What Life Could Mean to You

by Alfred Adler

  An anecdote is told of the leader of a small religious sect. One day she called her followers together and informed them that the end of the world was due on the next Wednesday. Her followers were much impressed, sold their property, abandoned all worldly considerations, and waited in excitement for the promised catastrophe. Wednesday passed without unusual occurrences. On Thursday they called in a body to ask an explanation. "See what difficulties we are in," they said. "We abandoned all our security. We told everybody we met that the end of the world was coming on Wednesday, and when they laughed at us we were not discouraged but repeated that we knew it on infallible authority. Wednesday has gone by and the world is still here around us."

  "But my Wednesday," said the prophetess, "is not your Wednesday." In this way, by a private meaning, she secured herself against challenge. A private meaning can never be put to the test. The mark of all true "meanings of life" is that they are common meanings — they are meanings in which others can share, and meanings which others can accept as valid. A good solution of the problems of life will always clear the way for others also; for in it we shall see common problems met in a successful way. Even genius is to be defined as no more than supreme usefulness: it is only when- a man's life is recognized by others as having significance for them that we call him a genius. The meaning expressed in such a life will always be, "Life means—to contribute to the whole." We are not speaking here of professed motives.

  We are closing our ears to professions and looking at achievements. The man who meets the problems of human life successfully acts as if he recognized, fully and spontaneously, that the meaning of life is interest in others and cooperation. Everything he does seems to be guided by the interest of his fellow beings; and where he meets difficulties he tries to surmount them only by means consonant with human welfare.

  To many people, perhaps, this is a new point of view, and they may doubt whether the meaning we give to life should really be contribution, interest in others and cooperation. They will ask, perhaps, "But what about the individual? If he is always considering other people and devoting himself to their interests, does not his own individuality suffer? Is it not necessary, for some individuals at least, that if they are to develop properly they should consider themselves. Are there not some of us who should learn, first of all, to guard our own interests or to strengthen our own personalities?" This view, I believe, is a great mistake, and the problem it raises is a false problem. If a human being, in the meaning he gives to life, wishes to make a contribution, and if his emotions are all directed to this goal, he will naturally be bound to bring himself into the best shape for contribution. He will fit himself for his goal; he will train himself in social feeling and he will gain skill from practice. Granted the goal, the training will follow. Then and then only will he begin to equip himself to solve the three problems of life and to develop his abilities. Let us take the example of love and marriage. If we are interested in our partner, if we are working to ease and enrich our partner's life, of course we shall make the best of ourselves that we can.

  If we think that we must develop personality in vacuo, without a goal of contribution, we shall merely make ourselves domineering and unpleasant.

  There is another hint from which we can gather that contribution is the true meaning of life. If we look around us to-day at the heritage we have received from our ancestors, what do we see? All that survives of them is the contributions they have made to human life. We see cultivated ground; we see roadways and buildings; we see the communicated results of their experience of life, in traditions, in philosophies, in the sciences and the arts, in the technique of dealing with our human situations. These results have all been left by men who contributed to human welfare. What has happened to others? What has happened to those who never cooperated, who gave life a different meaning, who asked only, “What can I get out of life?” They have left no trace behind them. Not only are they dead; their whole lives were futile. It is as if our earth itself had spoken to them and said, “We don't need you. You are not fitted for life. There is no future for your aims and strivings, for the values you held dear, for your minds and souls. Be off with you! You are not wanted. Die out and disappear! "The last judgment for people who give any other meaning to life than cooperation is always, “You are useless. Nobody wants you. Go!" In our present culture, of course, we can find many imperfections. Where we find that it fails we must change it; but the change must always be one which furthers still more the welfare of mankind.

  There have always been men who understood this fact; who knew that the meaning of life is to be interested in the whole of mankind and who tried to develop social interest and love. In all religions we find this concern for the salvation of man. In all the great movements of the world men have been striving to increase social interest, and religion is one of the greatest strivings in this way. Religions, however, have often been misinterpreted; and it is difficult to see how they can do more than they are doing already, unless by a closer application to this common task. Individual Psychology arrives at the same conclusion in a scientific way and proposes a scientific technique.

  It makes, I believe, a step forward. Perhaps science, by increasing the interest of human beings in their fellow human beings and in the welfare of humankind, will be able to approximate closer to the goal than other movements, political or religious. We approach the problem from a different angle, but the goal is the same — to increase interest in others.

