Contributions to Adlerian Psychology

Copyright © 2011 by James Robert Bitter.

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Table of Contents

Preface

My life as an Adlerian: Playing with the Big Kids

Reflections on the Ideas of Adlerian Masters

An Interview With Heinz Ansbacher*

On Neurosis: An Introduction to Adler’s Concepts and Approach*

Dreikurs’ Holistic Medicine: An Introduction*

An Interview with Harold Mosak*

Adlerian Brief Therapy with Individuals

Adlerian Brief Therapy with Individuals: Process and Practice*

Relational Strategies: Two Approaches to Adlerian Brief Therapy

Adlerian Group Counseling

Adlerian Group Counseling: Step by Step

Counseling Children in Groups*

Adlerian Couples and Family Counseling and Therapy

Family Mapping and Family Constellation: Satir in Adlerian Context*

Communication Styles, Personality Priorities, and Social Interest:

Conscious Motivations: An Enhancement to Dreikurs’ Goals of Children’s Misbehavior*

The Mistaken Notions of Adults with Children*

Two Approaches to Counseling a Parent Alone: Toward a Gestalt-Adlerian Integration*

Human Conversations: Self-Disclosure and Storytelling in Adlerian Family Therapy*

A Study on Early Recollections

Early Recollections versus Created Memory: A Comparison for Projective Qualities*

An Adlerian-Feminist Approach to Therapy

Reclaiming a Profeminist Orientation in Adlerian Therapy*

Reconsidering Narcissism: An Adlerian-Feminist Response to the Articles in the Special Section of The Journal of Individual Psychology, Volume 63, Issue 2*

Adlerian Therapy and Social Construction

Integrating Narrative Therapy with Adlerian Lifestyle Assessment: A Case Study*

Emotion, Experience, and Early Recollections: Exploring Restorative Reorientation Processes in Adlerian Therapy*

Final Thoughts

Am I an Adlerian?*

Dedication

This book is for

Manford A. Sonstegard

and

Oscar C. Christensen

My teachers, colleagues, and dear, dear friends

Preface

Almost forty years ago, I began my training as a Counselor Educator. For the first year or so, I learned to practice active listening through the use of reflections and especially reflections of feeling. Somewhere in the second year of training, I was introduced to a model called Adlerian counseling, and I immediately felt at home. Indeed, the more I read books by Adler and Dreikurs, the more I felt that I had found a way to practice that fit with everything I believed—not just about therapy, but also about how to live my own life.

While I never met Adler or Dreikurs, I have been privileged to meet and study with many of their students. None of my teachers were more important to me than the more than thirty years I spent around Manford A. Sonstegard and Oscar Christensen, the two mentors to whom this compilation of writings is dedicated.

Except for the Introduction describing My Life as an Adlerian, all of the articles in this book have already been published in professional journals. Almost all of them appeared in either Individual Psychology or the Journal of Individual Psychology. And they appear here with permission of the publisher of those journals. One of the articles appeared in The Family Journal, and again, I wish to thank that journal for permission to reprint the article here.

The relationship of theory to practice has always fascinated me. I actually think of myself as a clinical theorist, a person who starts with efforts at therapeutic practice and then seeks to ground that work in the larger constructs that make up Adlerian theory. As you will see from the introduction, I have also had many teachers who were outside of the Adlerian community. Among them were the late pioneer of family therapy, Virginia Satir, and the master Gestalt therapists, Erv and Miriam Polster. And although my time with him was short, I also learned a great deal from training with the late Narrative therapist, Michael White. In each of these training experiences, I learned something new that I would bring back to my Adlerian foundation for integration. After almost forty years of practice, I am convinced that the Adlerian model is the strongest foundation for the integration of a wide range of effective therapeutic interventions.

The articles that make up this book are a tour of what I have learned during the wonderful journey I have had in the Counseling profession. I am eternally grateful to all who have made the journey possible and who have touched and enriched my life along the way.

                                                 James Robert Bitter

                                                 Johnson City, TN

                                                 June 15, 2011

My life as an Adlerian:

Playing with the Big Kids

James Robert Bitter

It was my fourth birthday. My maternal grandparents had come to town to celebrate the event with me and with my family. I remember getting up and coming into the dining room on that special day. Everyone was there––grandma and grandpa, my father and mother, and my sister, Jo Ellen, not quite two years old. There were so many presents everywhere. Some were big and some were small. All of them were wrapped in brightly colored birthday paper.

