Adlerian Counseling Theory and Practice: (Including Material from Rudolf Dreikurs, MD-Child Psychiatrist-Essentially in His Own Words)

By William Lyman Camp FACAPP

The Adlerian approach to counseling is a highly structured approach. Adlerians operate according to a set of principles and procedures that make this form of counseling different from many other forms of counseling. In most other forms, a counselor sees a client and they talk, and they talk, and they talk. Adlerians try not to waste a moment. Every word said and everything done is designed according to plan. In the pages of this book, the writer will present techniques that have been used successfully, with the suggestion that the reader, too, may find real success in their use.

Chapter 1 and 2 consists of Adlerian child psychology concepts and ideas with information drawn from lectures, interviews, writings, and conversations with Rudolf Dreikurs, MD, as well as ideas from other Adlerian authors, compiled, summarized, edited, updated, annotated, and supplemented for the twenty-first century.

Chapters 3 and 4 are essentially the words of Dr. Dreikurs, compiled and edited from tapes, excerpts from his public conversations, lectures, and radio and television presentations—all organized and presented with his suggestions for their organization and presentation.

Much of this material is presented primarily as a casebook, with explanations included and transcripts of cases conducted by Dr. Dreikurs. It is presented with his permission and appropriate confidentiality, including name changes, etc. Interspersed are comments, observations, and brief explanations presented for clarification.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685179786

Book preview

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ADLERIAN COUNSELING

THEORY AND PRACTICE

(Including Material from Rudolf Dreikurs, MD—Child

 

Psychiatrist—Essentially in His Own Words)

William Lyman Camp PhD, FACAPP

ISBN 978-1-68517-977-9 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68517-978-6 (digital)

Copyright © 2022 by William Lyman Camp PhD, FACAPP

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Including material from Rudolf Dreikurs, MD, child psychiatrist, Essentially In His Own Words.

Adlerian child psychology concepts and ideas plus cases, compiled, summarized, edited, updated, and supplemented for the twenty-first century by William L. Camp, PhD, FACAPP.

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Brief Theory and History

The Adlerian Approach to Counseling

A Sample Case

Questions, Answers, and Cases

Connecting with Young People

Discussion with Students

Parental Complaints

Questions and Answers

Counseling Interview with Parents

Background Questions Regarding Adlerian Philosophy

A Demonstration with Richard’s Family

Work with Barbara’s Family

Early Recollections

Questions and Answers

More Questions and Answers, Plus Examples

Conflict Resolution

Mutual Respect

Pinpoint the Issue

Decision-Making through Leadership

Bibliography

Dedicated to my mother and father, Julia and William Camp; my wife and best friend, Mildred; our children, Christine Lick and Jonathan Camp, and their spouses, Benjamin and Iwona; and our grandchildren, Katherine, Julia, Carolyn, Austin, and Olivia. I have learned a great deal from observing and interaction with each one.

Foreword

What counseling strategies work to help children and families in our modern society? To answer this question, let me first say that historically, in the years after World War II, innovations and changes in the field of psychology, particularly in areas of treatment, came almost too fast and in too great a number to follow. In psychoanalysis, such workers as Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, and Frieda Fromm-Reichman brought new insights into both theory and therapy. Such people as Carl Rogers and B. F. Skinner opened new approaches to therapy and new ways of dealing with human behavior. In many ways, they have brought changes to the field of therapy, which have produced a new look, which for people schooled in analytic approaches, make the field at times almost unrecognizable.

Then there were those who went back to earlier theorists in the area of psychoanalysis and brought the insights of some of these earlier analysts to an American scene, which was changing and which required new approaches. Again, although the list is not exhaustive, one thinks of Frederick Allen applying the ideas of Otto Rank to the field of child guidance and child therapy, and of Rudolf Dreikurs’s applying Adlerian psychology to the area of child therapy and also to the entire field of parenting.

What Dreikurs saw in postwar America were children growing up in a society without traditions. Not only were the old-world traditions, which often shaped identity and sometimes shaped lives completely not a feature of American society, but in addition, the mobility which, prior to the war, had really been restricted to a small portion of American society now involved everybody. This mobility insisted that each person must somehow become his own creation and that parents, with their own childhood experiences contributing very little, would have to somehow help their children to create themselves in this way.

In addition to the lack of traditions, there was general weakening of extensive family ties so that families tended to become very much nuclear families and identification of children was with a very small group of family people, and a larger group of community people, including teachers, peers, and public heroes such as athletes and television stars. Here again, the parents, whose own childhood had perhaps prefigured some of this change, were often at a loss to have methods to deal with the demands of society on them and on their children.

