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

THE ADLER SOCIETY 89

system ‘Individual Psychology’ because for him each unique individual was the central figure in their own environment. Only by establishing a proper relationship with these surroundings could the individual achieve health and sanity. Consequently, Adler was particularly concerned with exploring the relationship between the individual and the community—the relationship that was the focus of so much of Mitrinovic’s attention.

In contrast with Freud and Jung, Adler focussed less on the depths of the unconscious but turned his attention to things that lay within people’s conscious power to change and remedy. His emphasis upon individual responsibility and freedom corresponded to Mitrinovic’s stress upon the need for people to take upon themselves the responsibility for recreating the world. According to Adler the personality was the centre of the individual where they were free and, since free, responsible for their actions and feelings. He taught his patients that whatever they did, their activities and life style belonged to them. He asserted that at all times individuals followed their own chosen path in life and therefore had no one to blame for their troubles but themselves. The neurotic were those who sought to avoid the responsibility of their individual freedom in various ways and, as such, they were the creators of their own disease.

In developing his ideas Adler, like Mitrinovié, found the theory of fictions as developed by Hans Vaihinger in The Philosophy of As If of value. According to Vaihinger, in any sphere of life and knowledge, we need to base our thinking in the first instance on fictitious assumptions. These may be selfcontradictory or have no corresponding objective reality, but they are indispensable as a starting off point, as ‘scaffolding’ from which to proceed with the building of knowledge. One of Adler’s fictions was the ‘law of social interest, that individuals had an innate disposition for spontaneous social effort.

The high degree of cooperation and social culture which man needs for his very existence demands spontaneous social effort, and the dominant purpose of education is to evoke it. Social interest is not inborn (as a full-fledged entity), but it is an innate potentiality which has to be consciously developed.’

The capacity to identify with another was the basis of social interest for Adler: “To see with the eyes of another, to hear with the ears of another, to feel with the heart of another.” All the main problems of individual life were related to the problems of human cooperation. In essence neurosis was anti-social behaviour arising from the fact that the neurotic do not feel part of the society in which they live, they lack community feeling. Individuals must be helped and educated so that they might learn to transcend