  Since the meaning given to life works out as if it were the guardian angel or pursuing demon of our careers, it is very dearly of the highest importance that we should understand how these meanings come to be formed, how they differ from one another, and how they can be corrected if they involve big mistakes. This is the province of psychology, as distinct from physiology or biology —the use for human welfare of an understanding of meanings and the way in which they influence human actions and human fortunes. From the first days of childhood we can see dark gropings after this “meaning of life." Even a baby is striving to make an estimate of its own powers and its share in the whole life which surrounds it. By the end of the fifth year of life a child has reached a unified and crystallized pattern of behavior, its own style of approach to problems and tasks. It has already fixed its deepest and most lasting conception of what to expect from the world and from itself. From now on, the world is seen through a stable scheme of apperception: experiences are interpreted before they are accepted, and the interpretation always accords with the original meaning given to life.

  Even if this meaning is very gravely mistaken, even if the approach to our problems and tasks brings us continually into misfortunes and agonies, it is never easily relinquished. Mistakes in the meaning given to life can be corrected only by reconsidering the situation in which the faulty interpretation was made, recognizing the error and revising the scheme of apperception. In rare circumstances, perhaps, an individual may be forced by the consequences of a mistaken approach to revise the meaning he has given to life and may succeed in accomplishing the change by himself. He will never do it, however, without some social pressure, or without finding that if he proceeds with the old approach he is at the end of his tether: and for the most part the approach can best be revised with the assistance of someone trained in the understanding of these meanings, who can join in discovering the original error and help to suggest a more appropriate meaning.

  Let us take a simple illustration of the different ways in which childhood situations may be interpreted. Unhappy experiences in childhood may be given quite opposite meanings. One man with unhappy experiences behind him will not dwell on them except as they show him something which can be remedied for the future. He will feel, "We must work to remove such unfortunate situations and make sure that our children are better placed.” Another man will feel, "Life is unfair. Other people always have the best of it. If the world treated me like that, why should I treat the world any better?" It is in this way that some parents say
of their children, "I had to suffer just as much when I was a child, and I came through it. Why shouldn't they?" A third man will feel, "Everything should be forgiven me because of my unhappy childhood." In the actions of all three men their interpretations will be evident; and they will never change their actions unless they change their interpretations. It is here that individual psychology breaks through the theory of determinism. No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences — the so-called trauma — but we make out of them just what suits our purposes. We are self-determined by the meaning we give to our experiences; and there is probably something of a mistake always involved when we take particular experiences as the basis for our future life. Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.

  There are, however, certain situations in childhood from which a gravely mistaken meaning is very frequently drawn. It is from children in these situations that the majority of failures come. First we must take children with imperfect organs, suffering from diseases or infirmities during their infancy. Such children are overburdened, and it will be difficult for them to feel that the meaning of life is contribution. Unless there is someone near them who can draw their attention away from themselves and interest them in others, they are likely to occupy themselves mainly with their own sensations. Later on, they may become discouraged by comparing themselves with those around them, and it may even happen, in our present civilization, that their feelings of inferiority are stressed by the pity, ridicule or avoidance of their fellows.

  These are all circumstances in which they may turn in upon themselves, lose hope of playing a useful part in our common life, and consider themselves personally humiliated by the world.

  I was the first person, I think, to describe the difficulties that confront a child whose organs are imperfect or whose glandular secretions are abnormal. This branch of science has made extraordinary progress, but hardly along the lines in which I should have liked to see it develop. From the beginning I was seeking a method of overcoming these difficulties, and not a ground for throwing the responsibility for failure upon heredity or physical condition. No imperfection of organs compels a mistaken style of life. We never find two children whose glands have the same effects on them. We can often see children who overcome these difficulties and who, in overcoming them, develop unusual faculties for usefulness. In this way Individual Psychology is not a very good advertisement for schemes of eugenic selection. Many of the most eminent men, men who made great contributions to our culture, began with imperfect organs; often their health was poor and sometimes they died early. It is mainly from those people who struggled hard against difficulties, in body as in outer circumstances, that advances and new contributions have come. The struggle strengthened them and they went further ahead. From the body we cannot judge whether the development of the mind will be bad or good. Hitherto, however, the greatest part of children who started with imperfect organs and imperfect glands have not been trained in the right direction; their difficulties have not been understood and they have mainly become interested in their own persons. It is for this reason that we find such a great number of failures amongst those children whose early years were burdened with imperfect organs.