Where do I start? I asked.

Anywhere you like, my mother said.

So I opened the first box, a big one. It had a wonderful black cowboy hat in it. Then, I opened another, and this time there was a two-gun holster. Where there was a holster, there had to be a cap gun, so I kept going. I opened the next box, and there was another box inside it that was wrapped in birthday paper too. I opened it, and there was still another box, wrapped in paper, in that one. And when I opened the third little box, I found inside it a little tin bullet that fit into the belt of the holster. I was so excited: I couldn’t keep from smiling and laughing and talking a mile-a-minute about how neat everything was. There must have been forty or more presents to open. The little ones tended to have more bullets. The bigger ones had chaps and cap guns and even a Red Rider rifle.

I loved cowboy stories. I listened to the Lone Ranger on the radio every night before bed. And now I had a complete cowboy outfit. This was the best birthday ever. I had never been as happy as I was that day. I galloped around the house, listened to the grown-ups laughing and talking.

This is your lucky day, my father said, and I felt lucky.

Most of my life, this has been true: I am a very lucky man. I was born in a Navy Hospital in Seattle, Washington, on February 27, 1947. My birth mother kept me for almost six months before she gave me to Catholic Charities for adoption. I know very little about my birth parents. I know that the woman was of Italian descent, and the man was half Irish, half Pennsylvania Dutch. My real parents, Greg and Betty Bitter, adopted me and brought me home to Wenatchee, Washington, to live.

My father told me that when they first brought me home, we lived in a six apartment complex, three stories with apartments on each side of a center stairway going up the middle of the building. When I would wake up in the middle of the night, crying, my father could hear the toilets in the other five apartments all flushing, and he knew that my crying had awakened the entire building.

When I was about eighteen months, we moved to a single family home, and I was given my own room. On the first night, my father put me in my crib and told me that I was free to cry as much as I wanted to, because I would not be waking the neighbors anymore. That night, I slept all the way through, and I never cried in the middle of the night again. I’ve often wondered who taught my father that paradoxical intervention.

My father was a man who kept a lot inside himself and was somewhat aloof and distant, not really knowing what to do with children and leaving us to be raised by my mother. My mother was a warm, gregarious woman who loved her life as a homemaker and a community volunteer. My mother and father were both devout Catholics; they also believed that they were each other’s soul-mate; and they were committed to a marriage that was to last forever. Two years after they adopted me, they adopted my six-week-old sister, Jo Ellen. We were a working-class, nuclear family of the 1950’s, seeking the promise of a better life through hard work and dedication. We lived in a small town in central Washington, known for its production of apples and its traditional values––with little or no diversity acknowledged or appreciated in the community. In short, we were what our world called a normal family. Manners were important; faith was important; hard work was important; extended family and community were important and intertwined. Contributing to others and making a difference in the world was expected and valued.

When I was four years old, my mother called me into our dining room where she was sitting. She asked me if I would like to start going to school for half-a-day, each day. I asked her if I would be going to the school up the street where the big kids went. She said, Why yes, you would be going there.

The big kids went to the high school at the end of my block, and their marching band came right down our street, and they walked together to and from school, carrying books before there were book bags, and throwing balls back and forth. And I wanted to go where they were, so I was thrilled when my mom said I could go there. Later, I would realize that a wing of the high school had been given over to pre-school education, but on that day, I was about to be launched into the exciting world of the big kids. I have been privileged to be at school with the big kids for most of the rest of my life.

My grandfather died when I was nine, and my grandmother came to live with us. She and my mother were very close, and they loved being together. My grandmother was respectful of the relationship between my father and mother, and she helped everyone when she could, but she also had her own life and interests. I remember having long talks with my grandmother and being amazed by her stories of being a school teacher in Wisconsin before she met and married my grandfather. Having grandma with us in the family seemed as natural to me as having parents. In a short period of time, it was as if she had always been in our home.

Then, my mother died when I was fourteen; my sister was only twelve. My mother died from lung cancer: Both of my parents were heavy smokers, and both were addicted to it long before the Surgeon General started putting warnings on the side of cigarette packages. My mother’s death turned everything upside down. Both my father and my grandmother met the basic needs of my sister and me, but both were grieving, crying with a sadness that seemed like it would never end. Within a year, I would distance myself from the pain in the family by heading off to a Catholic boarding school. My sister would not be able to find such a convenient way out: She led a troubled life throughout high school, and as soon as possible, she started a life-long search for her birth parents.

