ABSTRACT
The Neo-Freudians represent the transition from depth to self-psychology. Credit is generally given to Alfred Adler as the first revolutionary to realize that man is as much a product of his culture as of his psychological drives, and to urge that man self-consciously plans his own life. Adler's term: Individual Psychology, is significant, and his teachings have had a considerable influence upon many workers in child guidance (cf. Ansbacher, 1956). Even for Adler, however, the child is innately inferior and conscious of his own weakness; hence he develops a drive for coping with life — a ‘life-style’ that persists in all his later adjustments. Karen Horney accepted the deterministic Freudian view that adult conflicts and neuroses arise from the totality of childhood experience, but urged that the inconsistent demands of Western culture are at least as influential as the sex instinct. For example, society's stress on Christian altruistic virtues and on the achievement of success through individual assertiveness create frustrations and anxieties which are solved by neurotic strategies. In Fromm's and in Sullivan's writings there is even more stress on sociological factors and on the building up by the neurotic of distorted patterns of relationships with people and conceptions of the Self. Each of these writers, of course, differed in important respects from the others (cf. Hall and Lindzey, 1957), but they all emphasized, in contradistinction both to Freudian and to modern learning theories, the view that the individual strives to actualize and to maintain the integrity of his personality.
