Adler Quotes

“This quote begins here. A simple rule in dealing with those who are hard to get along with is to remember that this person is striving to assert his superiority; and you must deal with him from that point of view. This quote ends here.”
― Alfred Adler, Social Interest: Adler's Key to the Meaning of Life

“But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little use) and almost ignorant of Nature: Adler, reducing almost everything to the will to power: and Jung, certainly the most humane and gentlest of them, and possibly the greatest, but nevertheless the descendant of parsons and professors, and himself a super-parson and a super-professor. all men of extraordinary character, and they devised systems that are forever stamped with that character.… Davey, did you ever think that these three men who were so splendid at understanding others had first to understand themselves? It was from their self-knowledge they spoke. They did not go trustingly to some doctor and follow his lead because they were too lazy or too scared to make the inward journey alone. They dared heroically. And it should never be forgotten that they made the inward journey while they were working like galley-slaves at their daily tasks, considering other people's troubles, raising families, living full lives. They were heroes, in a sense that no space-explorer can be a hero, because they went into the unknown absolutely alone. Was their heroism simply meant to raise a whole new crop of invalids? Why don't you go home and shoulder your yoke, and be a hero too?”
― Robertson Davies, The Manticore

“The difficulties connected with my criterion of demarcation (D) are important, but must not be exaggerated. It is vague, since it is a methodological rule, and since the demarcation between science and nonscience is vague. But it is more than sharp enough to make a distinction between many physical theories on the one hand, and metaphysical theories, such as psychoanalysis, or Marxism (in its present form), on the other. This is, of course, one of my main theses; and nobody who has not understood it can be said to have understood my theory.

The situation with Marxism is, incidentally, very different from that with psychoanalysis. Marxism was once a scientific theory: it predicted that capitalism would lead to increasing misery and, through a more or less mild revolution, to socialism; it predicted that this would happen first in the technically highest developed countries; and it predicted that the technical evolution of the 'means of production' would lead to social, political, and ideological developments, rather than the other way round.

But the (so-called) socialist revolution came first in one of the technically backward countries. And instead of the means of production producing a new ideology, it was Lenin's and Stalin's ideology that Russia must push forward with its industrialization ('Socialism is dictatorship of the proletariat plus electrification') which promoted the new development of the means of production.

Thus one might say that Marxism was once a science, but one which was refuted by some of the facts which happened to clash with its predictions (I have here mentioned just a few of these facts).

However, Marxism is no longer a science; for it broke the methodological rule that we must accept falsification, and it immunized itself against the most blatant refutations of its predictions. Ever since then, it can be described only as nonscience—as a metaphysical dream, if you like, married to a cruel reality.

Psychoanalysis is a very different case. It is an interesting psychological metaphysics (and no doubt there is some truth in it, as there is so often in metaphysical ideas), but it never was a science. There may be lots of people who are Freudian or Adlerian cases: Freud himself was clearly a Freudian case, and Adler an Adlerian case. But what prevents their theories from being scientific in the sense here described is, very simply, that they do not exclude any physically possible human behaviour. Whatever anybody may do is, in principle, explicable in Freudian or Adlerian terms. (Adler's break with Freud was more Adlerian than Freudian, but Freud never looked on it as a refutation of his theory.)

The point is very clear. Neither Freud nor Adler excludes any particular person's acting in any particular way, whatever the outward circumstances. Whether a man sacrificed his life to rescue a drowning, child (a case of sublimation) or whether he murdered the child by drowning him (a case of repression) could not possibly be predicted or excluded by Freud's theory; the theory was compatible with everything that could happen—even without any special immunization treatment.

Thus while Marxism became non-scientific by its adoption of an immunizing strategy, psychoanalysis was immune to start with, and remained so. In contrast, most physical theories are pretty free of immunizing tactics and highly falsifiable to start with. As a rule, they exclude an infinity of conceivable possibilities.”
― Karl Popper

“Elli."
"Shea," she gasped as he bit softly.
"Show me your undies." Elli broke out in a fit of giggles as Shea smiled against her neck.
"No way."
"What if a get a goal just for you-then can I see your undies?"
"Do they have to be on me?" she asked, playing along. There was no way in hell he would see her in her undies.
"Yes, they do."
"Hmm...no."
"Come on, two goals."
"No."
"Three."
"Okay. Three, and y'all gotta win."
"Deal. Now kiss me."
"That I will do," she said with a grin as she leaned up on her tippy toes to kiss him deeply.
It was probably the first time Elanor Fisher hoped Shea didn't score.”
― Toni Aleo, Taking Shots

“He gave her one last kiss before walking toward his truck. She watched his beautiful sculpted ass in his fitted jeans and suppressed a groan. She had never felt the urge to rip a man's clothes off, but ripping Shea Adler's jeans off would be a magical experience if she ever got the balls and confidence to do it.”
― Toni Aleo, Taking Shots

“Two inches to the left, and it would have severed your femoral artery.” Devin glares at him. “You would have bled out.”

My son’s blue eyes meet mine as he smirks, and I shake my head. That’s a boy in love. “You know your mother once stabbed me.” I chuckle at the memory.

His lips pull back with disgust. “Gross, Dad. I don’t want to know about any kinks you and Mom have.”

“You know they say sexual fetishes are hereditary,” I add.

He makes a gagging sound, and Devin just laughs.”
― Shantel Tessier, Madness