Into this state of confusion Dreikurs introduced the work Children: The Challenge in 1964. He offered principles and, in addition, suggestions, for helping children to achieve their own sense of identity and the sense of respect, of being loved, and of optimism about themselves and their own futures, which is so necessary to healthy growth. However, Dreikurs was well aware that principles are not prescriptions. Although he was sometimes quite specific in his suggestions, he knew that the love, the respect, the optimism had to be within the parents before it could be sincerely expressed and transmitted to the child. Dreikurs did not offer a new way to write on the tabula rasa but rather offered ways in which firm, positive, parental identity and parental feeling could be consistently made manifest to the child. At no point did he mean the book to be a cookbook, nor a guarantee that actions A, B, and C would always result in desirable situation D.

If Dr. Dreikurs wrote an excellent book for parents in 1964, is there reason for Dr. Camp to write this book in addition to its three companion books, Parenting Our Children in a Changing World, Understanding and Managing the Difficult Child, and The Parent-Child Relationship, which in a sense do cover some of the same ground? To answer this question, one has only to consider the changes that have occurred in American society from 1964 until the present day. The year 1964 represented, perhaps, a culmination of some sixty years of change, which had not been slow but had had something in it of gradual change, with the war bringing a somewhat faster pace. The changes since 1964 have been anything but gradual, and they have been monumental. The role of the child in our society has changed. There is now an emphasis on children’s rights, which often seem to put parents and their children, supported by social forces, in an adversarial position. The protest movements of the late sixties, and since that time not only created suspicion in youth regarding their parents’ values, but also left many parents unsure of their own beliefs and values. The intrusion of the world outside the family, especially through the mediums of television and computer/information technology, has become almost total. As has been pointed out by a recent president, the great historical events of the era have left Americans feeling unsure, pessimistic about their future, and not in control of their own destinies. How then can parents be helped to help a child create himself?

Adlerian and related principles continue to have meaning, and they need to be stated in the vernacular of today and within the perspective of American society of today. This Dr. Camp has undertaken to do, and I think in large measure with success.

However, we must again return to the point that there are principles. The methods and the behaviors that are sometimes quite specifically drawn in Dr. Camp’s work are still not infallible formulae for the successful raising of children. They can help to deal with a parent’s sense of unsureness. They can bring to the parent a skill in expressing to the child what is positive and important in the relationship. However, we must all remember that much of parenting is intuitive. Much of children’s security comes from a feeling that their parents are in control and do know best. Much of their growth comes with parents who can limit, restrict, and discipline when children need that type of help in dealing with their impulses; who can support when the child is unsure and feels a need to be supported; and who can give freedom when freedom is what the child wants and really needs. Dr. Camp’s contribution is important. It will not simply help to make us good parents. It will offer a means to convey to children our hope and our love in a way which will promote their own self-respect, their own growth, and their ability to create themselves.

Richard E. O’Conner MD

Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist

Preface

(Including material from Rudolf Dreikurs, M.D., child psychiatrist)

Chapters 1 and 2 consists of Adlerian child psychology words, concepts, and ideas with information drawn from lectures, interviews, writings, and conversations with Rudolf Dreikurs, MD, as well as ideas from other Adlerian authors (see Bibliography), compiled, summarized, edited, updated, annotated, and supplemented for the twenty-first century.

Chapters 3 through 10 are essentially the words of Dr. Dreikurs, compiled and edited from tape recordings, excerpts from his public conversations, lectures, and radio and television presentations—all organized using his suggestions. Some paragraphs, passages, and/or stories were added using Dr. Adler’s and Dr. Dreikurs’s ideas. Some were paraphrased or otherwise rewritten to supplement or summarize for continuity or clarity. However, most of the content was taken from tape recordings, with Dr. Dreikurs’s key concepts, meanings, and principles retained.

Much of this material is presented primarily as a casebook, with explanations included and transcripts of cases conducted by Dr. Dreikurs. It is presented with his permission and appropriate confidentiality, including name changes, etc. Interspersed are comments, observations, and brief explanations prepared by the undersigned for clarification.

Dedicated to the memory of Rudolf Dreikurs, MD, my teacher, whose ideas appear frequently throughout this volume, along with those of Dr. Alfred Adler.

During the summer of 1970, Dr. Dreikurs and several psychologists met at Dr. Don Verger’s home in Platteville, Wisconsin. At the time, Dr. Dreikurs stated that if he had our youth, he would write another book or books, the outlines of which he discussed.

