«Every Comparison Will Be Welcome»: Adlerism between Respect for Tradition and Openness to Change

Editorial

Abstract

Alfred Adler in "Psychology of the Difficult Child" writes: "We will welcome any comparison, because we are tolerant: you will have to study other theories and other points of view, compare everything very carefully and do not blindly believe any 'authority' not even me." Individual Psychology, like all depth psychologies, cannot dispense with the inevitable and incessant epistemological reflection on its conditions of possibility, reliability and rigor, although the theoretical principles that characterize it as an open and flexible system show themselves in all their singular relevance: minus-plus dynamism as the motivational principle of psychic life, antidogmatism, phenomenological subjectivism, causal finalism, the individual conceived as a temporal phenomenon, the unitary coherence of the individual parts organized into a dynamic indivisible whole, the concept of Self-lifestyle/Creative Self, the prospectively oriented imaginary the "as ifs," psychotherapy understood as an artistic work rather than as a falsifiable exact science, the unrepeatability of the "present moments" and "moments of encounter" experienced in the here and now by the creative therapeutic couple, which opens, thus, toward intersubjective/interindividual horizons