Running head: TELLING THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE 1 Alfred Adler and Martin Buber: Telling the Dancer from the Dance A Master’s Project Presented to The Faculty of the Adler Graduate School _______________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for The Degree of Master of Arts in Adlerian Counseling and Psychotherapy ________________ By: Ives K. Wittman ________________ Chair: Roger Ballou Member: Herb Laube ________________ April 2016 TELLING THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE 2 Abstract This project argues for Alfred Adler’s study of the soul in the creative force, claiming of inferiorities, unity and holism, and social interest as expressions of spirituality and a striving for perfection in a similar fashion to Martin Buber’s I-Thou philosophy of dialogue and his interpretations of Hasidism as a way to re-vision Judaism. Adler’s study of the soul and Buber’s I-Thou philosophy create a spiritual subjectivity that grounds the therapeutic relationship between therapist and client. This project demonstrates through a historical perspective of Adler and Buber’s lives and a comparison of Individual Psychology to Buber’s Hasidism and the I-Thou relationship how Adler’s psychology and Buber’s spirituality and his views of psychotherapy utilize an intersubjective and spiritual space for shared movement and an innate striving to overcome in the therapist and client relationship. TELLING THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE 3 Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 4 The Argument ................................................................................................................................. 6 Part I: Background: Alfred Adler and Martin Buber ..................................................................... 8 Family Backgrounds and Early Childhood ................................................................................. 8 Religious and Spiritual Overview ............................................................................................. 11 Martin Buber’s Hasidism and Dialogical Spirituality .......................................................... 11 Alfred Adler, Jewish Roots, God, and Religion ................................................................... 14 Summary ................................................................................................................................... 17 Part 2: Individual Psychology, Buber’s Hasidism and Judaism .................................................. 17 Comparative Studies of Judaism and Individual Psychology ................................................... 18 Summary ............................................................................................................................... 23 Buber’s Early Hasidism as Jewish Spirituality ......................................................................... 24 Hasidism: Historical, spiritual, religious, and cultural landscape. ........................................ 24 An Adlerian response to Hasidism and Judaism................................................................... 25 Buber’s engagement with Judaism and Hasidism. ............................................................... 27 Buber’s reorientation of Hasidism and Judaism. .................................................................. 28 Buber’s Early Hasidism and Adler’s Individual Psychology - Primal and Subjective............. 30 Summary ................................................................................................................................... 32 Part 3: Therapeutic Implications: Buber’s I-Thou and Adlerian Therapy ................................... 33 Adlerian Community and Spirituality – Brief Literature Survey ............................................. 33 Adler and Buber Meeting Through Ferdinand Tonnies and Gemeinschaftsgefühl .................. 37 Adler and Buber Meeting Through Jääskeläinen (2000) .......................................................... 39 Adler’s Striving to Overcome and Creative Force and Spirituality .......................................... 41 Definitions of spirituality ...................................................................................................... 43 Buber’s I and Thou ................................................................................................................... 45 The Thou. .............................................................................................................................. 47 I-thou relationship and therapy. ............................................................................................ 48 Intersubjectivity, I-thou, and therapy. ................................................................................... 49 Adlerian Therapy Meets I-Thou Relationship .......................................................................... 50 Therapy in Meeting ................................................................................................................... 52 Forming the relationship. ...................................................................................................... 53 Assessment, analysis, and re-orientation. ............................................................................. 54 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 56 References ..................................................................................................................................... 59 TELLING THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE 4 Introduction In the dance of therapy, movement occurs when the therapist and client risk the wholeness of their being in a relationship. A meeting of subjectivities and souls co-mingle in a sanctuary for healing anxiety and neurosis. In the therapeutic moment, the spiritual work of meeting convenes. Presence and connection engage the I-Thou relationship between therapist and client. Genuine dialogue activates the creative force of therapist and client in a mutual striving to overcome. Transcendence leads to alignment and engagement, the first step of the four-step model of Adlerian therapy. Alfred Adler and Martin Buber’s views of spirituality, psychotherapy, and community offer a therapist a deeper understanding of his or her immanent resources in work with clients. Through Adler’s Individual Psychology and his concept of the creative force and Buber’s personal engagement of Judaism as he envisioned it through Hasidism and his I-Thou dialogical philosophy of relationship, Adler and Buber offer a framework for spirituality, soul work, and subjectivity in the in-between space of the therapeutic encounter. Through the creative force and the I-Thou relationship, an intersubjective and interhuman striving to overcome provokes both client and therapist towards mutual self-discovery and goal striving. An overarching spiritual theme between Adler and Buber’s outlooks was their view of the soul as intrinsic to the human spirit. Adler and Buber believed in the healing of the soul as a priori to well-being and one’s striving in interpersonal and communal relationships (Buber, 1958/2006; Duba, 2012). Buber and Adler’s focus on the soul leaves them somewhat at odds with a current institution charged with promoting the counseling profession. A current white paper on the concept of spirituality posted by the Association for Spiritual, Ethical, and Religious Values in Counseling (ASERVIC), a division of the American Counseling Association (n.d.), TELLING THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE 5 considers concepts of “meaning,” “innate,” “unique,” “creativity,” “transcendence,” “connectedness,” “compassion,” “life force,” and “wholeness” (paras 3, 4, 5, & 6); however, nowhere in the document does one find mention of the soul. The omission of the soul in an institutional treatise on spirituality and psychology eerily recalls Adler’s criticisms of the psychological institutions of his day. In a piece from 1935 entitled “The Structure of Neurosis,” Adler stated, “The very word ‘psychology’ means science of the soul” (Duba, 2012, p. 218). He rebuked the “schools” of psychology and their work as “mechanistic” (p. 218) excluding the soul as part of the holistic nature of the human condition. Adler’s statement harkened back to Greek roots of psychology with Aristotle’s work on the soul that eventually gave way to a mechanistic view of psychology beginning with Renee Descartes (Vidal, 2011). The Enlightenment reconfiguring of psychology led to the field’s focus away from the study of the soul to the study of the mind. Buber and Adler’s shared views of the soul and relationship challenged the institutions of their times. Like Adler, Buber professed the unique soul of persons as central to healing and wholeness. His re-visioning of Judaism with Hasidism and soul emphasis challenged the institution of traditional, rabbinic Judaism. Buber espoused his soul views in his comments on psychotherapy when he wrote, “The sicknesses of the soul are sicknesses of relationship. They can only be treated completely if I translate the realm of the patient and add to it the world as well” (Agassi, 1999, p. xi). The relationship between the client and therapist becomes the immediate world of healing: a relationship embodied by spirituality and subjectivity. Friedman (1960) argued that Buber’s ideas of dialogue stemmed from a person’s wholeness and “when the soul