Here and now

“It is very obvious that we are not influenced by ‘facts’ but by our interpretation of facts.” — Alfred Adler

I didn’t know I was an Adlerian until very recently. That’s the strange part. Most of what shaped me, I absorbed before I had a name for it.

My mom is a doctor. Somewhere in her training she did a stint in CBT, and without ever announcing it, she ran the protocol on me my entire childhood. The reframing. The catching of automatic thoughts. The patient redirection from “this happened to me” to “what am I telling myself about this.” I thought it was just how parents talked. I thought “what’s the evidence for that belief” was a normal sentence to hear at the dinner table. It was years before I realized she had handed me a worldview, not a parenting style.

And the worldview, it turns out, has a name. It traces back further than CBT. It traces back to a man Freud personally exiled from his inner circle in 1911 for refusing to put instinctual drives at the center of everything.

His name was Alfred Adler. And almost no one in the West talks about him.

The schism nobody remembers

In Vienna, in the early 1900s, there were three. Freud, Jung, Adler. The original triumvirate of depth psychology. We remember the first two because we still teach them, quote them, build movies around their ideas. Adler we forget, even though, in a quiet and almost embarrassing way, his ideas are the ones most of us actually live by.

Adler was the first president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Freud had hand-picked him. But Adler kept refusing to play along. He thought the obsession with drive theory was reductive to the point of distortion. He thought personality was holistic, not splintered into id-ego-superego shards constantly at war with each other. And most importantly, he thought human beings were not primarily driven by buried drives from childhood, but by a forward-pointing striving. A pull toward significance, toward belonging, toward contribution.

The split, when it came in 1911, was sharp and personal. Freud treated it as heresy. Adler walked out with around nine colleagues and founded what he called Individual Psychology. The name is misleading. It does not glorify the individual. The “individual” in “Individual Psychology” means indivisible, as in, you cannot understand a person by splitting them up into drives and instances; you have to look at the whole person inside the whole community. Adler believed that mental health was, at its root, a measure of social interest. How connected you are. How much you contribute. How much you feel you belong.

Two years later, in 1913, Jung followed Adler out the door. He went in the opposite direction, deeper into the unconscious, into archetypes, into the collective inheritance of myth and symbol. Three men. Three exits from each other. Three completely different bets about what a human being actually is.

The West placed its bet on two of them.

What the West kept

Freud we kept because Freud was useful to a particular kind of project. The unconscious, repression, childhood trauma, the long couch session, the years of analysis. Whether you believe him or not, his framework was structurally compatible with a culture that was learning to spend money on itself, on its private interior. Psychoanalysis built an entire profession around going inward, alone, for a long time.

Jung we kept for a different reason. Jung gave us meaning. He gave us the shadow, the anima, the hero’s journey. Hollywood runs on Jung. Joseph Campbell, Star Wars, the entire architecture of self-help, the personality typologies your coworkers post about on LinkedIn, the spiritual-but-not-religious project of “individuation,” even a lot of the new-age and crypto-mystical content sloshing around the internet, all of it draws from Jungian wells. Jung was the perfect psychologist for a culture that wanted to feel spiritual without committing to a community. You could do the work in your journal. You could integrate your shadow alone. You could become whole inside yourself.

Adler offered none of that. Adler said the unit of analysis is not the self. It is the self-in-community. He said you cannot individuate your way out of belonging. He said the deepest sickness is not unprocessed childhood material, it is the failure to develop Gemeinschaftsgefühl, social feeling, a felt sense of being one of many. He said you become whole by being useful to others. By contributing. By turning toward the world rather than burrowing into yourself.

That message did not sell. Not in the West. Not in the 20th century. Not in a market that needed individuals to optimize, perform, narrate themselves, and consume.

So we shelved him.

The smuggling

Except, and this is the part I love, Adler didn’t actually leave. He just went underground.

In the 1950s, a clinical psychologist named Albert Ellis got fed up with how slow and indirect Freudian analysis was. He started building something new. He called it Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. He drew on the Stoics, who taught that we are not disturbed by events but by our interpretations of events. And he drew, by his own explicit acknowledgement, on Adler. Ellis credited Adler as a foundational precursor. Adler was the one who had first said that behavior springs from ideas, that interpretation precedes emotion, that you could change a life by changing what someone believed about themselves and the world.

