What Life Could Mean to You

by Alfred Adler

  But this is not the most noteworthy point in considering their lack of cooperation. All criminals are cowards. They are evading problems they do not feel strong enough to solve. We can see their cowardice apart from their crimes, in the way in which they face life. We can see their cowardice, also, in the crimes they commit. They guard themselves by darkness and isolation; they surprise somebody and draw their weapons before he can defend himself. Criminals think they are being courageous; but we should not be fooled in the same way. Crime is a coward's imitation of heroism. They are striving for a fictitious goal of personal superiority and they like to believe that they are heroes; but this is again a mistaken scheme of apperception, a failure of common sense. We know that they are cowards, and if they were sure we knew it, it would be a big shock to them. It swells their vanity and pride to think of themselves as overcoming the police, and often they think, "I can never be found out."

  Unfortunately, a very careful investigation of the career of every criminal would reveal, 1 believe, that he had committed crimes without being found out; and this fact is a very great nuisance. When they are found out, they think, “This time I wasn't quite clever enough, but next time I shall outwit them." And if they do get away with it, they feel they have obtained their goal; they feel superior, they are admired and appreciated by their comrades.

  We must disturb this common estimate of the criminal's courage and cleverness; but when are we to disturb it? We can do it in the family, in the school, and in reformatories. Later on I shall describe the best point of attack; at present I want to go further into the circumstances in which a failure in cooperation may occur. Sometimes we must put the responsibility on the parents. Perhaps the mother was not skillful enough to draw the child to cooperate with herself: she was so infallible that no one could help her, or she was incapable of cooperation herself. It is easy to see that in unhappy or broken marriages the cooperative spirit is not being properly developed. The child's first tie is with his mother, and the mother, perhaps, did not wish to widen the child's social interest to include the father and other children or grown-ups. Or, again, the child may have felt himself to be the boss of the family; when he is three or four years old, another child comes along and the first one feels that he has suffered a reverse, has been ousted from his position; he refuses to cooperate with his mother or with the younger child. These are all factors to be considered; and, if you trace back the life of a criminal, you will almost always find that the trouble began in his early family experiences.

  It was not the environment itself that counted; but the child misunderstood his Position and there was no one there by his side to explain it to him.

  It is always a difficulty for the other children if one child in the family is especially prominent or gifted. Such a child gains most attention and the others feel discouraged and thwarted. They do not cooperate, because they wish to compete but have not enough confidence. We can often see the unhappy development of children who have been outshone in this way, and have not been shown how they themselves could use their own capabilities. Amongst them we may find criminals, neurotics or suicides.

  When a child who is lacking in cooperation goes to school, we can notice it in his behavior on the very first day. He cannot make friends with the other children. He does not like the teacher, he is inattentive and does not listen to the lessons. If he is not treated with understanding, he can suffer a new setback. He is reproached and scolded, instead of being encouraged and taught cooperation. No wonder he finds the lessons still more distasteful! He cannot be interested in his school life, if he is all the time suffering new attacks on his courage and self-confidence. Often in the career of a criminal you will find that at the age of thirteen he was in the fourth grade and he was blamed for his stupidity. His whole later life is thus endangered. He loses progressively more and more of his interest in others; his goal is put more and more on the useless side.

  Poverty, also, offers opportunities for a mistaken Interpretation of life. A child who comes from a poor home may meet social prejudice outside the home. His family suffers many deprivations, they have many trials and sorrows. He himself, perhaps, has to earn money very early in life to help out his parents. Later he comes across rich people who lead an easy life and can buy everything they want; and he feels they have no more right to indulgence than he has. It is not hard to understand why the number of criminals is so high in the big cities, where there are very noticeable extremes of poverty and luxury. No useful goal ever came from envy; but a child in these circumstances can easily misunderstand and think that the way to superiority is to get money without working for it.

  The feeling of inferiority can also be centered round an organic deficiency. This was one of my own discoveries; and I am a little guilty, on this point, of having paved the way to theories of heredity both in neurology and psychiatry. But even in the beginning, when I first wrote of organ inferiorities and their mental compensations, I recognized this danger. It is not the organism which is to blame, but our methods of education. If we used the right method, children with organic deficiencies would be interested in others as well as themselves.

  A child burdened with imperfect organs is only interested in himself alone if nobody is at his side to develop his interest in others. There are many people suffering from endocrine deficiencies, but I should like to make clear that we can never say, once and for all, what the normal functioning of an endocrine gland should be. The functioning of our endocrine glands can be very various without damage to the personality. This factor must therefore be excluded; especially if we want to find the right method for making these children also into good fellow men, with a cooperative interest in other people.

