal" in the human subject, the world of ethics, aesthetics, religion, and values--not to be confused with the world of reality (Ansbacher 78; cf. Corsini 52).

Vaihinger outlines categories of fictions--abstractive, symbolic, heuristic, practical, aesthetic--which each function heuristically to some degree. The human mind makes use of these fictive devices to simplify or schematize complex problems, thoughts, concepts, etc. Put simply, Vaihinger is cataloguing psychic or mental tropes that can easily be understood as metaphorical. Ansbacher and Ansbacher provide a typical use by Adler of these fictive tropes.

The dream strives to pave the way towards solving a problem by a metaphorical expression of it, by a comparison, an 'as if'....In dreams we produce those pictures which will arouse the feelings and emotions which we need for our purposes, that is, for solving the problems confronting us at the time of the dream, in accordance with the particular style of life which is ours (Adler in Ansbacher 82).

Imagination for Vaihinger is a tool used by thinking to service discursive thought. The idea of truth becomes the most expedient error supporting the continuation of thinking. Meaning is erroneous belief or opinion sustained by fiction as the stop gap between truth in reality and truth as we the individual understand it (Ansbacher 83).

To this Vaihinger adds "The Law of Ideational Shifts," an explanation for the dogmatism of fictions based on the psychic need to effect an equilibrium out of the disequal tension-coefficients between fiction and hypothesis. Because the mind cannot balance fiction with the weight of hypothesis, the mind raises fiction to dogma. The reverse trend from dogma through hypothesis to fiction is true when objective evidence shakes the validity of our dogmas, reducing them to fictions or effecting their complete falsification and removal. The (positivist) usefulness of fictions according to Vaihinger is its predictive power, enabling a person to calculate events and make predictions about future experience and sensation (Ansbacher 87).

Adler combined Vaihinger's concept of fiction with the concept of goal. Adler's choice of goal is significant in its teleological contrast to Freud's use of drives to explain primary human motivation. A fictional goal, contrary to Freud's external or objective drives, is subjective insofar as it can be causal. A fictional goal encompasses the individual, yet it is unconscious to the individual. Here we see the foundations of Adler's notion of "style of life" as a controlling, subjective determinant of human behaviour or striving.

We can comprehend every single life phenomenon, as if the past, the present, and the future together with a super-ordinated, guiding idea were present in it in traces (Adler in Ansbacher 89).

Already the parallels with 'Ricoeurian' Process Psychotherapy surface. What Adler would call a guiding idea or fictional goal, organizing a complete style of life for the individual, I would call root metaphor or matrix of metaphors, organizing a personal mythology or story for the individual. Integral to one's personal mythology or story is an orientation to self whereby we are located in the world as we perceive it. This world in which the self is located is phenomenological in that our disclosed world is perceived through the filter or schema of that controlling matrix of root metaphors.

Vaihinger's notion of fiction is central to Adler's under-standing of the unity of the personality. The personality is unified in the subjectivity of the fictional goal or self-ideal.

...in every mental phenomenon we discover anew the characteristic of pursuit of a goal, and all our powers, faculties, experiences, wishes and fears, defects and capacities fall into line with this characteristic (Adler in Ansbacher 94).

The self-ideal is a creation of the individual, a fictional persona of superiority masking the child's perceived inferiorities. It is this fictional self-ideal that sustains and guides the child into adulthood and completion, through the potentially harsh realities of weakness and inferiority. As Vaihinger asserted, fiction--however erroneous--has a practical value for human living. The client's fiction is the key to discovering his or her perceived inferiorities and subsequent strivings and style of life.

My criticism of Adlerian Individual Psychology is directed not at the genius of Adler, but at the idealistic positivism he used to fashion his notion of the subjectivity of the human personality. Of course, my forthcoming criticism of Vaihinger's thought is done from the vantage point of hindsight, and Vaihinger may very well have provided for Adler's psychology the most eloquent of contemporary notions of subjectivity. Nonetheless, I find room for improvement using the more advanced language philosophy of Paul Ricoeur.

