[6] Adler was born on February 7, 1870[7] at Mariahilfer Straße 208[8] in Rudolfsheim, a village on the western fringes of Vienna, a modern part of Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus, the 15th district of the city.

[15] Adler began his medical career as an ophthalmologist, but he soon switched to general practice, and established his surgery in a less affluent part of Vienna across from the Prater, a combination of amusement park and circus.

[7] In 1902, because of his supportive article, Adler received an invitation from Sigmund Freud to join an informal discussion group that included Rudolf Reitler [de] and Wilhelm Stekel.

He remained a member of the Society until 1911, when he and a group of his supporters formally disengaged from Freud's circle, the first of the great dissenters from orthodox psychoanalysis (preceding Carl Jung's split in 1914).

Their enmity aside, Adler retained a lifelong admiration for Freud's ideas on dreams and credited him with creating a scientific approach to their clinical utilization (Fiebert, 1997).

The resulting climate enabled Adler and his associates to establish 28 child guidance clinics, and Vienna became the first city in the world to provide schoolchildren with free educational therapy.

Prevention strategies include encouraging and promoting social interest, belonging, and a cultural shift within families and communities that leads to the eradication of pampering and neglect (especially corporal punishment).

Adler was also influenced by the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rudolf Virchow and the statesman Jan Smuts (who coined the term "holism").

Adler was an early advocate in psychology for prevention and emphasized the training of parents, teachers, social workers and so on in democratic approaches that allow a child to exercise their power through reasoned decision making whilst co-operating with others.

Adler was also an early supporter of feminism in psychology and the social world, believing that feelings of superiority and inferiority were often gendered and expressed symptomatically in characteristic masculine and feminine styles.

Adler also spoke of "safeguarding tendencies" and neurotic behavior[27] long before Anna Freud wrote about the same phenomena in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.

Adlerian-based scholarly, clinical and social practices focus on the following topics:[28] Adler created Adlerian Therapy, because he believed that one's psyche should be studied in the context of that person's environment.

[29] In one of his earliest and most famous publications, "Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation," Adler outlined the basics for what would be the beginning foundation of his personality theory.

The sense of connection and one-ness revered in various religious traditions (among these, Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Buddhism and Baha'i) finds a strong complement in Adler's thought.

Adler (1908) believed that in a three-child family, the oldest child would be the most likely to suffer from neuroticism and substance addiction which he reasoned was a compensation for the feelings of excessive responsibility "the weight of the world on one's shoulders" (e.g. having to look after the younger ones) and the melancholic loss of that once supremely pampered position.

In sum, the subjective experiences of sibling positionality and inter-relations are important in terms of the dynamics of psychology, for Adlerian therapists and personality theorists, not the cookbook predictions that may or may not have been objectively true in Adler's time.

[43] Adler's insight into birth order, compensation and issues relating to the individuals' perception of community also led him to investigate the causes and treatment of substance abuse disorders, particularly alcoholism and morphinism, which already were serious social problems of his time.

Adler's work with addicts was significant since most other prominent proponents of psychoanalysis invested relatively little time and thought into these widespread ills of the modern and post-modern age.

In addition to applying his individual psychology approach of organ inferiority, for example, to the onset and causes of addictive behaviors, he also tried to find a clear relationship of drug cravings to sexual gratification or their substitutions.

Adler argued therefore that teachers, nurses, social workers, and so on require training in parent education to complement the work of the family in fostering a democratic character.

[47] These strategies exact a social toll by seeding higher divorce rates, the breakdown of the family, criminal tendencies, and subjective suffering in the various guises of psychopathology.

In a late work, Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind (1938), Adler turns to the subject of metaphysics, where he integrates Jan Smuts' evolutionary holism with the ideas of teleology and community: "sub specie aeternitatis".

Our idea of social feeling as the final form of humanity – of an imagined state in which all the problems of life are solved and all our relations to the external world rightly adjusted – is a regulative ideal, a goal that gives our direction.

Ellenberger posits several theories for "the discrepancy between greatness of achievement, massive rejection of person and work, and wide-scale, quiet plagiarism..." These include Adler's "imperfect" style of writing and demeanor, his "capacity to create a new obviousness," and his lack of a large and well organized following.

[51] He was the first major figure to break away from psychoanalysis to form an independent school of psychotherapy and personality theory,[52] which he called individual psychology because he believed a human to be an indivisible whole, an individuum.

[54] His writings preceded, and were at times surprisingly consistent with, later Neo-Freudian insights such as those evidenced in the works of Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, some considering that it would take several decades for Freudian ego psychology to catch up with Adler's ground-breaking approach.

[55] Adler emphasized the importance of equality in preventing various forms of psychopathology, and espoused the development of social interest and democratic family structures for raising children.

[59] During his college years, he had become attached to a group of socialist students, among which he had found his wife-to-be, Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein, an intellectual and social activist from Russia studying in Vienna.

Through the work of Rudolf Dreikurs in the United States and many other adherents worldwide, Adlerian ideas and approaches remain strong and viable more than 80 years after Adler's death.

Teaching institutes and programs exist in Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Switzerland, the United States, Jamaica, Peru, and Wales.