This is part of my attempt to create four of those books, of which this is one—my best effort to comply with the details of his long-remembered suggestions/requests.

William L. Camp, PhD

Introduction

During the summer of 1970, William L. Camp, PhD, was serving as associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. At that time, he and other professionals were privileged to get to know Rudolf Dreikurs, MD, a world-famous psychiatrist who headed the Adlerian Institute (now Adlerian University) in Chicago, Illinois. Dr. Dreikurs and his wife were in Platteville at the invitation of Dr. Don Verger, at the time chairman of the UW-Platteville Psychology Department, but also a faculty member at the Adlerian Institute. Dr. Dreikurs offered two one-credit graduate seminars at UW-Platteville during the summer session that year. Joseph Volpe, MD, another world-famous psychiatrist, also offered two one-credit graduate seminars in reciprocal inhibition, systematic desensitization, etc., during that same summer session. Surely, the stars fell on this medium-sized university that summer.

As part of formal and informal meetings with Dr. Dreikurs, including radio and television interviews through the nearby Dubuque, Iowa, television station, some of his presentations were recorded. Statements from these recordings have been edited by the undersigned and are presented here as part of Adlerian Counseling Theory and Practice (including information from Rudolf Dreikurs, MD, child psychiatrist, Essentially In His Own Words).

Some of the material presented was recorded as part of formal presentations, but other parts were gleaned from informal and small group discussions, etc. Perhaps Dr. Camp’s first verbal exchange with Dr. Dreikurs involved his mistaken statement that Dr. Dreikurs may have been a student of Alfred Adler, which elicited a somewhat vehement retort to Dr. Camp that No, young man, we were contemporaries!

During small informal discussions involving several psychology professionals who met with Dr. Dreikurs at that time, he pointed out that if he had their youth, he would write one or more additional books, the outlines of which he discussed. He pointed out that part of his early work had been to refine, organize, and present Alfred Adler’s ideas in a more concise and focused way for presentation in the United States and other parts of the world. He indicated at that time his hope that others would eventually do the same with his and other presentations of Adlerian psychology, to further distill and present the material for future audiences/generations of parents, teachers, and others. With that in mind, he granted permission for the Platteville group to record several of his presentations, including related discussions, again with the hope that some parts of it might possibly be summarized and organized for later presentation or publication. This volume is a partial attempt to do as he suggested.

The materials included here are Dr. Camp’s attempts to edit, organize, and present segments of that and other information. The material presented in the chapters that follow are Dr. Dreikurs’s and Dr. Adler’s ideas or at least represent elements of those ideas gleaned from that available information. Chapter 3 through chapter 10 are taken from recordings of Dr. Dreikurs’s words, edited as necessary for clarity, with explanatory comments provided as appropriate.

In these pages, Dr. Dreikurs’s ideas and insights regarding parents, children, families, and the evolving American society are set forth as he saw them at that time. In addition to his observations, he conducted demonstrations with volunteer families, done in front of his classes. These demonstrations were designed to enrich the understanding of the volunteer families and family members as well as that of graduate students who participated as members of the audiences. All are presented with permission and with individual identities appropriately obscured.

Students of Adlerian child psychology will appreciate the content and context of Dr. Dreikurs’s remarks. He agreed that part of these recorded lectures could be and perhaps should be organized, edited, and published. Much later, during Dr. Camp’s semiretirement, time became available for that to happen. The results, fifty years later, make up much of the content of this volume.

In the opinion of Adlerian psychologists and others, Dr. Adler’s and Dr. Dreikurs’s ideas and insights are as valuable and useful now as when they were originally presented. The order of presentation with explanatory comments, as well as elements of the syntax and sentence structure, were in some cases somewhat modified for clarity. However, the content comes directly from Dr. Rudolf Dreikurs. Chapters 1 and 2 were written by Dr. Camp but using Dr. Dreikurs’s ideas and information. A table of contents and bibliography were also added.

Please note that the words attributed to counselor in the text are, in fact, the words or very closely paraphrased ideas of Rudolf Dreikurs, MD, presented as taken from the tape recordings by William L. Camp, PhD, again with small edits or changes made only when necessary to provide logical sequence and/or clarity.

Dr. Dreikurs died in 1972.