My father dedicated the proceeds from the life insurance on my mother to sending his children to college. I was blessed with a great education (academically as well as in life) at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. I majored in English Literature with a minor in Philosophy. It turns out, however, that my father was right: There really aren’t any jobs waiting for people with a degree in English Literature and Philosophy. For a year after I graduated, I worked in a gas station and tried to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

I had many of the common developmental difficulties that occur in late adolescence and early adulthood. If it was possible to engage in life the hard way, I usually did. Counselors at Gonzaga really helped me begin the process of growing up. They were the people who, it seemed to me, had a handle on kindness, caring, and stability as well as a moral and ethical life. It was their modeling of effective engagement that led me to want to become a counselor.

In 1970, I headed off to Idaho State University in Pocatello, Idaho, to get a Master’s Degree in Counseling. At that time in the history of the counseling profession, the skills and interventions associated with Rogerian or Client-Centered Therapy made up the majority of our training. We spent hours learning to do reflections, active listening, and clarifications, continually paraphrasing content and feelings and hoping that it would all become second nature to us. For many of my peers, it did become second nature, but I struggled. I always had more questions I wanted to ask: I was always curious and wanted to know how everything fit together. I wanted to know who said what to whom. How did people react when my clients did one thing or another? What were the different parts that made up the personalities of the individuals I was seeing, and how did those parts work for people or against them? I was also far more directive in my interventions than would make any of my supervisors comfortable, because I genuinely wanted to help people find solutions to their problems. In the early days of my training, I seldom felt like I was effective, and in truth, I am sure that I wasn’t.

In early 1971, one of my professors went to a conference in which a man named Ray Lowe demonstrated Adlerian family counseling. This professor brought back tapes and books… and later, he even brought Ray Lowe, himself, to our campus. I absorbed everything I could about the Adlerian model. The more I read about Adlerian psychology, the more I felt at home. Adler was systemic before we even had such a word in our professions. He saw people as socially embedded; took into account the effects of birth order, family constellation, and family atmosphere; and considered interaction and doing central to understanding human motivation and behavior. Discovering the works of Adler and Dreikurs helped me to make sense out of my own life as well as the lives of the clients entrusted to my care.

I was part of a team who opened up the first public (open-forum) family education center at Idaho State University. I even conducted the first family counseling interview ever done there. I had lots of support and was given lots of room to make mistakes––and to learn. But I had found my approach. As graduate students, we ran parent study groups, held weekly family counseling sessions, and carried what we were learning into local area schools and community agencies. I stayed at Idaho State University to get my doctorate in Counselor Education. In March of 1974, we held a Conference on Adlerian Psychology that featured, once again, Ray Lowe and such masters as Heinz Ansbacher (see Bitter & West, 1979), Don Dinkmeyer, and the man who was to become my best friend and colleague for the second half of my life, Manford A. Sonstegard.

Sonstegard or Sonste was simply the best family and group counselor I had ever seen in action. He had an enormously calm manner that reflected what Murray Bowen (1966, 1976) called a differentiated self. He listened very carefully to the positions and counter-positions taken in families and groups, and he always stayed focused on redirecting motivation. When I finished my course work in 1974, I was able to get a position in a Counseling Program in West Virginia, a program that Sonstegard had been hired to chair. Over the next thirteen years, we established family education centers and conducted Adlerian family counseling sessions in multiple states in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. For the last three years we were in West Virginia, we offered a two-week summer training program in Adlerian family counseling that attracted people from Ireland and England as well as people from the eastern half of the United States.

Adler (1927/1957) had called his approach Individual Psychology, but it was anything but oriented toward the individual. He used the term Individual to emphasize the necessity of understanding the whole person (rather than just parts of people) within that person’s social contexts. Adler focused on the individual’s movement through life (one’s style of living) and how that style was enacted with others: He spoke of having a psychology of use, rather than possession. From Adler’s perspective, people had a purpose and use for the symptoms encountered in therapy. Others in the client’s life generally reacted in ways that maintained the very problems for which individuals sought help. Without any question, Adler was a systemic thinker, and working with systems was part of his therapy even back in the 1920s.