The limits of this essay demand that I be brief in my presentation of Ricoeur's ideas. To begin, Vaihinger's formulation of fictions is characteristic of the substitution theory of tropes. As tropes, fictions offer to language no new information as they can be restored by an 'exhaustive paraphrase' (Rule of Metaphor 46). Fictions, according to Vaihinger, are practical schemata employed by the psyche as convenient, simplified representatives of more complex ideas and ideals. A fiction is a deviation in naming. The tropological understanding of metaphor, paralleled by the fictions of Vaihinger's idealistic positivism, is a focus of Ricoeur's critique in The Rule of Metaphor.

Ricoeur understands metaphor as having a more important function in the description of reality. Put simply, metaphor is the process whereby new worlds or deeper structures of reality are disclosed and revealed into language. Vaihinger's analysis of 'as if' is an analysis of predication. Predication--in its simplest form of to be--for Ricoeur is at the heart of metaphorical process. All language is metaphorical, and language functions psycholinguistical-ly within the subjectivity of the human being. Whereas simple metaphors hold in tension previously distant referential fields, complex metaphors or 'texts' hold in tension previously distant text worlds or ontological worlds. Metaphors or texts, as compared to Vaihinger's fictions, are more than expedient errors; rather, metaphor is the process whereby deeper truth and reality are revealed. Metaphor moves our known world closer to new worlds of being.

Ansbacher and Ansbacher remark that "Vaihinger's contribution is that he elevates fictions as such to rank and dignity" (Ansbach-er 87). Subjectivity within a Ricoeurian framework is raised to even higher rank and dignity! For Vaihinger, fictions function within the personality and the cognitive structures of the individual--subjectivity of personality is judged within the parameters of a greater "objective' reality. For Ricoeur, cognitive structures and human being function within language and metaphor-subjectivity is not reduced to depth psychology, and subjectivity operating at the level of language connects individuals through participation in 'being.' Thus, 'fictive' knowing is not contrasted to an 'objective' reality, since all reality--including scientific observation--is perceived subjectively by the individual through metaphor. Metaphor is reality.

What becomes of Adler's notion of human striving for superiority? For Vaihinger, and subsequently for Adler, fictions compensate for inferiorities in thinking and perceiving. With Ricoeur, a notion of inferiority suggests itself only insofar as language seeks to increase its descriptive power and capacity for understanding. Inferiority need not be seen as 'content' housed within the human psyche as fiction, since the process of metaphor provides its own theory of motivation to wholeness as new worlds disorient our known world. As our known world and its modes of being or self encounters new text or ontological worlds, there follows the epoche or suspension of our known world and the appropriation of the new modes of being or dimensions of self disclosed within the structures of the new, text world. Striving is replaced with the human need for 'courage to be.' Perhaps in Adler and Vaihinger too much Nietzsche.

For the sake of brevity, the following list compares the basic principles of Adlerian Psychotherapy (taken from "Basic Propositions of Individual Psychology" from Ansbacher & Ansbacher, The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler) to those of the Process Psychotherapy I propose.

