Chapter 3 Adlerian Theory

ADLERIAN THERAPY

Note taken from Key Reference Text :
Theory & Practice of Counseling & Psychotherapy,
Gerald Corey 9th Ed.
Note taking by ONG SING YEE (KB, PA)

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

•KEY CONCEPTS
•THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS
•APPLICATION: THERAPEUTIC TECHNIQUES
AND PROCEDURES

SEMINAR OBJECTIVE

• VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
✓Understand and able to apply the key concepts on:
❖Inferiority Feeling
❖Subjective Perception of Feeling
❖Unity and Patterns of Human Personality
❖Social Interest
❖Birth Order
❖Fictional finalism
❖Superiority
❖Inferiority Feeling

VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE

• Adler believed that the individual begins to form an approach in the 1st 6 years
of living

• Person’s past as perceived in the present and how an individual’s interpretation
of early events continued to influence that person’s present behavior.

• Humans are motivated primarily by social relatedness .
• Behavior is purposeful and goal directed, and consciousness.
• Stressed choice and responsibility, meaning in life and the striving for success,

completion and perfection.
• We have the capacity to interpret, influence and create events.
• Focus: reeducating individuals and reshaping society.
• Focus: internal determinants of behavior such as values, beliefs, attitudes,

goals, interests, and the individual perception of reality.
Inferiority feelings
• Well spring of creativity
• Motivate us to strive for master, success (superiority) and completion.
• a normal condition of all people and as a source of all human striving

VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE

Subjective Perception of Reality
•View the world from the client’s subjective frame of
reference, an orientation described as
phenomenological.
•Subjective reality= individual’s perceptions, thoughts,
feelings, values, beliefs, convictions and conclusion

VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE

Unity and Patterns of Human Personality

•Individual psychology

•The unity and indivisibility of the person and stressed
understanding the whole person in the context of his or
her life.

•Holistic concept: all aspects of ourselves must be
understood in relationship.

•Implication : the client is an integral part of a social
system

•Emphasis on interpersonal relationship

VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE

Unity and Patterns of Human Personality – Behavior as
purposeful and goal oriented.

•All human behavior has a purpose

•Basic assumption: we can only think, feel and act in relation to
our goal: we can fully understood only in light of knowing the
purposes and goals toward which we are striving.

•Most decisions are based on the person’s experiences, on the
present situation and on the direction in which the person is
moving – with the latter being the most important.

•Fictional finalism = an imagined life goal that guides a person’s
behavior. Or guiding self ideal/ goal of perfection = striving
towards superiority and perfection.

VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE

Unity and Patterns of Personality – Striving for Significance and
Superiority

•Superiority = moving from a perceived lower (or minus)
position to a perceived better ( or plus) position.

•People cope with feelings of helplessness by striving for
competence, mastery and perfection.

•People are viewed as adopting a proactive approach to their
social environment.

•We can reframe childhood experiences and consciously create
a new style of living.

View of Human Nature

Unity and Patterns of Human Life - Lifestyle
•connecting themes and rules of interaction that give
meaning to the world.
•Our perceptions regarding self, others and the world.
•It includes an individual’s characteristic way of thinking,
acting, feeling, living and striving toward long term
goals.

View of Human Nature

Social Interest and Community Feeling

• Most significant and distinctive concepts

• Individuals’ awareness of being apart of the human community and to
individual’s attitudes in dealing with the social world.

• We are primarily motivated by a desire to belong

• Community feeling = feeling of being connected to all humanity – past,
present and future – and to being involved in make the world a better
place.

• We must successfully master 3 universal life tasks: building friendships
(social tasks), establishing intimacy (love – marriage task), contributing to
society (occupational task).

• Each of these tasks requires the development of psychological capacities of
friendship and belonging , for contribution and self worth and for
cooperation

View of Human Nature

Social interest

• the action life of one’s community feeling, and it involves being as
concerned about others as one is about oneself.