Adler’s conceptualized individuals, groups, couples, and families in ways that made sense out of what I already believed: I didn’t have the language of systemic therapy when I first read Adler, but the ideas were all there, and his holistic psychology has served as a wonderful foundation in my life and work for more than thirty-five years.

In 1979, I had the opportunity of attending a month-long training seminar, called a Process Community, led by Virginia Satir and two of her AVANTA trainers. The training program focused on applications of her Human Validation Process Model (Bitter, 2009b; Satir, 1983, 1988; Satir & Baldwin, 1983; Satir, Banmen, Gerber, & Gamori, 1991) with individuals, groups, couples, and families. Centered in her now famous focus on communication and self-esteem, it was as much a personal growth experience as it was a learning experience for family practitioners. Over one hundred participants were accepted for the program held just north of Montreal, Quebec, in Canada. Half of the participants spoke only English, and half of the participants had a primary language of French, so every word was offered in both languages. The power of Satir’s work in this cross-cultural experience was overwhelming. I came away from the month with a new dedication to experiential teaching and learning and a determination to integrate Satir’s communications, human validation, process model with the Adlerian principles I used in clinical practice (see Bitter, 1987, 1988, 1993; Satir, Bitter, & Krestensen, 1988).

In 1979, I became a member of the AVANTA Network, an association of Satir-trained practitioners who used her methods and processes––and who were engaged in training others to do the same. For the next ten years, until her death, I was privileged to work with Satir during three more Process Communities in Crested Butte, Colorado; coauthor an article and a chapter with her; and spend at least a week each year learning the newest ideas, hopes, and dreams of one of the most creative family systems therapists to have ever graced our planet.

This (Process) model is one in which the therapist and the family join forces to promote wellness. The heart of the model consists of all those interactions and transactions translated into methods and procedures which move the individuals in the family and the family system from a symptomatic base toward one of wellness. (Satir, 1982, p.12)

If I had not referenced Satir at the end of the last quote, the statement could have been made just as easily by Manford Sonstegard, Oscar Christensen, or Rudolf Dreikurs. But the parallels in her work to that of Adlerians did not stop there. Satir believed in holism and social embeddedness; she saw purpose in every action and interaction; and her work centered in validation and encouragement, the heart of every transformational process she developed. Most striking were the parallels between the personality priorities of Nira Kfir (1971, 1981) and Satir’s communication stances, which I started to describe in Systems of Family Therapy: An Adlerian Integration (see Bitter, 1987).

Kfir had suggested that her personality priorities were lifestyles, but assigning that status to her otherwise important discoveries diminished, it seemed to me, Adler’s conceptualization of life movement. Styles of living could simply not be reduced to only four possibilities. Bill Pew (1976), who integrated personality priorities into his clinical work, also suggested that personality priorities were the most important theme in an individual’s style of living. When I pressed him on this in a workshop once, he said that the individual’s movement toward a life-goal, from a felt-minus to a felt-plus, was the style of living, a roadmap through life. Personality priorities were more like the mode of transportation one chose when the going got tough, especially under stress This notion of personality priorities as first line of defense fit nicely with what Satir called her stress stances. The parallels between Satir and Kfir were hard to ignore: Placating and Pleasing; Blaming and Superiority (or Significance); Super Reasonable and Control; and Distracting/Irrelevant and Comfort, especially when comfort was defined as the avoidance of stress or pain.

Virginia Satir also taught me the power of congruent communication, an enactment of social interest in relationships, as well as the forms that meta-communications often take in therapy. She introduced sculpting to my work and gave me processes for creating transformative experiences with families. Her emphasis on touch, nurturance, presence, and vulnerability put my heart as a person and a counselor on the line, but it also opened up avenues of trust and caring that had been missing before. Satir taught me how to really join with families and still not get lost in them. When she died, it was like I had lost a mother, a father, a sister, and a brother all rolled into one. I had certainly lost one of the best teachers in my life.

