TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “I have no satisfaction in formulas unless I feel their arithmetical magnitude.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index A > Alfred Adler Quotes

Thumbnail of Alfred Adler (source)
Alfred Adler
(7 Feb 1870 - 28 May 1937)

Austrian psychiatrist and ophthalmologist.


Science Quotes by Alfred Adler (2 quotes)

It is one of the triumphs of human wit ... to conquer by humility and submissiveness ... to make oneself small in order to appear great ... such ... are often the expedients of the neurotic.
— Alfred Adler
In The Neurotic Constitution (1917), 81-82.
Science quotes on:  |  Appearance (145)  |  Conquer (39)  |  Expedient (6)  |  Great (1610)  |  Human (1512)  |  Humility (31)  |  Neurotic (6)  |  Oneself (33)  |  Order (638)  |  Small (489)  |  Triumph (76)  |  Wit (61)

The neurotic ... is nailed to the cross of his fiction.
— Alfred Adler
Aflred Adler and Bernard Glueck (trans.), The Neurotic Constitution: Outlines of a Comparative Individualistic Psychology and Physchotherapy (1917), 66.
Science quotes on:  |  Fiction (23)  |  Neurotic (6)



Quotes by others about Alfred Adler (1)

The difficulties connected with my criterion of demarcation (D) are important, but must not be exaggerated. It is vague, since it is a methodological rule, and since the demarcation between science and nonscience is vague. But it is more than sharp enough to make a distinction between many physical theories on the one hand, and metaphysical theories, such as psychoanalysis, or Marxism (in its present form), on the other. This is, of course, one of my main theses; and nobody who has not understood it can be said to have understood my theory.
The situation with Marxism is, incidentally, very different from that with psychoanalysis. Marxism was once a scientific theory: it predicted that capitalism would lead to increasing misery and, through a more or less mild revolution, to socialism; it predicted that this would happen first in the technically highest developed countries; and it predicted that the technical evolution of the 'means of production' would lead to social, political, and ideological developments, rather than the other way round.
But the (so-called) socialist revolution came first in one of the technically backward countries. And instead of the means of production producing a new ideology, it was Lenin's and Stalin's ideology that Russia must push forward with its industrialization ('Socialism is dictatorship of the proletariat plus electrification') which promoted the new development of the means of production.
Thus one might say that Marxism was once a science, but one which was refuted by some of the facts which happened to clash with its predictions (I have here mentioned just a few of these facts).
However, Marxism is no longer a science; for it broke the methodological rule that we must accept falsification, and it immunized itself against the most blatant refutations of its predictions. Ever since then, it can be described only as nonscience—as a metaphysical dream, if you like, married to a cruel reality.
Psychoanalysis is a very different case. It is an interesting psychological metaphysics (and no doubt there is some truth in it, as there is so often in metaphysical ideas), but it never was a science. There may be lots of people who are Freudian or Adlerian cases: Freud himself was clearly a Freudian case, and Adler an Adlerian case. But what prevents their theories from being scientific in the sense here described is, very simply, that they do not exclude any physically possible human behaviour. Whatever anybody may do is, in principle, explicable in Freudian or Adlerian terms. (Adler's break with Freud was more Adlerian than Freudian, but Freud never looked on it as a refutation of his theory.)
The point is very clear. Neither Freud nor Adler excludes any particular person's acting in any particular way, whatever the outward circumstances. Whether a man sacrificed his life to rescue a drowning, child (a case of sublimation) or whether he murdered the child by drowning him (a case of repression) could not possibly be predicted or excluded by Freud's theory; the theory was compatible with everything that could happen—even without any special immunization treatment.
Thus while Marxism became non-scientific by its adoption of an immunizing strategy, psychoanalysis was immune to start with, and remained so. In contrast, most physical theories are pretty free of immunizing tactics and highly falsifiable to start with. As a rule, they exclude an infinity of conceivable possibilities.
'The Problem of Demarcation' (1974). Collected in David Miller (ed.) Popper Selections (1985), 127-128.
Science quotes on:  |  Accept (198)  |  Against (332)  |  Anybody (42)  |  Behaviour (42)  |  Being (1276)  |  Blatant (4)  |  Break (109)  |  Call (781)  |  Capitalism (12)  |  Child (333)  |  Circumstance (139)  |  Circumstances (108)  |  Conceivable (28)  |  Connect (126)  |  Contrast (45)  |  Course (413)  |  Criterion (28)  |  Cruel (25)  |  Develop (278)  |  Development (441)  |  Different (595)  |  Distinction (72)  |  Do (1905)  |  Doubt (314)  |  Dream (222)  |  Enough (341)  |  Everything (489)  |  Evolution (635)  |  Fact (1257)  |  Facts (553)  |  Falsification (11)  |  First (1302)  |  Form (976)  |  Forward (104)  |  Free (239)  |  Sigmund Freud (70)  |  Happen (282)  |  Happened (88)  |  Himself (461)  |  Human (1512)  |  Idea (881)  |  Ideology (15)  |  Immunization (3)  |  Infinity (96)  |  Interesting (153)  |  Lead (391)  |  Life (1870)  |  Look (584)  |  Lot (151)  |  Man (2252)  |  Marxism (3)  |  Mean (810)  |  Means (587)  |  Mention (84)  |  Metaphysical (38)  |  Metaphysics (53)  |  Methodology (14)  |  Mild (7)  |  Misery (31)  |  More (2558)  |  More Or Less (71)  |  Most (1728)  |  Must (1525)  |  Never (1089)  |  New (1273)  |  Nobody (103)  |  Non-Science (2)  |  Non-Scientific (7)  |  Other (2233)  |  People (1031)  |  Person (366)  |  Physical (518)  |  Plus (43)  |  Point (584)  |  Political (124)  |  Possible (560)  |  Possibly (111)  |  Predict (86)  |  Prediction (89)  |  Present (630)  |  Prevent (98)  |  Principle (530)  |  Production (190)  |  Psychoanalysis (37)  |  Psychological (42)  |  Push (66)  |  Reality (274)  |  Refutation (13)  |  Remain (355)  |  Rescue (14)  |  Revolution (133)  |  Rule (307)  |  Say (989)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Scientific Theory (24)  |  Sense (785)  |  Situation (117)  |  So-Called (71)  |  Social (261)  |  Special (188)  |  Start (237)  |  Strategy (13)  |  Term (357)  |  Terms (184)  |  Theory (1015)  |  Through (846)  |  Treatment (135)  |  Truth (1109)  |  Understood (155)  |  Vague (50)  |  Way (1214)  |  Whatever (234)


See also:

Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.