The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, Volume 2 - Journal Articles: 1898-1909 by Adler Alfred

Author:Adler, Alfred [Adler, Alfred]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Alfred Adler Institute of Northwestern Washington
Published: 2011-07-18T05:00:00+00:00

Part II

A Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation1

A Contribution to Clinical Medicine

1907

1 Originally published as Studie über Minderwertigkeit von Organen in 1907. Translated into English by Smith Ely Jelliffe, M.D. and published in 1917. This 2002 edition is based on the 1917 translation and has been minimally edited for readability by Henry T. Stein, Ph.D.

Adler”s Preface to the 1907 Edition

Adler’s Preface to the 1907 Edition

The purpose of this book is to add to clinical medicine a further principle of research. From the completeness and the import of these early results I am sure that I have come upon very fruitful territory.

To me, moreover, it was an attractive task to see our benumbered and thwarted conceptions of disease completely dissolved; to be able to observe human pathology in its making.

Many a valuable bit of knowledge has supported my theory of the inferiority of organs. I have been unable to give acknowledgment to all at the proper place, as I should have liked. In this paper, in addition to the authors named, the range of thought of Martius, Rosenbach, Exner, Hering, Obersteiner, Haeckel, Schwalbe, and many another has played a large part.

This work is to count as a beginning. Perhaps, at some future time, I shall be permitted to make the connection with clinical medicine, with psychology, and pedagogy still closer by bringing together all previous works on the subject1.

1 The author has advanced this purpose in his monograph The Neurotic Character.

Introduction

An examination of the diseases of the urinary apparatus can be very extensively carried on so far as their symptomatology is concerned. In renal pathology, as in all other diseases, the schema of symptoms is built up empirically, and accordingly rests on a firm basis. It is richly enough equipped to lead the diagnostics of renal diseases along safe paths. The compass is at once reduced, however, when the examination is directed towards etiology. The theories of the causes of renal diseases read like a short collection of truisms, in which terms such as predisposition, chill, poisons, infection, disturbance of the circulation appear and reappear and play their part, just as they do in other organic diseases.

The fact that a definition of these causal factors themselves is notably lacking ought not even to be particularly emphasized. More important is the fact that there: is so little positive material available to decide the question concerning the localization of disease in the kidney. What has been emphasized, the sickening of the kidneys through poisoning; or infection as well as through the progressive changes in (functions) affections of the circulatory system, all this is in line with the basal (primary, basic ) concepts of pathology, for the urinary organs are affected like all others proportionately to their relation to the disease centres.

The conditions in those cases which one is forced to designate as "genuine," or "primary" diseases of the kidney are less clear. A long list of diseases falls under these heads. They all have this in common, namely, that the final

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