• Capacity to cooperate and contribute

• We have enough contact with the present to make a move toward a
meaningful future, that we are willing to give and to take, and that we
develop our capacity for contributing to the welfare of others and striving
for the betterment of humanity.

• Innate, learned, developed and used.

• A sense of identification and empathy with others.

• Central indicator of mental health

• Feelings of inferiority and alienation diminish, through shared activity and
mutual respect.

VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE

Birth Order and Sibling Relationships

• Birth order: increase an individual’s probability of having a certain set of
experiences.

• Oldest: receives a good deal of attention. Becoming a model child, bossing
younger children and exhibiting a high achievement drive.

• Second child: competitive struggle between the 1st 2 children influences
the later course of their lives.

• Middle child: may become convinced of the unfairness of life and feel
cheated. Poor me attitude and become a problem child. May become the
switchboard and the peacemaker, the person who holds things together.

• Youngest child: the most pampered one. Tend to go their own way. May
outshine everyone.

• The only child: May learn to share or cooperate with other children. May
become dependently tied to parents. May want to have center stage all of
the time.

SEMINAR OBJECTIVE

THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS
•Therapeutic Goals
✓Understand the goals for the educational process of
therapy
•Therapist’s Function and Role
✓Understand the counselor’s function and role
•Relationship Between Therapist and Client
✓Understand the relationship between therapist and
client

THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS

Therapeutic Goals
• Collaborative arrangement between the client and the counselor.
• The therapeutic process includes forming a relationship based on

mutual respect, a holistic psychological investigation or lifestyle
assessment and disclosing mistaken goals and faulty assumptions with
the person’s style of living.
• Followed by reeducation or reorientation of the client toward the
useful side of life.
• Main aim: to develop the client’s sense of belonging and to assist in
the adoption of behaviors and processes characterized by
community feeling and social interest.
• They favor the growth model of personality
• The counseling process focuses on providing information , teaching,
guiding, and offering encouragement.

THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS

•Providing new cognitive map, a fundamental understanding of
the purpose of their behavior, counselors assist them in
changing their perceptions.

•Goals for the educational process of therapy:

- Fostering social interest

- Helping clients overcome feelings of discouragement and
inferiority

- Modifying clients’ views and goals

- Changing faulty motivation encouraging the individual to
recognize equality among people

- Helping people to become contributing members of society.

THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS

Therapist’s Function and Role

• Therapists tend to look for major mistakes in thinking and valuing such as
mistrust, selfishness, unrealistic ambitions and lack of confidence.

• They assist clients in better understanding, challenging and changing their
life story.

• Make a comprehensive assessment of the client’s functioning.

• Gathering information on the client’s family constellation which includes
parents, siblings and others living in the home, life tasks and early
recollections.

• Uses early recollections as an assessment procedure, defined as stories of
events that a person says occurred before he or she was 10 years of age.

• The process of gathering early memories is part of what is called a lifestyle
assessment.

• Dreams as a rehearsal for possible future actions, suggest possible answers
to a client’s present problems.

THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS

Client’s Experience in Therapy
•Clients explore what Adlerians call private logic, the
concepts about self, others and life that constitute the
philosophy on which an individual’s life style is based.
•It involves our convictions and beliefs that get in the
way of social interest and that do not facilitate useful,
constructive belonging.

THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS

Relationship Between Therapist and Client
• Good client – therapist relationship to be 1 between equals that is

based on cooperation, mutual trust, respect, confidence,
collaboration and alignment of goals.

SEMINAR OBJECTIVE

APPLICATION: THERAPEUTIC
TECHNIQUES AND PROCEDURES
•Phases of Existential Counseling
✓Understand and able to apply 4 phases in
counseling in a case study

THERAPEUTIC TECHNIQUES
AND PROCEDURES

These phases are as follows:

•Establish the proper therapeutic relationship

•Explore the psychological dynamics operating in the
client (an assessment)

•Encourage the development of self understanding
(insight into purpose)

•Help the client make new choices (reorientation and
reeducation)

THERAPEUTIC TECHNIQUES
AND PROCEDURES

Phase 1 : Establish the Relationship

•Based on a sense of interest that grows into caring,
involvement, and friendship.