Chapter 1

Brief Theory and History

The comments to follow constitute a theoretical outline model designed to prepare the reader for specific recommendations concerning family counseling. In order for us to get to where we need to go, we will start with the ideas of Freud and Adler to reveal background concerning a historical approach to the issue of developing methods for child management that work. Freud was a colleague of Adler, or Adler was a colleague of Freud, but one was never a student of the other in spite of what writers have written to perpetuate the myth of a student-teacher relationship. Adler was already a well-recognized psychiatrist in Vienna at the time of the founding of the Psychoanalytical Society. He was invited to join the society as a full member. Of the two, Freud was probably the most appropriate for his time and place. Freud was extremely appropriate in that he was first person to attempt to put of study of human behavior into a scientific mold. He gained academic acclaim for his achievements in attempting to do so. The difficulty with Freud’s attempt, however, was that the only science mold of that period was the model of Newtonian physics. Newtonian physics had been the mold or model of scientific investigations since the turn of the century, and Freud attempted to make man fit that model.

Most psychologists today recognize that much of what Freud originally wrote is now considered to be close to science fiction. This is simply because it seems so inappropriate to what we now think we understand about the nature of man—human behavior. Freud was somewhat accepted in academic circles in his time, but Adler was almost totally unaccepted. Adler predicated his model on a philosophical base, and no one thought they needed another philosopher in Vienna in 1910. They had just come through the golden age of German philosophy, so there was no need for another philosopher. Freud’s relative emerging acceptance by the lay public had a different origin which, very simply stated, is that the mechanistic determinism of the Newtonian model was the perfect copout for the Victorian ethics of the time. It was the antithesis of the Victorian model of religious thought. It was very simple to accept in that it seemed to give license. Since I was deprived of the breast as a baby, it was predestined that I would chase girls when I was thirty-seven. So there was no way that I could prevent it. It was just there, in me.

If you wanted to be popular, Freudian at that time, you soon believed that this is the only way it goes. You somehow felt you could use it as a license to do whatever you wanted to do and attribute it to your animal nature. Adler, on the other hand, based his philosophy on a concept of creativity. If you read very much of Adler and his concept of creativity, you find that what he wrote sounds like free will, which means that man is ultimately accountable or ultimately responsible for his own behavior.

So if you were trying to escape your Victorian free will kinds of notions in the early 1900s, you didn’t buy into the Adlerian model, which perpetuates a concept of man being ultimately responsible for his own behavior. For this reason, Adler was not very well accepted in the well-placed intellectual circles of Vienna.

To be more specific, Freud’s model implies that man is understandable in the here and now because of all the preceding events that led up to his present. This, for Freud, set limits necessary to infer the mechanistic determination of a science model and allow for assumptions of cause and effect. Adler’s greatest contribution was the teleanalytic notion that man understands the here and now, not because of what preceded, but because of what comes after. His concept was that the effect of the here and now on tomorrow is more important than what happened yesterday. His principle is, by the way, being validated for us pretty well now by the behaviorists.

Adler’s basic point was that if one wants to understand behavior, one must understand its outcome, not what caused it. To illustrate this point, consider the man who had gone to Las Vegas four times. Four times he took a roll of quarters and lost them in a slot machine. Now he is going to Las Vegas again and will probably again take his roll of quarters. If the concept of cause had any validity at all, obviously he ought to leave his roll of quarters home, but he’ll take them because this time he expects to win. For this man—like many of us—the anticipated outcome is often much more of a motivator than is our own prior experience. We call this purposeless behavior, but some have called it causalistic behavior. Whatever it’s label, it illustrates the greatest single separation between the theoretical positions held by Adler and Freud.

Freud saw man as basically a biological being who was driven by psychosexual urgings. Adler, on the other hand, saw man’s greatest need as that of belonging. He meant this in a generic sense, belonging to the human race, belonging in terms of movement toward other human beings. This, he said, is the most profound human quality. Adler went so far as to speculate that man’s very survival as a species might depend upon this movement toward others, this groupness. He pointed out that as individual animals we are extremely poorly equipped to survive. Our body covering—our body hair—is extremely sparse, our claws are very brittle, our teeth are dull, our strength is minimal for our body weight, and we are extremely slow. The point is that, our very survival is dependent on working together in groups.

No one of our ancestors was strong enough to kill a sabertooth tiger, but maybe community cooperation with only the loss of a few could kill the beast, allowing the rest to survive. Our forbearers were not fast enough to catch a gazelle, but maybe all of them could encircle the animals and run them back and forth until the animals got so tired that they could be killed. Perhaps even our language evolved as an aid to our survival as a species. Adler’s point was that if one had to identify a single critical need in man’s life, it would have to be movement toward others, and belonging.