Adlerian Psychotherapy Process Psychotherapy
1. There is one basic dynamic force behind all human activity, a striving from a felt minus situation toward a plus situation, from a feeling of inferiority towards superiority, perfection, totality. 1. The dynamic force behind all human activity is the tensive becoming of human being. As external factors and events challenge our known world, we appropriate new modes of being-in-the-world.
2. The striving receives its specific direction from an individually unique goal or self-ideal, which though influenced by biological and environmental factors is ultimately the creation of the individual. Because it is an ideal, the goal is a fiction. 2. Being is oriented by personal mythology, which shapes our known world and reveals our self. Influenced by transgenerational and developmental stressors, personal mythology schematizes experience by a matrix of controlling, root metaphors into a "story."
3. The goal is only "dimly envisioned" by the individual, which means that it is largely unknown to him and not understood by him. This is Adler's definition of the unconscious: the unknown part of the goal. 3. Root metaphors are privatized or beyond consciousness. Personal mythology is seldom named or articulated. Personality is not reducible to content; self is process of being located in world. Possible multiple self is discovered.
4. The goal becomes the final cause, the ultimate independent variable. To the extent that the goal provides the key for under-standing the individual, it is a working hypothesis on the part of the psychologist. 4. Being and self as process are teleological though tensive. Root metaphors effect expectations for being. Transformed root metaphors transform self, expectations, and story. Storytelling by client de-privatizes root metaphors, giving clues to therapist for growth.
5. All psychological processes form a self-consistent organization from the point of view of the goal, like a drama which is constructed from the beginning with the finale in view. This self-consistent personality structure is what Adler calls the style of life. It becomes firmly established at an early age, from which time on behavior that is apparent-ly contradictory is only the adaptation of different means to the same end. 5. Personal story or mythology organizes the self in its known world. This known world provides the context or landscape for being in the world. All psychological processes form a self-consistent organization from the point of view of the known world. Behavior is consistent with the maintenance of the known world. Reorientation to new world forced by disorientation of known world is in tension between consistency with familiar mythology and new modes of being.
6. All apparent psychological categories, such as different drives or the contrast between conscious and unconscious, are only aspects of a unified relational system and do not represent discrete entities and qualities. 6. Same. The self, the other, modes of being, known world where self and other are located, personal story and mythology, root metaphors and subsequent expectations--these are interrelated expressions of a dynamic process best understood as metaphorical.
7. All objective determiners, such as biological factors and past history, become relative to the goal idea; they do not function as direct causes but provide probabilities only. The individual uses all objective factors in accordance with his style of life. "Their significance and effectiveness is developed only in the intermediary psychological metabolism, so to speak." 7. Transgenerational, developmental, and unpredictable "objective" stressors become relative to the client's "story." Experience finds meaning within "story" through the filter of the privatized matrix of root metaphors for self under-standing. There is not causality; rather, there are possibilities for being realized through the tensive process of metaphor as reduction of impertinence, and the process of appropriating new worlds.
8. The individual's opinion of himself and the world, his "apperceptive schema," his interpretations, all as aspects of the style of life, influence every psycho-logical process. Omnia ex opinione suspensa sunt was the motto for the book in which Adler presented Individual Psychology for the first time. 8. The individual's location of self in a known world, interpretation of experience, hopes, expectations, beliefs, etc. are dynamic and in process. Metaphorical process is best understood as orientation-disorientation-reorientation, revealing deeper levels of being and reality. Perhaps: omnia ex epiphora suspensa sunt.
9. The individual cannot be considered apart from his social situation. "Individual Psychology regards and examines the individual as socially embedded. We refuse to recognize and examine an isolated human being." 9. The individual cannot be considered apart from his or her known world. Located in this world and in relationship to others, the self suffers subject-loss with the disorientation of this known, shared world.
10. All important life problems, including certain drive satisfactions, become social problems. All values become social values. 10. We locate our self in a shared world with others, oriented by healthy and unhealthy relational root metaphors. Social relations inform self-understanding and vice-versa.
11. The socialization of the individual is not achieved at the cost of repression, but is afford-ed through an innate human ability, which, however, needs to be developed. It is this ability which Adler calls social feeling or social interest. Because the individual is embedded in a social situation, social interest becomes crucial for his adjustment. 11. Socialization of the individual is oriented by communal and cultural mythologies in tension with the growth of becoming and being and a complex fabric of systems of stressors and events. Individual being is connected to deeper ontological structures of reality. Again, shared worlds disclose new possibilities and dimensions of the self.
12. Maladjustment is characterized by increased inferiority feelings, underdeveloped social interest, and an exaggerated uncooperative goal of personal superiority. Accordingly, problems are solved in a self-centred "private sense" rather than a task-centred "common sense" fashion. In the neurotic this leads to the experience of failure because he still accepts the social validity of his actions as his ultimate criterion. The psychotic, on the other hand, while objectively also a failure, that is, in the eyes of common sense, does not experience failure because he does not accept the ultimate criterion of social validity. 12. Maladjustment and stress is grounded in dysfunctional root metaphors, that is, unhealthy metaphors of self-understanding promoting relationships of non-mutuality or non-interdependence. Discouragement is the lack of resources to complete the process of appropriating a new world where the self can be located. Pathology is rooted in the unhealthy, limiting root metaphors of self under-standing that inhibit movement through disorientation to reorientation. Unhealthy being in the world is oriented by metaphors of dependence/independence. Using religious language, the disclosure of shared realities of mutuality is the disclosure of the Realm of God.