•Must deal with personal issues

•Making person to person contact

•A positive relationship is created by listening,
responding, demonstrating respect for clients’
capacity to understand purpose and seek change and
exhibiting faith, hope and caring.

•Pay more attention to the subjective experiences.

THERAPEUTIC TECHNIQUES
AND PROCEDURES

Phase 2 Explore the Individual’s Psychology Dynamics
• Aim: to get a deeper understanding of an individual’s life styles.
• Subjective interview
- the counselor helps the client to tell his or her life story as completely as

possible.
• Objective interview seeks to discover information about
- How problems in the client’s life began
- Any precipitating events.
- A medical history including current and past medications
- A social history
- The reasons the client chose therapy at this time
- The person’s coping with life tasks
- A lifestyle assessment.

THERAPEUTIC TECHNIQUES
AND PROCEDURES

Phase 2 Explore the Individual’s Psychology Dynamics

The family constellation

•The client’s evaluation of conditions that prevailed in
the family when the person was a young child (family
atmosphere), birth order, parental relationship, and
family values, and extended family and culture.

THERAPEUTIC TECHNIQUES
AND PROCEDURES

• Phase 2 Explore the Individual’s Psychology Dynamics

Early recollections

• 1 time occurrences, usually before the age of 9

• An understanding of how we view ourselves, how we see the world, what
our life goals are, what motivates us, what we value and believe in and
what we anticipate for our future.

• We tend to remember only 6- 12 memories.

• Therapists use it as a projective techniques

- Assess the client’s convictions about self, others, life and ethnics

- Assess the client’s stance in relation to the counseling session and the
counseling relationship

- Verify the client’s coping patterns

- Assess individual strengths, assets and interfering ideas.

THERAPEUTIC TECHNIQUES
AND PROCEDURES

• Phase 2 Explore the Individual’s Psychology Dynamics
• Integration and summary
• Fears include being imperfect, being vulnerable, being
disapproved of and suffering from past regrets.
• 5 basic mistakes
- Overgeneralization,
- False or impossible goals of security
- Misperceptions of life and life’s demands,
- Minimization or denial of one’s basic worth,
- Faulty values.

THERAPEUTIC TECHNIQUES
AND PROCEDURES

Phase 3 Encourage Self Understanding and Insight
• Insight
- understanding translated into constructive action.
- An understanding of the motivations that operate in a
client’s life.
• Interpretation
- deals with clients’ underlying motives for behaving the
way they do in the here and now.
- Presented tentatively in the form of open ended
questions that can be explored in the sessions.

THERAPEUTIC TECHNIQUES AND
PROCEDURES

Phase 4 : Reorientation and Reeducation
Putting insights into practice
•Reorientation involves shifting rules of interaction,

process and motivation

THERAPEUTIC TECHNIQUES
AND PROCEDURES

Phase 4 : Reorientation and Reeducation
The encouragement process
• Central of all phases of counseling and therapy
• To build courage
• Encouragement entails showing faith in people, expecting them to

assume responsibility for their lives, and valuing them for who they
are.
• Promoting and activating social interest
• In the relationship phase, mutual respect.
• In the assessment phase, clients are encouraged to recognized.
• During reorientation, new possibilities are generated.

THERAPEUTIC TECHNIQUES
AND PROCEDURES

Phase 4 : Reorientation and Reeducation

Making a difference

•Techniques that go by the names of immediacy, advice,
humor, silence, paradoxical intention, acting as if,
spitting in the client’s soup, catching oneself, the push
button technique, externalization, re-authoring,
avoiding the traps, confrontation, use of stories and
fables, early recollection analysis, lifestyle assessment,
encouraging, task setting and commitment, giving
homework, and terminating and summarizing have all
been used.

Thank You