Pertaining to the theory and practice of Alfred Adler (1870 - 1937), whose school of psychoanalysis is called Individual Psychology (Individualpsychologie). Central to the Adlerian approach is to see the personality as a whole and not as the mere net result of component forces. Thus the term individual (indivisible) psychology. Adlerians adopt a radical stance that cuts across the nature-nurture debate by seeing the developing individual at work in creating the personality in response to the demands of nature and nurture but not absolutely determined by them. The self-created personality operates subjectively and idiosyncratically. The individual is endowed with a striving both for self-development and social meaning, expressed in a sense of belonging, usefulness and contribution, and even cosmic consciousness.

Neurosis and other pathological states reveal the safe-guarding or defensive strategems (largely unconscious or out of awareness) of the individual who believes him- or herself to be unequal to the demands of life. In "normal" development the child has experienced encouragement and accepts that his or her problems can be overcome in time by an investment of patient persistence and cooperation with others. The "normal" person feels a full member of life, and has "the courage to be imperfect" (Sofie Lazarsfeld).

Adlerians see a process of compensation at work as the individual strives, consciously and unconsciously, to overcome and solve the problems of life, moving "from a felt minus to a felt plus", overcoming feelings of inferiority.

In cases of discouragement the individual, feeling unable to unfold a real and socially valid development, erects a fantasy of superiority in some backwater of life, which offers seclusion and shelter from the threat of failure and annihilation of personal prestige. This fictional world, sustained by the need to safeguard an anxious ego, by private logic at variance with reason or common sense, by a schema of apperception which interprets and filters and suppresses the real-world data, is a fragile bubble waiting to be burst by mounting tension within and by assaults from the real world. The will to be or become has been replaced by the will to seem.

At the heart of Adlerian psychotherapy is the process of encouragement, grounded in the feeling of universal cohumanity and the belief in the as yet slumbering potential of the patient or client, This process of encouragement also makes the Adlerian approach so valuable to all those professions that concern themselves with the development and education of children.