ABSTRACT
Adler drew on the wide field of human concupiscence and discovered the need for self-assertion. This tendency of human nature was likewise made a cardinal principle of psychology and with the same one-sidedness so regrettable in Freud. Psychotherapy had grown to a psychology, and therapeutics had ceased to be a mere technique, the illusion still continued to flourish that psychological treatment was some kind of technical procedure. The object of therapy is not the neurosis but the man who has the neurosis. People have long known, for instance, that a cardiac neurosis comes not from the heart, as the old medical mythology would have it, but from the mind of the sufferer. The personality of the patient demands all the resources of the doctor's personality and not technical tricks. Freud took his stand with fanatical one-sidedness on sexuality, concupiscence in a word, on the 'pleasure principle'.