  Among criminals there is a large proportion of orphans; and it seems to me a disgrace to our culture that we could not establish the spirit of cooperation in these orphans. In a similar way there are many illegitimate children —no one was present who could win their affection and transfer it to their fellow beings. Unwanted children often take to criminal practices, especially if they know and feel that nobody wanted them. Among criminals, also, we often find ugly persons; and this fact has been used as evidence of the importance of heredity. But think what it feels like to be an ugly child! He is at a great disadvantage. Perhaps he is the child of a race mixture which does not give attractive results, or which meets with social prejudice. If such a child is ugly, his whole life is overburdened: he does not possess what we all like so much,— the charm and freshness of childhood. But all these children, if they were treated in the right way, would develop social interest.

  It is interesting to observe, moreover, that we sometimes find among criminals boys and men who are unusually handsome. While the first type might be considered as victims of bad hereditary traits, transferred together with physical stigmata — deformed hands, for example, or cleft palate — what are we to say of these handsome criminals? In reality, they, too, have grown up in a situation where it was difficult to develop social interest; they were pampered, children. You will find that criminals are divided into two types. There are those who do not know that there is fellow-feeling in the world and have never experienced it. Such a criminal has a hostile attitude to other people; his look is hostile and he regards everybody as an enemy; he has never been able to find appreciation. The other type is the pampered child; and I have frequently noticed, in the complaints of prisoners, that they assert, “

  The reason for my criminal career was that my mother pampered me too much." On this point we should say much more; but I mention it here just to emphasize that, in various ways, criminals have not been trained and taught into the right degree of cooperation. The parents may have wanted to make their child into a good fellow man, but they did not know how. If they were dictatorial and severe, they had no chance of succeeding. If they pampered him and let him take the center of the stage, he was taught to consider himself important through the mere fact of his existence, without making any creative effort t
o deserve the good opinion of his fellows. Such children, therefore, lose the ability to struggle; they want always to have notice taken of them and are always expecting something. If they do not find an easy way to satisfaction, they blame the environment for it.

  Now let us turn to some cases and see whether we can discover these points, in spite of the fact that the descriptions were not written for this purpose. The first case I shall give is from "500 Criminal Careers" by Sheldon and Eleanor T. Glueck; the case of "Hard-boiled John." This boy explains the genesis of his criminal career: I never thought I would let myself go. Up to fifteen or sixteen I was about like other kids. I liked athletics and took part in them. I read books from the library, kept good hours, and all that. My parents took me out of school and put me to work and took all of my wages except fifty cents each week.

  Here he is making an accusation. If we questioned him about his relation to his parents, and if we could see his whole family situation, we could find out what he really experienced. At present we must regard it only as an affirmation that his parents were not cooperative. I worked about a year, then I began going with a girl and she liked a good time.

  We find this often in the careers of criminals: they attach themselves to a girl who wants a good time. Recall what we mentioned before — this is a problem and tests the degree of cooperation. He goes with a girl who wants a good time and he has only fifty cents a week. We should not call this a true solution for the problem of love. There are other girls, for example. He is not on the right track. In these circumstances I should say, “If she wants a good time she is not the girl for me." These are different estimates of what is important in life. You can't give a girl a good time these days, even in N—, on fifty cents a week. The old man wouldn't give me any more. I was sore and had it on my mind: how could I make more money?

  Common sense would say, “Perhaps you could look around and earn more”; but he wants it easy, and if he wishes to have a girl it is for his own pleasure and nothing more.

  One day along came a fellow I got acquainted with. When a stranger comes along, it is another test for him. A boy with the right ability for cooperation could not be seduced. This boy is on a path which makes it possible for him to be seduced. He was a "right guy" [that is, a good thief; an intelligent, capable fellow who knows the business, and will “divvy with you and not do you dirt"]. We put through a lot of jobs in N— and got away with it, and I have been at it ever since.

  We hear that the parents own their own home. The father is foreman in a factory and the family is only just able to make ends meet. This boy is one of three children; and up to the time of his misconduct no member of the family had been known to be delinquent. I should be curious to hear a scientist believing in heredity explain this case. He admits having first had heterosexual experience at the age of fifteen. I am sure some people would say that he is oversexed. But this boy has no interest in other people and only wants pleasure. Anybody can over-sex himself. There is no difficulty in it. He is searching for appreciation in this respect — he wants to be a sexual hero. At sixteen he was arrested with a companion for breaking and entering and larceny. Other points of interest follow and confirm what we have said. He wants to be a conqueror in appearances, to attract the attention of girls, to win them by paying for them. He wears a wide-brimmed hat, red bandanna handkerchief, and a belt with a revolver in it. He assumes the name of a Western outlaw. He is a vain boy: he wants to appear a hero and has no other way. He admits having done whatever he was accused of, “and a lot more." He has no scruples about property rights. I do not think that life is worth living. For humanity in general I have nothing but the utmost contempt.

