What would Alfred Adler say about the Early Recollection of divorce?
S M asked:
My first memory (early recollection) was standing in between my parents when they were yelling before my Dad left. They got divorced.
How would Adler say this has influenced my style of life, etc?
Aromatherapy
My first memory (early recollection) was standing in between my parents when they were yelling before my Dad left. They got divorced.
How would Adler say this has influenced my style of life, etc?
Aromatherapy
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Comments
Hmm…interesting inquiry. I am actually taking Clinical Psychology (Introduction to Professional Psychology) and we are reviewing Adlerian therapy this past week. He emphasized the importance of striving for superiority as youngsters, and the need for social interest which then is thought to replace this inferiority experienced earlier in life.
Just a thought…
Sorry, there are too many other factors that enter in or need to be included in this issue.
I don’t believe your ER is “of divorce” but of your parents yelling. As time went by, you learned to deal with each of them separately, in various ways and in terms of their various behaviors. Did one bad-mouth the other partner, or was there support and encouragement between them? Did you have siblings, and how did you interact with them about the divorce? What do you think you learned from the divorce experience: anger? tolerance? forgiveness? That a man/woman is someone who (leaves you? keeps on loving you? helps you? is interested in you? Beats you…?)
I suspect that Adler himself would say (since divorce violates one of his three main Life Tasks) that your parents’ angry divorce became an “over-burdening situation” which you carried into youth and adulthood as an excuse for certain attitudes or behaviors (distrust of romantic partners, for example) and which have prevented you from dealing with adulthood in a mature way. Adler lived in another country and another time, of course, and things are different today. (As his son, Kurt, might have said as he said so often about other things, “That was another thing about which my father was mistaken.”)
In terms of your Life Style, I’d say your parents’ angry divorce may have become one of the major problems you, as a child, could not solve…and which therefore got chosen by you as “The Problem” you would have to solve before you could go on with your life. And so it would have become the center around which much of the rest of your life would circulate: Your Fictional Final Goal.
Glad to get a question involving Adler! (Have you been to my web site on Adler?)