This leads logically to speculation as to how people become people. How does a personality develop? What is the role of heredity, environment? Which is most important, or is it some specific combination of both? Actually, Adler suggested that all three of those possibilities are notably incorrect. That is, it is not either one nor the other, nor is it a combination of both, since all three of these possibilities leave out the most important aspect of all, which is the individual himself. It is the individual in interaction with his environment and in interaction with his inheritance that produces personality and not one or the other acting upon the individual as had been hypothesized by others.

As an example of this point, we cite an individual whose history we know who was born with a congenital club foot that was corrected by surgery—and from all appearances, then appeared quite normal. Yet he remained a helpless wheelchair invalid—seemingly totally incapable of doing much of anything for himself. We know of another person who as a young man had severe polio with severe paralysis in both legs. Water hydrotherapy treatment was popular at that time, which hooked his interest in swimming. He learned to swim and then went into diving and gymnastics. Within a decade, he was competing for the Pacific Coast League Diving league championship on the three-meter board. Our question is this, what permitted one person to see his deformity as something for which he had the right to expect service, and the other person to see it as something that he had to overcome? The only interpretation we can give for such behavior is that the individual himself determines, rather than the determination coming strictly from the outside.

As the child interprets or perceives his inner and outer environment, he begins to formulate a self-concept or what we call a lifestyle, which is quite different from the less-complex imposition of nature or nurture alone. This lifestyle becomes his characteristic way of viewing life and himself withing the context of life. This basis for interpretation is quite well formed by the time the child is four or five years of age. The child will begin to perceive himself or herself in a way that is rooted in personal experiences as he or she interprets them. This interpretation of perception forms the individual’s reality, his or her own perceptual field.

This biased apperception or comprehension of life provides each of us with a characteristic way of viewing life. This means that once we know a person’s lifestyle, we can predict with some degree of accuracy how they will view almost any situation throughout their lives. We have found that the child’s earliest social group—the family—plays a very important part in interpretation of perception. It is for this reason that we spend much time working with families in ways that permit parents to alter their perceptions or at least to attempt to alter their perceptions of situations.

We also believe that position withing the family—called the family constellation—plays a large part in helping or setting the stage for the individual’s interpretation. It does not determine his perception, but it does provide a basis from which he can proceed. We feel comfortable in our contention that there are no two children born alike into the same family, since each time a child is born into a family, the family changes. The first child is obviously born into a family that consists of only mother and father, or more frequently today perhaps only mother. So this family is either a two- or three-person relationship, but the next child is born into a family that already has three other members.

While the birth of a child does modify the family, that child soon develops a fairly firm conception of where he or she fits within the family hierarchy. As each successive child is born, each child views life from a different vantage point. From that vantage point, he or she begins to develop a characteristic way of seeing things and of viewing life in general.

Let us speculate for a moment concerning the first child in a family. The first child was born into a family that is just mom and dad. Suppose he is now one and a half years old, and it is Thanksgiving. He is the first grandchild on both sides of the family. Suppose for a moment that he and his family are now at the grandparents’ house with a dozen or so relatives from both sides of the family sitting around in the living room. Soon little Herman is doing a cute little dance in the middle of the floor, and by their collective responses, everyone is saying what seems to translate as Go, Herman! And Herman does just that. As he turns around the room, he makes an interpretation of what life is for him. This mental and emotional process is always phrased in the future tense. This is the notion of this fictional finalism, i.e., his formulation of a goal. It is a life goal, which is phrased as I will be secure as long as… The firstborn child in our example situation is getting some input that would suggest that his first hypothesis may be, I’ll be secure as long as I am the center of the universe.

This may seem to be an obvious sort of circumstance for a firstborn. This boy is a pretty secure child. First children are usually secure, nice youngsters. They get along fine, they toilet train relatively easily, they often learn speech patterns fluently at relatively young ages, and so on. Life for the firstborn is often rather smooth, until mother comes home from the hospital with the thing. And she walks right past old Herman, back to the baby’s bedroom. Grandmother comes and pats him on the head and walks on past.

Then, for some reason, we find that old Herman is wetting his pants, sucking his thumb, and perhaps a whole series of other things we thought he had outgrown. Why? Because his hypothesis about life has been violated. How can he be the center of the universe if indeed his universe now includes another central figure? This phenomenon seems to exist in most—if not all—cultures, which seems to suggest that this is a universal part of being human. There is an expression in almost every language for that which happens to the firstborn when the second child arrives. A colloquial expression used in parts of midwestern United States is that his nose is out of joint. In the Tahitian culture, it is another part of the anatomy, but it still is a displacement. Cross-cultural examination of this phenomenon suggests that it may well be something that will occur under wide varieties of cultural conditions.

