DR. ALFRED ADLER'S work in psychology, while it is scientific and general in method, is essentially the study of the separate personalities we are, and is therefore called Individual Psychology. Concrete, particular, unique human beings are the subjects of this psychology, and it can only be truly learned from the men, women and children we meet.The supreme importance of this contribution to modern psychology is due to the manner in which it reveals how all the activities of the soul are drawn together into the service of the individual, how all his faculties and strivings are related to one end. We are enabled by this to enter into the ideals, the difficulties, the efforts and discouragements of our fellow-men, in such a way that we may obtain a whole and living picture of each as a personality. In this coordinating idea, something like finality is achieved, though we must understand it as finality of foundation. There has never before been a method so rigorous and yet adaptable for following the fluctuations of that most fluid, variable and elusive of all realities, the individual human soul.

2011 Reprint of 1930 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Adler, along with Freud and Jung, created an entirely new branch of psychology, namely psychoanalysis. "The Pattern of Life", with an introduction by W. Beran Wolfe, the editor of Adler's clinical cases, demonstrates the method and technique of "Individual Psychology" so characterized by the Adlerian school of neurosis and psychotherapy. It does this by introducing the reader to the clinical procedure used by Adler in handling cases of wayward and defective children. According to the reviewer, the whole book is filled with good common sense plus keen scientific insight into the problems of maladjustment.