ABSTRACT
Those familiar with Individual Psychology know that Adler specified three main tasks in life-friendship, love, and work. However, in a paper published in the Handbook of the Science of Work (Giese, 1930) and reprinted as Fundamentals of Individual Psychology (Adler, 1970), Adler specified a fourth task as follows:
There are four great questions of life which, although schematized, encompass all the relationships of life; the social relationship to fellowmen, the question of occupation, the question of love and the attitude toward art and creative endeavor [schöferische Gestaltung]. (Adler, 1930/1970, p. 8)
Ansbacher, who edited this reprint, speculated that the fourth task consisted of an extension of the work task to leisure and hobbies. Yet, no one actually knows what Adler specifically meant by this fourth creative task. He neither defined it further in this paper nor clarified it anywhere else. However, there is an argument for showing that the task of “art and creative endeavor” reaches far beyond what we call the “arts,” and past what Ansbacher thought might be an application to leisure and hobbies. What Adler spoke of was the creative endeavor of the self in constructing
what he earlier designated as life line, guiding line, or one of a host of other similar expressions. I have identified more than 30 such phrases Adler used to explain this idea (Stone, 2001). My argument for this interpretation of what Adler meant by a fourth task is based upon the fact that he indicated every person shows creativity in their solution to the tasks of life by constructing a subjective, personal viewpoint for how to interpret the world, and for how to think and behave. This is what constitutes the creative self at work. Another example supporting this position comes from Adler’s paper on Mass Psychology (1937), where he writes:
After long-continued study and reflection, I found that one’s style of life-acquired in early childhood-is a result of the process of adapting oneself to the evolving structure of one’s immediate environment; and that this process of adaptation is effected by relatively inadequate means, by the creative power of the child actuated by the evolutionary urge to conquer and surmount obstacles. (p. 114, my emphasis)
Similar statements supporting this position were made by Adler where he opined about “the creative power of the child” (Adler, 1969, p. 6; 1979, p. 187).