During the past quarter century, sociologists and anthropologists have invested great amounts of time pointing out many differences they are able to discern between and among various ethnic groups. In fact, a current humorous definition of the Navaho family in Arizona with which we are familiar has been said to include a mother, a father, two or three children, and a Harvard anthropologist. Our point is that we have been spending so much time defining our differences that we may have lost sight of many of our similarities. Humanness transcends cultural biases. As any child grows and develops, he or she is busily engaged in the formulation of a lifestyle hypothesis.

Chapter 2

The Adlerian Approach to Counseling

The Adlerian approach to counseling is a highly structured approach. Adlerians operate according to a set of strict principles and procedures that make this form of counseling quite different from many other forms of counseling. In most other forms, a counselor sees a client and they talk, and they talk, and they talk, and sometimes something happens to help the client. Observation of such counseling has revealed that most of the talk that goes on between the counselor and the counselee is often insignificant, or at least of minor importance. Adlerians try not to waste a moment. Every word said and everything done is designed according to plan. In other words, Adlerians conduct a highly structured form of interview. In cases, for example, when counseling involves disclosure of the goals of the child, this extent of direction is clearly necessary. In such cases, other methods would usually not yield adequate recognition of reality and related facts. In Adlerian counseling, the issue is not words; it is one of techniques designed for specific applications.

The techniques revealed in the following pages are those that have been found to work best by Adlerian counselors over the past several decades. The methods described represent a systematic procedure for counseling, which many have found to be very effective. Adlerians find that by going almost immediately to the problem, and not wasting time, they gain advantage in that the client often responds with a maximum of validity. This direct way of dealing with each and every important step yields progress immediately—not after five or six interviews—which is probably the key reason for Adlerian’s ability to penetrate to real issues with a wide variety of persons, including the juvenile delinquent as well as the psychotic patient. In the pages that follow, the writer will present techniques that have been used successfully, with the suggestion that the reader, too, many find real success in their use.

As counseling is discussed, we will point out specifically how and why Adlerian counselors do and say what we recommend in counseling. Everything will be explained prior to presentations designed to illustrate the procedure. However, some elements of the ideas to be presented may only become completely obvious after the reader has tried them for himself or herself.

How is Adlerian counseling conducted? To answer this question, it is necessary to distinguish two types of counseling or consultation. One is child guidance and counseling, and the other is parent education. Many Adlerians no longer refer to their work with families as child guidance because the child guidance clinics of the past were more or less oriented toward the pathological. Our work with families does not focus on psychopathology. And we feel strongly that what we are doing with parents is strictly parent education.

The centers—which were first organized in the United States in Chicago, Illinois—were originally called Community Child Guidance Centers, yet this term also seems somewhat imprecise. Interestingly, most Adlerians accepted this term in American child guidance centers, while in Vienna—where the concept was developed—the centers were perhaps more correctly labeled Education Counseling Places or Places for Educational Counseling (in translation from German). More recently, Adlerians in the United States have adopted the term Family Education Center or Parent Education Program to designate the locations and focus of their work. These terms, too, are appropriate since what we are doing is family education. Our point, then, is that one kind of Adlerian counseling is family educational counseling.

The material to be presented below will illustrate the techniques used by the Adlerian counselor as he learns about a family during a first interview(s). In later pages, we will discuss details of these techniques that we use in family guidance and parent education.

The second aspect of counseling to be discussed in this chapter will involve the actual process of work with an individual concerning his or her own personal problems. Some practitioners call this work counseling while other call it psychotherapy. What is the difference between these two terms, and on what does that difference depend? Although we have heard and read a great many lengthy, cumbersome, and often needlessly detailed attempts to compare and contrast counseling and psychotherapy, we now believe that which the clinician does with clients or patients in reality seems to depend only on the academic degree held by the practitioner. If one is a psychiatrist, most of whom are MDs, whatever he does is called psychotherapy. If one is a clinical psychologist, the designation of his work depends on whether he holds the PhD or the master’s degree. If one has earned a PhD degree, what is done is again called psychotherapy, but if he holds a master’s degree, it is called counseling. This somewhat superficial definition is the only real difference we can find, after having rather carefully examined and worked with those who utilize and apply Adlerian procedures.

In attempting to help individuals, Adlerian clinicians use various procedures, none of which need be restricted in their application by the academic degree held by the counselor who utilizes them. The only exception we make to this generality involves our belief that psychotic persons are usually best treated in or through an institutionalized setting and/or by persons who have had supervised experience in work with this general classification of disability.