 

Unfortunately space does not permit a more systematic comparison of Vaihinger and Ricoeur, as well as a more comprehensive revision of Adler's understanding of psychotherapy using the tools of Ricoeur's language philosophy.

Process of Psychotherapy

Mosak outlines four basic aims in the Adlerian process of psychotherapy (Mosak 64; cf. Dreikurs in Belkin 29): 1) joining; 2) uncovering dynamics of patient, life style, goals, and how these affect life movement; 3) interpretation culminating in insight; 4) reorientation of client. Recalling that a psychotherapy of idealistic positivism postulates subjective causality within the dynamics of a client's personality while employing objective methods to observe this subjectivity (Ansbacher 18), how is objectivity achieved within the Ricoeurian framework of psychotherapeutic process?

As with Adler, Ricoeur, and all psychotherapies, counselling is a hermeneutical task. Ricoeur's threefold process of hermeneutics--paralleling the metaphorical process of predication--follows the path of first naivete, critical distanciation, and second naivete (Symbolism of Evil). First naivete is the tacit acceptance of the symbol system--thus, story or fiction--of the client. Critical distanciation is the stepping back to observe and analyze the structure of symbolic meanings in the story or text of the client, revealing deeper ontological structures of the client's being. Second naivete is the therapist's appropriation of the client's ontological world. From the client's perspective, first naivete is their presenting condition--the world as they experience it in its immediacy. Critical distanciation achieves for the client a disorientation from his or her immediacy to that known, symbolic world. Second naivete is the appropriation of new modes of being revealed by analysis of the structures of the client's known world.

Conclusion

Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology was psychotherapy's first step in the development of a phenomenological psychotherapy that acknowledged the subjectivity of the human personality. Adler's approach to subjectivity borrowed from the world of Hans Vaihinger's philosophy of 'as if' or fictionalism. In Vaihinger we see the first inroads into a dynamic and complex understanding of human subjectivity. In Paul Ricoeur we see a more detailed map of the place of language in subjectivity and phenomenology. I believe Ricoeur's thought offers to Adlerian psychology a more powerful descriptive power for the therapist seeking to discover, analyze, and offer transformation to a client's perception of reality.

Works Cited

Ansbacher, Heinz L. and Ansbacher, Rowena R. The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1967 (1956).

Belkin, Gary S. Contemporary Psychotherapies. 2nd Edition. Monterey, California: Brooks/Cole Publishing Co., 1987.

Clinebell, Howard. Contemporary Growth Therapies: Resources for Actualizing Human Wholeness. Nashville: Abingdon, 1981.

Mosak, Harold H. "Adlerian Psychotherapy" in Current Psychotherapies. Second Edition. Ed. by Raymond J. Corsini. Itasca, Illinois: F.E. Peacock Publishers, Inc., 1979. Pp. 44-94.

Prochaska, James O. "Adlerian Therapy" in Systems of Psychotherapy. 2nd. ed. Homewood, Illinois: The Dorsey Press, 1984. Pp. 154-176.

Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary studies of the creation of meaning in language. Trans. by Robert Czerney et al. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1977.

------. The Symbolism of Evil. Trans. by Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.