  All these conscious thoughts are really unconscious. He does not understand them; he does not know what they mean in their coherence. He feels that life is a burden, but he does not understand why he is discouraged.

  I have learned not to trust people. They say thieves won't do each other, but they will. I was with a fellow once, treated him white; and he did me dirt.

  If I had all the money I wanted, I would be just as honest as anybody. That is, if I had enough so I could do what I wanted to without working. I never liked work. I hate it and never will work. We can translate this last point as follows: "It is repression which is responsible for my career. I am compelled to repress my wishes and therefore I am a criminal." It is a point deserving much thought. I have never committed a crime for the sake of doing the crime.

  Of course there is a certain "kick" in driving up to a place in an automobile, putting through your job, and making your get-away. He believes it is heroism and does not see it is cowardice. When I was caught before at one time I had fourteen thousand dollars' worth of jewellery, but I didn't know any better than to go and see my girl, and cashed in only enough to pay my expenses to go to her, and they caught me.

  These people pay their girls and so gain an easy victory. But they think of it as a real triumph.

  They have schools here in the prison and I am going to get all the education I can get — not to reform myself, but to make myself more dangerous to society.

  This is the expression of a very bitter attitude toward mankind. But he does not want mankind. He says: If I had a son I would wring his neck. Do you think I would ever be guilty of bringing a human being into the world? Now how are we going to improve such a person? There is no other way than to improve his capacity for cooperation and to show him where his estimate of life is mistaken. We can convince him only when we trace back the misunderstandings of his earliest childhood. I do not know what happened in this case. The description is not occupied with the points which I believe important. Something happened in his childhood that made him such an enemy of mankind. If I had to guess, I would suggest that he was the eldest boy; very much pampered at first, as oldest children generally are. Later on, he felt dethroned because another child was born. If I am right, you will find that things as small as this can block the development of cooperation.

  John remarks further that he was treated roughly at an industrial school to which he was committed and he left this school with a feeling of intense hatred toward society. I must say something on this point.

  From the psychologist's standpoint, all harsh treatment in prison is a challenge. It is a trial of strength. In the same way, when criminals continually hear, “We must put an end to this crime wave”, they take it as a challenge. They want to be heroes, and they are pleased to have the gauge thrown down to them. They take it as a sport: they feel that society is daring them and continue all the more stubbornly. If a man thinks he is fighting the whole world, what could give him a bigger "kick" than to be challenged? In the education of problem children, too, it is one of the worst errors to challenge them: "We'll see who is stronger! We'll see who can hold out longest!" These children, like criminals, are intoxicated with the idea of being strong; and they know they can get away with it if they are clever enough. In reformatories they sometimes challenge the criminals; and this is a very mischievous policy.

  Now let me give you the diary of a murderer who was hanged for his crime. He cruelly murdered two people and before he did it he wrote down his intentions. This will afford me an opportunity of describing the kind of planning which goes on in the criminal's mind. No one can commit a crime without planning it; and into the planning there always enters a justification of the deed. In all the literature of such confessions I have never found an instance where the crime was described quite simply and distinctly, and I have never found an instance where the criminal did not try to justify himself. Here we see the importance of social feeling. Even the criminal must try to reconcile himself with social feeling. At the same time he must prepare himself to kill his social feeling, to break through the wall of social interest, before he can commit the crime. So in Dostoyevsky’s story, Raskolnikov lies in bed two months, considering whether he shall commit a crime. He drives himself on with the thought: "Am I Napoleon, or am I a louse?” Criminals deceive themselves and
spur themselves on with such imaginations. In reality, every criminal knows that he is not on the useful side of life and he knows what the useful side is. He rejects it, however, out of cowardice; and he is cowardly because he has not the ability to be useful: the problems are problems demanding cooperation and he has not been trained in cooperation. Later in life criminals want to relieve themselves of their burden; they want, as we have shown, to justify themselves and plead extenuating circumstances. "He was sick and a loafer," and so forth.

  Here are the extracts from the diary: I was disowned by my people, the subject of disgust and contempt [he had an affection of the nose], almost destroyed by the greatness of my misery. There is nothing to keep me back. I feel I cannot bear it any longer. I might resign myself to my abandoned condition; but the stomach, the stomach cannot be dictated to. He produces the extenuating circumstances. It was prophesied that I should die on the g-allows; but the thought came to, “What is the difference whether I die of starvation or on the gallows?"