In February of 1983, I married Lynn Williams, a coal miner’s daughter who had actually been raised in a coal camp for the first ten years of her life. Her father had worked as a foreman in the mine at Tams, West Virginia, having started there at 57 cents an hour. The following September, Lynn and I left for Chicago, where I took courses at the Alfred Adler Institute on Dearborn Street. I am still grateful to Harold Mosak for making it possible for me to work at the institute part-time and attend the classes he conducted––as well as other classes led by Jerry Mozdzierz, Bob Powers, Seymour Schneider, and Bernie Shulman. I also started life-long friendships with Jon Carlson and Len Sperry and was given the privilege of working with Bob Powers and Jane Griffith in their private practice. Powers and Griffith provided me with supervision through the use of multiple therapy (Dreikurs, Shulman, & Mosak, 1984), and to date, it was the best hands-on training in individual therapy I ever received.

In 1984, I returned home to West Virginia, armed with a new interview with Harold Mosak (Bitter, 1985), which was published a year later. 1984 was also the year that my wife and partner started her doctoral degree in Speech Pathology at Indiana University. For the next four years, I would commute every other weekend to Indiana to see Lynn, and we would dream of what would come next.

Before I left Chicago, Dr. Mosak had questioned my practice of asking clients to make up a memory when they were unable to think of one on their own. I told him that I had seen many Adlerians using this practice––on the theory that because we are holistic beings we would have to make up a memory that also carried projective qualities and which were oriented toward our self-selected life goals.

If that were true, Mosak said, there would be no creativity, and all fiction would be autobiographical.

In the mid-1980s, my colleague Sandy Barker and I began to design the only experimental study I have ever done (see Barker & Bitter, 1992). We asked people in our study to generate a set of actual early recollections and to create a set of fictional memories for themselves too. When we compared the two sets of memories, it turned out that Mosak’s suspicion had been correct. There was little or no similarity in the projective qualities of the two sets of memories. Created memories were just that, created.

In 1986, we celebrated Sonste’s 75th birthday with an Adlerian conference in West Virginia. Heinz Ansbacher came for the workshop as did Ray Lowe and many long-time friends and colleagues. Ansbacher focused on theory, using the recollections of Marilyn Monroe to demonstrate Adler’s interpretive processes. Ray Lowe concentrated on family therapy, and Sonste and I did demonstrations of group counseling. At the end of that academic year, Sonste retired from teaching in West Virginia.

In 1987, Lynn graduated from Indiana University, and we moved to Fullerton, California, where I would chair the Department of Counseling at California State University at Fullerton (CSUF). I came the year after a faculty member had committed suicide and had aimed it at another faculty member. There had been a lot of pain, grief, and loss experienced by students, faculty, and staff. I wanted the year to get off to a better start, so I asked Virginia Satir to lead a retreat with the faculty, which she agreed to do. For two days, she helped us get to know each other and helped the healing process to start.

I had become interested in Fullerton, because Jerry Corey taught there. Jerry Corey is one of the most prolific writers in the field of Counseling; by 1987, he had produced thirteen of the top fifteen selling textbooks in the helping professions. Because many of his books included chapters on Adlerian theory and practice, his efforts were keeping Adlerian ideas alive and well in graduate counseling programs across the nation.

When I arrived at Fullerton, I was surprised to find Jerry teaching in an undergraduate human services program that he had started with colleagues many years earlier. He was practically banned from teaching in the Counseling Program. We formed a friendship very quickly; and that first year, we applied for a joint appointment so that he could teach in both Counseling and Human Services. We were also able to talk Marianne Corey and Jerry’s colleague, Patrick Callanan, into conducting group experiences for our students. To this day, Jerry Corey is one of my best friends, a true colleague, and a giant pest. In that first year, he had me reading all of those Adlerian chapters to make sure that they were current and accurately represented Adlerian practice. Literally, he would ask me to look at the chapter, and in the time it took me to walk to my office, he was calling to see if I had finished the assignment yet. He is charming, fascinating, intelligent, gentle, and kind. He is like Heinz Ansbacher, having more social interest naturally than I have learned in 64 years of living. And did I mention: He is a gigantic PEST!

On September 10, 1989, Virginia Satir died. She was diagnosed with cancer right after she returned from a month of doing training in the Russia. This was before the fall of the USSR, but she came back from Russia full of hope for the people and the country: She could feel transformation in the air. Twelve of us conducted the last month-long Process Communities (parts 1 and 2) that were ever held in Crested Butte. Virginia returned to her home in Palo Alto, California, where she met with friends, colleagues, and family before she died.