Family counseling is ordinarily done by practitioners trained in Adlerian methods in the following way. Since it is usually the mother and/or father with whom the clinician first has contract, the first thing he or she will often do is ascertain the family constellation. That person will write on a piece of paper, listing the family names vertically at the left of the page and then filling in detail from the parental interview. This facilitates recognition of relative ages and relationships at a glance. Still, when the counselor has examined the family constellation, he or she will have obtained only a first glimpse of the family problem, i.e., the nature of the problem.

The Adlerian counselor will make his or her first guesses, or tentative hypotheses, when examining the family constellation. When this is done, the counselor is using a technique that in Adler’s time was initially rejected by others as unscientific. Adler, however, using each bit of information drew tentative conclusions using family constellation data, i.e., he made informal guesses based on the family data. For many years, this technique was rejected by others as unscientific, until more recent developments in theoretical physics began to change the entire nature of science. Physicists have also come to the realization that guessing can be an adequately qualified and respectable format for seeking information. In their own field, physicists have called this method the Socratic process (part of the experimental method), which is a scientific term for making intelligent guesses. Simply stated, one makes educated guesses, develops a hypothesis, and then gathers information to determine whether the guess was correct or incorrect. (More on this later.)

Counselors often ask us, It is best to make a wrong guess or to make no guess at all? The answer, of course, is that guessing is a very profitable venture. When one makes an incorrect guess, he (or she) can immediately change it as soon as he obtains information that contradicts or modifies that guess or hypothesis. But if one makes no guess at all, he will have no hypothesis to correct; hence he will never know anything for sure. However, in our society, this process of making guesses is still not well accepted. People warn others not to jump to conclusions. In fact, the entire discipline of social and behavioral science is based on what some have called factophilia. People are crazy for facts. They gather facts and more facts in the hope that eventually they will understand. This, of course, poses problems. Eventually one gets so many facts that he cannot see the forest for the trees.

Within this context, why do Adlerians feel free to jump to conclusions so quickly? It is because we are wholistic. We attempt to see the whole first, i.e., the pattern. Then we seek the significance of its antecedents and elements. As we proceed, we gather information from the family constellation, trying simultaneously to find a pattern of the personality and of relationships between and among personalities. The success that can be demonstrated in doing so gives us the right (correct judgement) to jump or move to tentative conclusions.

A great deal of the opposition that Adler originally found to his techniques was based on his apparent tendency to do this very thing, to jump or move to tentative conclusions. Now, of course, years later, we see its value. Dr. Dreikurs often told the following story, which illustrates the importance of this wholistic point of view—this perception of the whole.*

I was invited by the Governor of the state of San Palo in Brazil to give a demonstration of child guidance counseling. I did it in my usual way. I let the mother talk. She spoke in Portuguese. I didn’t know Portuguese, but it worked out well through translation. After about an hour I believed I had a complete diagnosis of what was wrong, and made my recommendations. People were sitting there listening, with eyes and ears wide open. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. On the second day I sensed some recklessness in the group and on the third day the storm broke loose. First, a German assistant professor of psychology let me have it. She said, What you are doing is quackery! It is not permissible. When we get a child we examine him for perhaps two months before we know what it is all about, and you think you can find out in less than one hour what the real problem is. What you are doing is black magic!

If a physician friend of mine who had arranged the trip had not been there with me I might have faired pretty badly, but he let them have it and said, Instead of telling Dr. Dreikurs that it can’t be done, why don’t you learn from him how it is done? A long argument and discussion in Portuguese followed, which I didn’t understand, but the upshot was that I was asked whether I would be willing to see a different case, a juvenile delinquent, in the institute of criminology. Of course I would. For me it is not black magic, it is simply a helpful technique. So, I saw this boy. His problem was very simple: the poor boy simply could not say no. When his friends wanted to burglarize a house and asked him to stay and watch for the police, he couldn’t say no. Further, he did a poor job because all were caught. But, he had done (or tried to do) what was expected of him.

The point is that I diagnosed his case correctly; he admitted this was his problem. Was he a hardened criminal? Of course not. He got involved because he couldn’t say no to an order or request to watch. I was asked if I would trust him with keys, to let him come and go as he pleased. I said absolutely, yes. Then I was asked if I would feel I could rely on him if he promised to obey the rules. Again I said yes. I don’t know how many months, how many tests, and what kind of tests it took before they found out that he was trustworthy—which they did—but when I saw him he was trustworthy. When the staff of the institute discovered that my guess, based on the total situation as I saw it was correct, they admitted that I had been correct. I could, of course, see it immediately as I studied the pattern of the family—the family constellation.

