January 8, 2010
The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler and his successors has always purported to have implications for career choice and satisfaction. The techniques of Adlerian lifestyle analysis, such as the assessment of psychological birth order and the interpretation of early recollections, provides a great deal of information about an individual’s motivations, preferences, and general orientation towards self, other, and the world at large. In this paper we will examine the ways that this information can be used to develop an expedient and comprehensive view of our clients’ career paths and to assist them in making choices that will satisfy their conscious needs as well as their unconscious private logic.
The basic premise of Individual Psychology is that all individuals strive to transform their perceived inferiorities into perceived superiorities. The specific types of inferiority that an individual perceives originate in his or her relationship to the early environment. Elements of this environment include what is called the family constellation, or the arrangement of parents, siblings, and other family members in relation to the individual. For example, the order in which a child is born into his or her family will tend to exert a strong influence on the types of opportunities and expectations that he or she experiences while growing up, and so will influence the development of the individual’s personality and style of living across the lifespan (Watkins, 1993).
Another major premise of Adlerian assessment and counseling is that behaviors of all kinds, including emotional and cognitive behaviors, are teleological. In fact, Individual Psychology holds that the purposive nature of each behavior can be fit within the framework of an individual’s overarching final goal, of which he or she is unlikely to have any conscious knowledge. The pattern of behaviors which build up in support of this final goal, in turn, constitute the individual’s style of life (Watkins, 1993).
Finally, Individual Psychology holds that the individual is inseparable from his or her social environment. Because the individual’s perceptions and purposes are seen to emerge from the social situation in which the individual is positioned, all of the actual and perceived problems of life are seen as social problems, The well-adjusted individual, therefore, experiences a strong sense of connection with his or her social environment. Adlerians refer to this sense of connectedness as the community feeling or the sense of social interest (Watkins, 1993).
Adlerian assessment is fundamentally an assessment of the individual’s manner of relating to the world around him or her. One way in which this relationship can be understood is through an examination of the early social environment in which the individual’s style of life originated and developed. Because the individual is seen as an active force in his or her world from the very beginning, the lifestyle assessment focuses on the ways in which the young individual began to make a place for himself or herself within the family unit.
A major component of this adaptive process can be surmised from the individual’s ordinal and psychological birth order. A first-born child, for example, is often cherished and expected to fulfill the wishes of his or her parents, and so is likely to tend toward conventionality and conscientiousness. The second-born enters the environment several years behind his or her older competitor and is therefore unable to match the elder sibling’s skill in fulfilling the parents’ wishes. This child will therefore often learn to demand attention and recognition through originality and rebellion, and by developing skill in areas where the elder sibling has not excelled. A key point in the consideration of birth order is that it is the child’s experience of his position within the family that is important, rather than the actual order in which the child was born. A second-born who is five or six years older than the elder sibling may feel and behave as though he or she were a second-born, an only child, an eldest child, a middle child, or any combination of the four, depending on the interactional dynamics of the family as a whole (Leong, Hartung, Goh, & Gaylor, 2001).
A key projective technique of Adlerian assessment is the interpretation of early recollections. Because the individual is seen as an active participant in the creation of his or her environment, the memory itself is seen not as a passive storage of past events but rather as an active recreation which serves to reinforce the individual’s private goals. Therefore, by scrutinizing an individual’s recollections of early life, the clinician can get a sense for the private logic that emerged from the early situation and the ways in which it may be maintained in the present day.
From these techniques the individual’s style of living can be deduced. This lifestyle consists of the individual’s attitudes toward him or herself, toward others, and toward the world at large. It is through the exploration and evaluation of these attitudes that Adlerian counseling and psychotherapy aim to assist the client in cultivating an increased sense of interconnectedness with his or her social environment. It is precisely this social interest which is, in Individual Psychology, seen as the essence of health and adaptation.
An individual’s choice of career can be seen as an extension and expression of his or her total style of life. As Watkins (1993) explains:
It is saying, “This is who I am,” “This is how I see myself vis-a-vis others,” “This is how I see myself vis-a-vis the world at large.” For example, the person whose life-style is oriented around helping and assisting others might gravitate toward such jobs as counseling, nursing, or some other helping profession. The person whose life-style is oriented around knowing (to know, find out) might gravitate toward such jobs as science or academics. Further still, the person whose life-style is oriented around getting and acquiring (to have and to hold) might gravitate toward jobs that emphasize collecting, buying, and investing (p. 357).
There is some limited research to support these notions and to connect them with other, better-studied models of career conceptualization. A 1978 study compared the predictive power of Holland’s Self-Directed Search (SDS) against Mosak’s lifestyle typology. This study found that life style type was “essentially as effective as SDS in such predictions.” A study published in 1980 also supported a relationship between vocational orientation and lifestyle type. This study compared Thorne’s Life Style Analysis measure against Holland’s Vocational Preference Inventory and found a number of significant correlations between indices on the two measures. In particular, the authors of that study noted strong correlations between Holland’s Enterprising scale and the Aggressive-Domineering and Domineering-Authoritarian lifestyle configurations. Mosak’s Conforming lifestyle type also correlated positively with Holland’s Conventional scale and negatively with his Artistic scale (Watkins, 1984).
As self-selected representations of the life-style, early recollections can therefore be used as an expedient tool for collecting information about individuals’ vocational motivations as well as their individual vocational needs. A series of early recollections provides the skilled Adlerian counselor with a wealth of information about the client’s way of learning, of motivating him or herself, of approaching work as a basic task of life, and of relating to others in both collegial and authoritative capacities.