In the fall of 1989, I talked Sonste out of retirement, and he came to Fullerton as a distinguished visiting professor. In less than a year, he had established three family education centers and three additional practicum sites, and he had our students out in the field doing the kind of in vivo supervision he had always favored. Some of those centers are still operating today as is the Adlerian Society of Southern California that he started in 1990. Most importantly to Lynn and me, Sonste lived with us in our home. In the evening, we would share a dinner together and sit around telling stories and sipping one of Sonste’s favorite liqueurs. And on Sunday morning, Sonste would make waffles, topped with vanilla ice cream, strawberries, and whipped cream on top of that. This was our version of the good life in southern California.

In 1990, Lynn and I both had established careers. We had been married for seven years, and we decided it was time for us to start a family. Lynn was 34 years old, and I was ten years older. On December 22, 1991, our first daughter, Alison Harper Williams, was born. We gave Ali her mother’s surname for many reasons, not the least of which was that Lynn had carried her for nine months and birthed her. We also wanted her connected to a long line of strong women in Lynn’s family and to loosen the hold of patriarchy on the tradition that assigns the father’s surname to children. We would do the same thing for Nora when she was born in 1998.

Both of my children clearly know who their father is. I am the person who takes them to school and violin lessons and softball or soccer. I am the person who either fixes dinner or does the dishes. I am the person who works with them on their homework and science fairs, asks them to clean their rooms or the bathroom, plans with their mother for college––and who loves them more than life itself.

In the 1990’s, I had two opportunities to do month-long training programs with Erv and Miriam Polster, the master Gestalt therapists. Their emphasis on awareness, contact, and experiment in therapy fit wonderfully with the decade worth of knowledge I had received from Satir. They also had the same kind of great heart that Satir and Sonste had. Whether working with individuals, couples, or families, Satir and the Polsters demonstrated the importance of an authentic and nurturing relationship in facilitating change. At the heart of both models was also a dedication to experiential therapy and learning through experiment and enactment. Even today, when I walk into a room to meet a family, I feel the wisdom of these great therapists with me (see Bitter, 2004).

As much as I have learned from master therapists in different models, I have always come back to Adlerian psychology as the foundation for what I do.

As you can see, I have been given the gift of great teachers in my lifetime. I have been welcomed by them into learning situations that I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world. Watching great masters at work has provided me with ideas and models for effective interventions that I never would have discovered on my own. To tell the truth, I often found myself imitating them initially in very concrete ways, sometimes using the exact words and interventions that I had seen them create spontaneously. Over time, I would begin to feel a more authentic integration of their influences in my life and work––and I let these influences inform my own creativity in family practice.

I have become fascinated by the flow and rhythms of therapeutic relationships. The two most important aspects of family practice are still the client(s) and the practitioner with the latter being in the best position to influence the process. I currently think in terms of four aspects to therapeutic movement: Purpose, Awareness, Contact, and Experience (Bitter 2004, Bitter & Nicoll, 2004). You may already have noticed that the acronym for these words spells the word pace. In both my personal and professional life, paying attention to purpose, awareness, contact, and experience brings a useful pace to human engagement and provides me with enough structure to support creativity in my interventions.

Purposefulness has always been a central aspect of Adlerian therapy and provides a sense of directionality and meaning to life. Awareness and contact are most clearly defined in the Polsters’ Gestalt practice: I consider both of these aspects as critical to an enlivened and energized life. They make being present sufficient as a catalyst for movement and change. Awareness and contact are also essential to more fully realized human experiences. They allow both the client(s) and the practitioner to touch the authentic within them and to find expressions that flow from their hearts. Such experiences are a natural part of Virginia Satir’s work. The therapeutic experiments and enactments common to systemic family therapy are just one form of such experiences.

In 1993, Lynn took a position at Oklahoma State University, and I took a leave of absence from Fullerton to stay home with Alison. She was about 18 months old when we moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma, and I got to experience what it was like to be a full-time parent. There were parts of it that I loved. Ali was a wonderful child, and we would go to the park and the swings, visit cows and horses to whom we fed grass and carrots, and we would play lots of games. One of my favorite games was called clearing out the corner of the block. At the corner of our block, all the stay-at-home mothers with their children in strollers would gather to talk and to gossip. I have never been against gossip: It is after all the substance of both life and good stories. So I would take Ali in her stroller, and we would head to the corner to join in the conversation. That is when the mothers on our block would decide it was time to go home, and Ali and I would have successfully cleared the corner once again.

