Editorial

Abstract

We open issue no. 47 of the Rivista di Psicologia Individuale with an Adlerian text from 1918, unpublished in Italian, Bolschewismus und Seelenkunde (Bolshevism and psychology)*, in which the terms ‘Gemeinsinn’ and ‘Gemeinschaftsgefühl’ are used, which, translated by us as ‘social sense’ and ‘social feeling’ respectively, express the social nature of man, a key idea of Individual Psychology.
The individual, according to Alfred Adler, is in fact motivated not by drives of biological origin, but by needs and values that imply relationality: the motor of psychological development is, in fact, the subjective feeling of inferiority, a term that, in its Latin etymon, infˇ erior, derived from infˇ erus, already provided with a substantial ‘comparative’ value that is further reinforced, implies the co-presence of the other than oneself