Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

98 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

What is much more unfortunate—some of our associates have lent an ear to this option. The view which I hold and which is, I believe, shared by some Or most of you is that the cooperation between Dr. Adler and Mr. Mitrinovié is both more loyal in spirit and productive in effect than that which we see between its detractors. The respective teachings of these leaders are individual and complementary, but in no important respect irreconcilable. In their appeal to the public however we must recognise a certain difference and it would be, I think, advisable to express this difference in our reorganisation.3°

The decision was taken to restrict the activities of the Adler Society to ‘psychology proper, leaving the Philosophical and Sociological sections to organise an independent programme. It was further agreed that the new society thus formed would rent the Gower Street rooms for its own use for three evenings a week.

Despite this further erosion of the activities and formal scope of the parent society, the report on the activities of 1932 was hopeful and bouyant. The Society boasted of more than 70 active members; a full programme of lectures and meetings had been sustained; and two of Adler’s colleagues, Dr. Erwin Wexberg and Dr. Leonhard Seif, had delivered lectures to the Society, strengthening the links between the London branch and the international network of individual psychologists. The report concluded that it merely required “but a little more spirit” by just “a very few more” to “make the next year’s work the most successful we have ever known.”?!

It was not to be. Adler had insisted with increasing emphasis that Individual Psychology had nothing whatever to do with any form of politics. He had always refused to associate himself with any political party. Only a better individual could make a better system, and politics was an inadequate substitute for individual growth. He likened Individual Psychology to “a basket of fruit, out of which any passer-by can take whatever agrees with him!”? This concern to keep Individual Psychology untainted and unsullied by political associations or bias of any kind increased with the growth of European fascism and the threat posed by such regimes to the Individual Psychology movement. It was undoubtedly the fear that the activities and concerns of the London branch might provide sufficient evidence of the subversive nature of Individual Psychology to threaten the lives and activities of his followers in Germany and Austria that led Adler to the decision to disassociate himself from the London society. He wrote from New York on November 14th 1933:

In all friendship I want to tell you that because of the development of things in your society and some new acquaintances abroad who cannot line up with