Being Ali’s full-time parent for over a year gave me an opportunity to re-think Dreikurs’ mistaken goals in children. I had already come to the conclusion that there were additional goals beyond Dreikur’s original four. Dreikurs’ goals were most prominent in early childhood, up to about the age of 10, and they certainly accounted for most of children’s misbehavior. These goals were also mostly unconscious; that is, children enacted them without really being aware of having a goal. Based on conversations with Heinz Ansbacher at his Adlerian summer school in Vermont and later with Sonste, I began to think about more conscious goals in children, goals enacted, largely, when children are very young, for taking things that did not belong to them, for tattling or telling stories on others, and for lying (see Bitter, 1991). My year with Ali also convinced me that adults who spend most of their time with children also developed mistaken, but concrete, goals that interacted with the mistaken goals of children and tended to make it very difficult for adults to disengage from negative patterns. I returned to the idea of goal interaction that I had first developed in my doctoral dissertation, but I would think about it for more than a decade before I would publish it (see Bitter, 2009a).

In 1994, I returned to Fullerton, because our family could not live on just one salary. Again, I would commute every other week. Commuting got old for all of us really fast: When Ali was a little over three and a half, Lynn and I both took jobs at East Tennessee State University (ETSU)––in part so we could be closer to her family in West Virginia, and mostly so we could all be together. It was at ETSU that I was destined to work with some of the most influential colleagues in my career.

In June, 1996, I became a co-editor with Gerald Mozdzierz of what was then called Individual Psychology: The Journal of Adlerian Theory, Research, and Practice (now the Journal of Individual Psychology). Being an editor of the journal forced me to re-learn most of Adlerian psychology and to consider its expanding applications in therapy, in the home, and in schools. I was aided in this effort by numerous masters in the field. I am still thankful that Heinz Ansbacher, Guy Manaster, Bob Powers and Jane Griffith, and Jon Carlson would often take my calls and help me sort through ideas and issues. Heinz Ansbacher, for example, re-translated two of Adler’s articles on neurosis so that the nuances of Adler’s concepts of community feeling, social interest, and social feeling could be presented as originally written and clarified. Dr. Ansbacher was already 92 years old.

The following year, I was in Washington, DC, and I remembered that my friend Janet Terner had once been a librarian at the Library of Congress, and years earlier, she had shown me some papers by Rudolf Dreikurs that had never been published. I went to the Congressional library to have another look, and I found an unpublished manuscript by Dreikurs called Holistic Medicine. It constituted about 75% of the full book he had intended to write. I was certain that the journal should publish this work. Doing so almost cost me my friendship with Eva Dreikurs Ferguson.

The manuscript had apparently been filed in the Library of Congress as being in the public domain; that is, it could be read by anyone––and even copied. So I did. I copied it, and I brought it back to publish in the journal. I had the copy ready to go to the printer when it dawned on me that Eva might want to write an introduction to the manuscript. Because the manuscript was incomplete and more than twenty years old, it needed a lot of footnotes and clarifications in order for Eva to feel comfortable with its publication, and she simply did not have the time to do that kind of work. She was finishing a book of her own. But I was up against a deadline, and I did not have any concern that Dreikurs’ work would be misunderstood. But I was not Dreikurs’ child either, and I had not lived with him while he had been under attack from the medical community. So I all but forced Eva into interrupting her work to write an introduction and footnotes for Dreikurs’ Holistic Medicine. I still think of that manuscript as one of the most important to have ever been printed in the journal (see Nappier Carr & Bitter, 1997).

In 1996, Sonste turned 85 years old. Among other things, we began to think of ways to make his work in Adlerian group counseling more widely known. For more than two decades, I had watched him provide group counseling and therapy to children, adolescents, and adults. In many ways, his group work was transformative. I had watched adolescents, especially young men who seemed almost lost, come out of group counseling with direction, increased empathy for others, and a sense of purpose. I decided to dedicate one of the last journal issues I would edit to Sonste’s efforts. Two of the articles we wrote together (see Sonstegard & Bitter, 1998a, 1998b). The rest were developed from his thoughts. This effort laid the foundation for what would be the last book Sonste would publish (Sonstegard & Bitter, 2004).