Those readers who are not acquainted with Adlerian methods, and those who feel comfortable using more traditional methods, will probably find our method of making educated guesses (or as some might say, jumping to conclusions) a bit strange at first. A second story often told by Dr. Dreikurs may help to further clarify this method.**

It is the opposite of what I first experienced concerning social workers when I came to this country. I was working in a psychiatric hospital and I remember the first time I heard a social worker give a long half-hour report on a case. I got up and said, Now tell me, from all that you found out, what conclusions do you draw? I was promptly rebuffed by the chief psychiatrist who told me that, a social worker is not here to draw any conclusion; he is here only to provide the facts. Now, how can one provide the facts if he or she doesn’t know the significance of the facts. If it were common to describe the color of the various walls in the patient’s house, that simply wouldn’t do much good because one has to ask questions which are meaningful. But that person is not permitted to interpret factual observations. All of this is still going on in many settings, but not nearly to the same extent as before. We are learning.

In these pages, we hope to instruct you, the reader, so that you can learn to draw tentative conclusions immediately, from little evidence, and then let the counselee help you by supporting what you have guessed, or by denying it. Typically, we see the mother (or parents) first. We let her talk about the problems that she has with the child, but not for very long. Usually we encourage this for just a few minutes, until it becomes clear to us that the same data are being repeated, only in a different way. Many mothers can talk about the problems of their children for hours on end. We must learn when to intervene in this process. Of course, many children can also discuss their parents at length. It is all part of the game that we are now beginning to outline.

The first thing we do is this: Whenever the mother reports what her child has done wrong, we immediately ask her, And what did you do about it? This is necessary because it is only when we know what the mother has done about the child’s behavior that we can begin to understand the misbehavior of the child. In other words, until we know the mother’s response to the child’s acting out, we cannot know the reason for the child’s misbehavior since childhood misbehavior is geared directly to parental response. We now know that whatever the child is doing wrong is done for the benefit of the mother (parent). Here we come to a very important theoretical premise which is that the child’s behavior has a purpose. Whatever the child does is directed to a definite purpose.

But what are these purposes which we distinguish as the primary factors that lead to the disturbing behavior of children? The normal goal of a child’s behavior is to participate by being useful, by contributing, and by being part of interpersonal or group activity. But when the child is discouraged—and our society systematically discourages children—he or she then switches to what Adler called the useless side, that is, to disruptive or detrimental behavior. To understand this concept, one must first realize that misbehavior in children below the age range of eight to ten is always directed toward adults. The four goals of this behavior have been carefully studied. In the first goal, called attention getting, the child wants to get adult attention and to keep that someone busy, if necessary, with disturbance. If he (or she) can gain attention by being cute or unique, he will, but if he cannot he will be bad, bad enough to get the attention he desires. In fact, he will much prefer to be scolded and/or threatened and/or punished than to be ignored. When ignored, he feels lost. The child’s second goal is power. In a real sense, he is saying, If you don’t let me do what I want to do you don’t love me—you’re unfair. Many parents seem to be almost continually drawn into power contests (fights) with their children. Goal three is revenge. This type of conflict occurs when the child doesn’t want attention, but rather wants to get even. He wants to hurt his parents as he feels hurt by them. Goals three and four reveal a child who is so discouraged that he wants to be left alone. The fourth goal is demonstration of complete inadequacy. Here in a very real sense the child is saying, Don’t do anything with me. You can’t do anything, and I can’t do anything. I quit.

As soon as we discover the reaction of the mother to her child’s behavior, we have the first glimpse or clue of the child’s goals. When the mother is annoyed, the chances are very good that the child’s goal is number 1, attention-getting. When she feels angry, provoked, or defeated, the chances are that it is goal two, power. When she feels deeply hurt and disrespected, the child’s goal is number 3, revenge. When she feels hopeless, like giving up, like throwing up her arms and saying, I just don’t know what to do with you, we are usually seeing goal four, demonstration of inadequacy.

Further, the mother always does exactly what the child wants her to do and then may act surprised that what she does fails to work. In other words, most corrective efforts on the part of parents involve behaviors that are exactly what the child wants them to do. But most parents have no idea that this is the case.

From the mother’s response, then, we can immediately determine the goal of the child. It is interesting and perhaps at first may even seem hard to believe—until you try it—that when the mother reports about an incident and what she told the child she will nearly always repeat it in the same tone that she originally used with the child. Immediately, we can determine from her tone what goal was involved: attention, power, revenge, or inadequacy. Also, however, the reader should note that when two children behave in the same ways (do the same things), the reaction of the mother is not