ABSTRACT
Adler's striving for a place in the sun, however, also had one consequence that psychoanalysis is bound to appreciate. When, after the emergence of our irreconcilable scientific opposition, I got Adler to resign from the editorship of the Zentralblatt, he also left the Society and founded a new society that initially showed its good taste by adopting the name "Society for Free Psychoanalysis." But people outside, who are strangers to psychoanalysis, are evidently as i l l equipped to appreciate the differences
between the views of two psychoanalysts as we Europeans are to recognize the nuances that distinguish two Chinese faces. "Free" psychoanalysis remained in the shadow of the "official," "orthodox" version and was discussed merely as an appendage to it. Then Adler took the step that merits gratitude: he fully dissolved the ties to psychoanalysis and presented his doctrine separately as "Individual Psychology." There is so much space on God's earth and it is certainly justified that everybody who is able to do it should romp around unchecked; but it is not desirable that people should go on living under the same roof when they no longer understand each other and cannot get along any more. (p. 95f.)
To be sure, that was not al l Freud had to say about Adler; he also commented on Adler's theories:
Adler's doctrine is characterized less by what it asserts than by what it denies; it thus consists of three elements of very unequal value: good contributions to ego psychology, superfluous but admissible translations of analytic facts into a new jargon, and distortions of these facts insofar as they do not fit in with the ego presuppositions.
