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I just reposted my most successful ever reel. With over 7,000 comments, it clearly struck a nerve. Click here to watch it
Freud and Adler are two of the founders of modern therapy. Pitting them against each other turned out to be the thing people argued with most in the comments. So today I want to put both Freud and Adler on the table and show you which of their teachings are still relevant and which have gradually fallen apart over the years.
Here is the honest truth: Both men got things right. Both got some things badly wrong.
Let me start with Freud, because he gave us more than his critics admit.
What Freud got right
Freud was right when he said that a large part of our mental life runs below our awareness. We decide, react, and feel for reasons we cannot see. Modern psychology broadly agrees that much of the mind runs on autopilot, even though the machinery looks nothing like his cauldron of repressed urges.
He was right that early life leaves a mark, an instinct that later grew into attachment research. He saw that we defend ourselves against painful truths, the everyday denial and rationalisation we all run. He even understood that the bond between a patient and a therapist is a real factor in healing mental illness.
His approach did not die with him either. One widely cited review found that modern psychodynamic therapy produces benefits as large as the treatments we usually call evidence-based, with gains that last after therapy ends (Shedler, 2010). That finding has its critics, but it should stop anyone from writing Freud off completely.
So this is not a hit piece.
Now to the other side.
What Freud got wrong, and where it hurt people
Most of Freud’s actual theory collapsed over time. The psychosexual stages, the Oedipus complex, penis envy, and the idea that everything traces back to buried sexuality. The field of psychology retired all of that.
Worse, some of Freud’s theories caused real damage. Freud built his early method on the idea that we bury traumatic memories and heal by digging them back up. That idea powered the recovered-memory movement of the 1980s and 1990s, aka ‘The Satanic Panic’, where suggestive therapy helped people "remember" abuse that never happened.
Elizabeth Loftus showed how easily this works. In her classic study, a trusted source planted a false childhood memory of being lost in a shopping mall, and roughly a quarter of participants came to remember it as real (Loftus and Pickrell, 1995). Memories that suggestive therapy created tore real families apart. If you follow my work on estrangement, you already know how often this still echoes.
Then there is catharsis, the comforting idea that you heal by getting it all out. When researchers had angry people vent by hitting a punching bag, they ended up angrier and more aggressive than people who did nothing at all (Bushman, 2002). Venting feeds the thing it claims to drain. Sorry, Freud.
And the deepest problem with the whole looking-back model is that dwelling on your pain can become the illness. Decades of research on rumination show that chewing over your problems and their causes predicts worse depression over time, erodes problem-solving and wears down the people around you (Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco and Lyubomirsky, 2008). A model that sends you back into the wound again and again can deepen it.
Now Adler made a very different bet.
What Adler got right
Adler put human connection at the centre of everything, and the evidence favors him in a big way. A meta-analysis pooling 148 studies and more than 300,000 people found that strong social relationships raise your odds of survival by about half, an effect that rivals giving up smoking (Holt-Lunstad, Smith and Layton, 2010). Adler called this “social interest” a hundred years ago (Ansbacher and Ansbacher, 1956). The data now calls it a survival factor.
But Adler also looked forward. He cared about your goals, your beliefs and what you were building, and that instinct seeded modern cognitive therapy. Albert Ellis credited him openly, and Adler's approach sits at the root of CBT and several other mainstream models (Carlson and Englar-Carlson, 2017). Some scholars now call him the original founder of positive psychology (Watts, 2015).
What Adler got wrong
Adler was not flawless either. One of his most popular ideas, that birth order shapes your personality, has not survived. A study of more than 20,000 people across three countries found essentially no effect of birth order on core personality traits, beyond a tiny bump in measured intelligence for firstborns (Rohrer, Egloff and Schmukle, 2015). Plenty of Adler's concepts are also fuzzy and hard to test (like his 'style of life', the single unified life pattern he claimed locks in by around age five), and ironically, the therapy that carries his name has a thinner direct trial record than the CBT his ideas helped create (Rohrer, Egloff and Schmukle, 2015).
So here is the deeper meaning that my viral reel could not hold.
Both men handed us something useful.
-Freud mapped the hidden mind.
-Adler mapped the social, forward-moving one.
Then we made a choice, mostly without noticing. Our whole culture leaned toward Freud's backward-looking model, the couch, the childhood archaeology, the endless analysis, even as the evidence kept pointing the other way. Effectively, we sidelined the man whose bets the science kept confirming. Adler.
Adler's wager was simple. Healing means building something better from where you stand right now, with other people, facing forward. More than a century on, that wager looks like the smarter one.
If you want to learn more of the lessons that therapy failed to learn, you can sign up for my new book wait list here.
Speak soon,
Richard
P.S. I read every reply, including the ones that tell me I am being unfair to Freud. Hit reply and make your case for what I’ve got right or wrong.
Richard
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References
Ansbacher, H.L. and Ansbacher, R.R. (eds.) (1956) The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. New York: Basic Books.
Bushman, B.J. (2002) 'Does venting anger feed or extinguish the flame? Catharsis, rumination, distraction, anger, and aggressive responding', Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(6), pp. 724-731.
Carlson, J. and Englar-Carlson, M. (2017) Adlerian Psychotherapy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Hofmann, S.G., Asnaani, A., Vonk, I.J.J., Sawyer, A.T. and Fang, A. (2012) 'The efficacy of cognitive behavioral therapy: a review of meta-analyses', Cognitive Therapy and Research, 36(5), pp. 427-440.
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T.B. and Layton, J.B. (2010) 'Social relationships and mortality risk: a meta-analytic review', PLoS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316.
Loftus, E.F. and Pickrell, J.E. (1995) 'The formation of false memories', Psychiatric Annals, 25(12), pp. 720-725.
Nolen-Hoeksema, S., Wisco, B.E. and Lyubomirsky, S. (2008) 'Rethinking rumination', Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(5), pp. 400-424.
Rohrer, J.M., Egloff, B. and Schmukle, S.C. (2015) 'Examining the effects of birth order on personality', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(46), pp. 14224-14229.
Shedler, J. (2010) 'The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy', American Psychologist, 65(2), pp. 98-109.
Watts, R.E. (2015) 'Adler's Individual Psychology: the original positive psychology', Revista de Psicoterapia, 26(102), pp. 81-89.
