2011 Reprint of 1938 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Alfred Adler (1870-1937) was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the Adlerian school of individual psychology. In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement and a core member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He was the first major figure to break away from psychoanalysis to form an independent school of psychotherapy and personality theory. In this late work, "Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind", Adler turns to the subject of metaphysics. He argues his vision of society: "Social feeling means above all a struggle for a communal form that must be thought of as eternally applicable... when humanity has attained its goal of perfection... an ideal society amongst all mankind, the ultimate fulfillment of evolution." This social feeling for Adler is a community feeling whereby one feels he or she belongs with others and has also developed an ecological connection with nature (plants, animals, the crust of this earth) and the cosmos as a whole.

After my attempt to investigate in the Studie uber Minderwertigkeit -von Organen (or Study of Organ Inferiority) the structure and tectonic of organs in association with their genetic basis, their functional capability and destiny, I proceeded, based on the data already available and my own experience, to use the same method in the study of psychopathology. In this book I have embraced the most important results of my comparative, individual-psychologic studies of the neuroses. I have used an empiric basis in comparative individual psychology -as I did in the theory of somatic inferiority--to establish a fictive standard of normality in order to enable one to measure and compare with it grades of deviation from it. In both of these scientific endeavors, the comparative method of study reckons with the origin of phenomena, dismisses from consideration the present and seeks to outline from them the future.This method leads us to view the compulsion of evolution and the pathological elaboration as the result of a conflict which breaks forth in the organic sphere for the purpose of attaining equipoise, functional capability and adaptation; the same struggle in the psychic sphere is under the command of a fictitious idea of personality whose influence dominates the development of the neurotic character and symptoms. If in the organic sphere, "the individual develops into a unit mass in which all of the individual parts co-operate toward a common goal" (Virchow), if the various abilities and tendencies of the individual tend toward a purposefully directed, unit-personality, then we may look upon every single manifestation of life as if in its past, present and future there are contained traces of a dominating, guiding idea. In this way it has appeared to the author of this book, that the most minute trait of psychic life is permeated by a purpose force., Comparative, individualistic psychology sees in every psychic event the impress, so to speak, or symbol of a uniformly directed plan of life which only comes more clearly to light in the neuroses and psychoses.