The Pattern of Life

Adler's central claim is that human conduct is not a collection of disconnected behaviors but a unified 'pattern of life' — a purposive movement toward significance and security. Every gesture, symptom, and habit expresses this pattern. The book rejects the psychiatric tendency to view people as 'static machines designated by labels,' as the editor's introduction puts it. Instead of classifying symptoms, the reader is taught to see each case as a moving, living, purpose-fulfilling entity. The child who steals, the child who refuses to eat, the child who fears growing up — each is pursuing a goal within a coherent, if mistaken, scheme.

The book was compiled and edited by W. Béran Wolfe, who translated and arranged Adler's American case material for an English-speaking audience. The introduction notes that before this volume, students of individual psychology had to search German publications for case material, much of which dealt with continental conditions puzzling to American readers. This volume presents purely American cases. The first edition appeared in 1930 from Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, with a London edition in 1931 from Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner. A second edition with a new preface by Bernard H. Shulman was issued in 1982 by the Alfred Adler Institute of Chicago.

Unlike The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1920), which collects Adler's own theoretical and applied essays, The Pattern of Life is explicitly a casebook edited by Wolfe. Its chief value, as the introduction states, lies not in teaching the technique of cure but in acquainting readers with the dynamic patterns of human conduct — the art of reading case histories. The book shows that individual psychology's principles are universally valid in application, demonstrated through American rather than European material. It functions as a companion volume to Adler's more systematic works, supplying the concrete clinical illustrations they lacked.

The book has had a long if unspectacular publication history. It was reprinted in 1982 by the Alfred Adler Institute of Chicago with a second preface, in 1999 and 2001 by Routledge as part of the International Library of Psychology and Individual Differences series, and in various print-on-demand editions. The 1930 edition is in the public domain in the United States. Modern reprints vary in quality, and the Routledge editions are generally considered the most reliable for scholarly use. Its primary audience has remained clinicians and students of Adlerian method rather than general readers.

The most common misreading is that these case studies offer a diagnostic system — a set of labels that can be applied mechanically to new patients. The book explicitly warns against this: it is an outline of childhood neuroses and a key to reading case histories, not a comprehensive treatise on psychotherapy. The cases demonstrate a method of understanding, not a set of recipes. Adler's approach requires grasping each child's unique pattern within their family constellation and social context. Readers who extract principles without the interpretive discipline the cases model will misunderstand both the method and the children it describes.

It extends the applied, child-focused orientation of The Education of Children (1930) into clinical case material, showing what the patterns described in that book look like in practice. Where The Education of Children provides the theory of child guidance, The Pattern of Life supplies the concrete evidence — case histories of maternal domination, the road to crime, fear of growing up, and other patterns. Together they demonstrate Adler's conviction that individual psychology is most useful when applied preventively, by teachers and parents, rather than only remedially by clinicians. The casebook format makes that application visible and teachable.