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.

This first volume of the Alfred Adler works collect four very important works, a must have for anybody interested in psychology: -What Life Could Mean to You-The Pattern of Life-The Science of Living-Problems of Neurosis 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: indeed, to Freud he was "the only personality there" What life could mean to you is one of Adler's most popular books. On the meaning of life, he begans: "Human beings live in the realm of meanings. We do not experience pure circumstances; we always experience circumstances in their significance for men. Even at its source our experience is qualified by our human purposes. " Wood " means " wood in its relation to mankind ", and " stone " means " stone as it can be a factor in human life." If a man should try to escape meanings and devote himself only to circumstances he would be very unfortunate: he would isolate himself from others: his actions would be useless to himself or to any one; in a word, they would be meaningless. But no human being can escape meanings. We experience reality always through the meaning we give it; not in itself, but as something interpreted. It will be natural to suppose, therefore, that this meaning is always more or less unfinished, incomplete; and even that it is never altogether right. The realm of meanings is the realm of mistakes."

THE science of Individual Psychology teaches us that the leit-motif of all neurosis and conflict is a sense of discouragement and inferiority. But the keynote of the practice of Individual Psychology is that "benevolent comradeship" which Adler tells us should characterize the attitude of the physician towards his patient.The sincerity of this utterance, and its full significance, can hardly be better known than by the Pupil, who has been asked, by the Teacher, to write some foreword to the latter's own work. Perhaps in such case the Pupil may he thought to fulfil his duty best in attempting to set out something he has learned, which others may wish to know.