  The second type of situation which often provides the occasion for a mistake in the meaning given to life is the situation of the pampered child. The pampered child is trained to expect that his wishes will be treated as laws. He is granted prominence without working to deserve it and he will generally come to feel this prominence as a birthright. In consequence, when he comes into circumstances where he is not the center of attention and where other people do not make it their chief aim to consider his feelings, he will be very much at a loss: he will feel that his world has failed him. He has been trained to expect and not to give.

  He has never learned any other way of facing problems. Others have been so subservient to him that he has lost his independence and does not know that he can do things for himself. His interest was devoted to himself and he never learned the use and the necessity of cooperation. When he has difficulties before him, he has only one method of meeting them — to make demands on other people. It seems to him that if he can regain his position of prominence, if he can forte others to recognize that he is a special person and should be granted everything he wants, then and then only will his situation improve.

  These grown-up pampered children are perhaps the most dangerous class in our community. Some of them may make great protestations of good will; they may even become very “lovable” in order to secure an opportunity to tyrannize; but they are on strike against cooperating, as ordinary human beings, in our ordinary human tasks.

  There are others who are in more open revolt: when they no longer find the easy warmth and subordination to which they were accustomed, they feel betrayed; they consider society as hostile to themselves and try to revenge themselves upon all their fellows. And if society shows hostility to their way of living (as it almost undoubtedly will) they take this hostility as a new proof that they are personally ill-treated. This is the reason why punishments are always ineffective; they can do nothing but confirm the opinion, “Others are against me." But whether the spoiled child goes on strike or openly revolts, whether he tries to dominate by weakness or to revenge himself by violence, he is in fact making much the same mistake. We find people, indeed, who try both methods at different times. Their goal remains unaltered. They feel, "Life means — to be the first, to be recognized as the most important, to get everything I want," and so long as they continue to give this meaning to life, every method they adopt will be mistaken.

  The third situation in which a mistake can easily be made is the situation of a neglected child. Such a child has never known what love and cooperation can be: he makes up an interpretation of life which does not include these friendly forces. It will be understood that when he faces the problems of life he will overrate their difficulty and underrate his own capacity to meet them with the aid and good will of others. He has found society cold to him and he will expect it always to be cold.

  Especially he will not see that he can win affection and esteem by actions which are useful to others. He will thus be suspicious of others and unable to trust himself. There is really no experience which can take the place of disinterested affection. The first task of a mother is to give her child the experience of a trustworthy other person: later she must widen and enlarge this feeling of trust until it includes the rest of the child's environment. If she has failed in the first task—to gain the child's interest, affection and cooperation—it will be very difficult for the child to develop social interest and comradely feeling towards his fellows.

  Everybody has the capacity to be interested in others; but this capacity must be trained and exercised or its development will be frustrated.

  If there were a pure type of neglected or hated or unwanted child we should probably find that he was just blind to the existence of cooperation; that he was isolated, unable to communicate with others and completely ignorant of everything that would help him to live in association with human beings. But, as we have already seen, an individual in these circumstances would perish. The fact that a child lives through the period of infancy is proof that he has been given some care and attention.

  We are therefore never dealing with pure types of neglected children: we are dealing with those who had less than usual consideration, or who were neglected in some respects, though not in others. In short, we need only say that the neglected child is one who never quite found a trustworthy other person. It is a very sad comment on our civilization that so many failures in life come from those children who were orphans or illegitimate; and that we must group such children, on the whole, amongst the neglected children.

  These three situations—imperfect organs, pampering, and neglect —are a great challenge to give a mistaken meaning to life; and children from these situa
tions will almost always need help in revising their approach to problems. They must be helped to a better meaning. If we have an eye for such things. — which really means, if we have a true interest in them and have trained ourselves in this direction — we shall be able to see their meaning in everything they do. Dreams and associations may prove useful: the personality is the same in dreaming life as in waking life, but in dreams the pressure of social demands is less acute and the personality will be revealed with fewer safeguards and concealments. The greatest of all helps, however, in gaining a quick comprehension of the meaning an individual gives to himself and to life comes through his memories.

  Every memory, however trivial he may think it, represents to him something memorable. It is memorable because of its bearing on life as he pictures it; it says to him, “This is what you must expect”, or "This is what you must avoid”, or "Such is life! " Again we must stress that the experience itself is not so important as the fact that just this experience persists in memory and is used to crystallize the meaning given to life.