A few years later, Aaron Beck developed Cognitive Therapy, originally for depression. Same lineage. Same conviction. Same Adlerian heart. Beck and Ellis fused into what we now call CBT, and CBT became, by orders of magnitude, the most widely practiced, most empirically validated, most insurance-covered psychotherapy in the world. Every workbook. Every app. Every “catch the thought, examine the thought, reframe the thought.” All of it is Adler in a lab coat.

So here is the strange historical fact. The West rejected Adler the philosopher and kept Adler the technician. We took his tools and forgot his project. We learned how to reframe a thought but lost the reason he wanted us to reframe it. Adler wanted us to reframe our thinking so that we could turn toward the community. So that we could belong, contribute, and stop being prisoners of our private inferiorities. The West kept the reframing and threw away the community.

That is the move my mother made on me, except she did it whole. She is from a place where the community was assumed, so the CBT she applied to me was applied inside an Adlerian frame she did not know she had. She was reframing my thoughts so that I could be a better son, a better brother, a better part of the family and the people around us. She was running the full program, not the Western shareware version.

I just didn’t have the name for it until now.

The spiritual war

I want to be careful here, because “spiritual war” is the kind of phrase that can mean anything and so usually means nothing. But I’ll say what I actually mean by it.

The crisis I see in people my age, the one I see in myself when I am being honest, is not a crisis of meaning in the Jungian sense. It is not that we lack archetypes or myths or symbols or a hero’s journey. We have those in surplus. We are drowning in them. Every podcast, every self-help thread, every founder’s biography is some retelling of the hero leaving the village to find himself. We have too much Jung. The shadow work, the individuation, the lone protagonist staring into the deep, we are full to the brim of it.

The crisis is the opposite. We have no village to leave from. And no village to return to.

What the present moment requires is not more inward descent. It is not another tool for getting in touch with ourselves. It is not a new framework for understanding our trauma or our type or our personal mythology. We are already the most self-aware, most self-narrated, most self-optimized generation in history. And we are also the loneliest, the most anxious, the most quietly desperate.

The Jungian project assumed a community to come home to. Strip that assumption away, and individuation just becomes a beautifully decorated cage.

What the moment needs is Adler. It needs the unfashionable, unmonetizable, deeply embarrassing claim that the cure for what ails us is not deeper inwardness but more contribution. Not more knowing yourself but more being useful to others. Not more shadow work but more showing up. Adler said, very plainly, that the neurotic is always the one who has turned away from social interest and gotten stuck in private striving for superiority. That every depression and every anxiety has, at its root, a failure of belonging.

You can feel how unwelcome that sounds. There is no app for it. There is no productized version. You can’t optimize “show up for your friend’s mother’s funeral.” You can’t habit-stack “be reliable in a community for ten years.” There is no morning routine for being the kind of person someone can call at 2am.

This is what I mean by spiritual war. Not a war between religions, but a war between two pictures of the human being. One says: you are the center, your meaning is yours to construct, go inward and find it. The other says: you are a node in a web, your meaning is in the web, go outward and serve it.

The West, almost without noticing, has been losing this war for a century. We just keep mistaking the losses for victories.

Adler had this teaching that you cannot understand a person by their past. You can only understand them by the goal they are moving toward, often unconsciously, in this moment. The past does not push you. The future, the imagined ideal of who you are trying to be, pulls you. Therapy, for Adler, was not archaeology. It was navigation. Here and now. What are you actually moving toward? Is it worth moving toward?

I think about that a lot. Most of the optimization I do, when I look at it honestly, is in service of a future self who is supposed to be loved, respected, secure. A future self for whom belonging will finally be earned. And Adler would say, gently, that this is exactly the trap. The future self is a fiction you are using to delay the present. The community you are postponing is the community that would actually heal you. You are striving for superiority because you have lost faith in belonging, and the more you strive, the further from belonging you drift.

The CBT my mother gave me was supposed to be a tool. It was supposed to clear the static so I could hear the thing underneath. The thing underneath, I am realizing now, was always Adlerian. Reframe the thought, yes, but reframe it toward what. Toward contribution. Toward the people in front of you. Toward the small, unglamorous, repeated work of being a member of something.

We forgot that part. Or, the West did. I am not sure I ever fully forgot. It just took me twenty-something years to recognize the language she was speaking.

Here and now, then. Not as a meditation cliché but as an Adlerian instruction. The work is not in the past, not in the future. It is in the room you are in. In the people whose names you know. In whether you can be useful, here, today, without making it a project about yourself.

That is the cure. That is what the present moment is asking for.

Not more Jung. Not more Freud. Just the quiet, unfashionable, slightly embarrassing return of the man they exiled in 1911.

Here and now, Adler.