At about this same time, I joined with my friends Oscar Christensen, Clair Hawes, and Bill Nicoll in the formation and development of the Adlerian Training Institute (ATI) in Florida. We offered a summer training program for a number of years in and around Boca Raton, but through Bill Nicoll’s efforts, we made our biggest impact in Europe. Bill brought us to Greece where our colleague, Pari Pelonis, had re-vitalized the Adlerian community. Bill took us into Slovenia, Germany, the Nederlands, England and Ireland. As a group, we developed two training videos, and Bill and I set out to define what Adlerian brief therapy would be (see Bitter & Nicoll, 2000, 2004).

In 1998, my daughter, Nora, was born. She was six years younger than her older sister, but she was a second born from the start. She was the opposite of her sister in almost every way. I did not want to miss Nora’s childhood, so I stepped down from my position as Chair of the Department of Human Development and Learning at ETSU to become a full-time faculty member. The woman who assumed the position of Chair was Patricia E. Robertson, a feminist therapist and a person I had recruited to our faculty. Pat is the embodiment of social interest and social advocacy, and she is simply the best leader I have ever had in my life. It is her influence that helped me return to Adler’s early feminist positions and to see what relevance feminist therapy today had for current Adlerian practices (see Bitter, 2008; Bitter, Robertson, Healey & Cole, 2009).

I have also had the gift of Dr. Graham Disque in my life. He is a friend and colleague who generates more creative ideas in a week than I have had in my lifetime. He also changes his approach to therapy with the same regularity that most people change their clothes. For fifteen years now, Graham and I meet regularly to talk over ideas and interventions with individual clients, in groups, and in couples and family therapy. We became fascinated with Narrative therapy in the late nineties, and it is Graham who helped me to see how Michael White’s (1990, 2007) social constructionist model fit with Adlerian therapy (see Disque & Bitter, 1998).

By the time our first article was published, Graham was into something new. Much of his work was immersed in the treatment of trauma, and he experimented with everything from EMDR to Acceptance therapy. In our discussions, he would talk about helping people to get in touch with the experiences in their bodies when emotion was otherwise overwhelming them. He wanted his clients to both stay present with their experiences and also connect them to something safe, something anchored in the present. I remembered the work of an Adlerian school counselor from Oregon, named Ed Janoe, who with his wife Barbara had published small booklets on emotional response (Janoe & Janoe, 1977a, 1977b). Applying their approach to work with those who had suffered trauma seemed to make a real difference in the lives of our clients (see Disque & Bitter, 2004).

In 2006, I was honored by the North American Society of Adlerian Psychology with the opportunity to present the Ansbacher Lecture at their annual meeting. All of my professional life I have been interested in the work of master therapists––and the ways in which their work could be integrated with Adlerian psychology and therapy. It had led to many people questioning whether I was actually an Adlerian at all, and so I decided to address that issue directly. I borrowed a title from an article that Dreikurs (1972) had written, and I set out to discuss what Adlerian integration was for me (Bitter, 2007). It took Dreikurs only five pages to declare he was an Adlerian. It took me twenty-eight. I think I had a lot more explaining to do than he did.

In the fall of 2007, my wife and I took the first sabbatical we had had since 1983 when were first married. We took the children out of school, and we went to Australia for two months. While I was there, I spent a week in a workshop with Michael White at his Dulwich Centre in Adelaide, South Australia. I returned from that experience more convinced than ever of the inter-connection between Narrative therapy and Adlerian psychology. There is very little difference between life stories and one’s style of living. As Michael (2007) would say:

When people consult therapists, they tell stories; they speak about the history of the problems, predicament, or dilemmas that have brought them to therapy, and they provide an account of what led to their decision to seek help. In doing this, people link the events of their lives in sequences that unfold through time according to a theme or plot (italics added). These themes often reflect loss, failure, incompetence, hopelessness, or futility. Along with this, people routinely refer to figures or protagonists that feature in the story, and they share with therapists their conclusions about the identity of these figures or protagonists and about their motives, intentions, and personal characteristics (again, italics added). Reauthoring conversations invite people to continue to develop and tell stories about their lives, but they also help people to include some of the more neglected but potentially significant events and experiences that are out of phase with their dominant storylines. (p. 61)

This