The Power Within

This historical project reconstructs the western circulation of the psychological theories of Viennese psychotherapist Alfred Adler (1870-1937), specifically in France, United States and Argentina, during the 1929-1967 period. Adler proposed that the development of the psyche, both normal and pathological, was based on a dynamic between a feeling of inferiority, tied to children dependence on adults for survival, and a will to power, with which children try to gain autonomy and impose their desires to adults. Such dynamic is tightly connected with educational and communal experiences, with which the child learns the social interactions that determine how power is valued and exercised. Adler, then, considered how power relations and social hierarchies become part of our inner life: personality, self-assessment, hopes and objectives. Adler and his collaborators were active promoters of this theory and its application to psychotherapy and education, reaching several western countries. However, there are no studies on how it was communicated nor about the actual uses and results beyond Austria. This project will reconstruct that historical process of dissemination of ideas, tracking how in different contexts Adlers ideas had different interpretations and results, and properly assess their productivity and impact in other latitudes. The project will examine three countries: France, where Adlers ideas where appropriated by politically engaged scholars as Georges Politzer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Manès Sperber, and Franz Fanon. The first three were antifascist activists and used Adlers ideas to examine the effects of authoritarian policies in the psyche; the last was a Martinican Psychiatrist that strongly criticized French colonialism and aimed to explain how colonial power creates racism. In Argentina, Adlers ideas were received by antifascist scholars like Anbal Ponce, Jorge Thénon and Jaime Bernstein, who focused on how education is related to social hierarchies. Finally, United States, where Adlers theories were used by psychologists Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie Clark to explain internalized racism in children and denounce US segregated education. Combining history of science and political history, this project analyzes how psychology and psychotherapy have studied power hierarchies and social dynamics, taking as case the western circulation of Adlers ideas among politically active scholars, allowing for a systematic comparison of the possibilities and limits of the theories involved and their actual impact in different contexts.