Many psychologists, including a number of Adler’s peers, interpreted human behaviour in aetiological terms. In other words, they believed that our actions were determined by a cause-and-effect relationship between the past and the future. They maintained that people developed certain character traits as a result of past events, and that their behaviour was a direct reflection of what had happened to them. Jung and Freud were among the many who backed this psychological approach.
Adler, on the other hand, put forward a different interpretation of human behaviour, known as ‘teleology’, which rejects the cause-effect relationship, and is instead based on the concept of purpose or intention. Teleology maintains that a person’s behaviour is determined by their intention to achieve a specific purpose, but that this goal is not always a clear, conscious choice. According to this approach, even people who display severe phobias or avoidant behaviour do not do so as a result of past trauma, but because they want to avoid further potentially painful events, relationships, or situations.
Another example is anger. In general, we almost never get angry because something has triggered a reaction, but because we want to assert our own reasons and opinions over someone else’s. According to teleology, we are perfectly capable of controlling our anger, but we tend to use it as a means to an end. In other words, it is not what happened in the past that determines our behaviour, but our purposes or intentions today.
Adler and Kishimi argue that, if the cause-effect relationship were always true, a certain cause would always result in the same effect, so we would all simply have to accept the consequences of any given event. It is not so much what happens to people that matters, but what they decide to do with it from that moment on.
An extremely short person, for instance, might use their height as an excuse to isolate themselves from other people and dwell on their feelings of inferiority; or they might decide to focus on the fact that their stature makes other people feel safe and secure, and use this to form relationships more easily.
