| As Nietzsche divined, as historians have documented, and as philosophers are gradually discovering, the modern soul is governed by the Will to Power. This vindicates the psychology of Alfred Adler for he alone among depth psychology's creator-founders ascribed to power a kind of sovereignty in psychic life. The Adlerian conception of power assumes that power (1) is not so much an attribute or quality as it is a form of desire or style of imagination that (2) exists only in a social matrix and (3) requires a counter force or resistance in order to cohere. According to the Adlerian thesis, power is a form of desire that engages a world whose autonomy it regards as the condition of its existence.;Power may be personified in the form of an "Alcibiades complex," which is the psychological expression of the desire to lead. The Alcibiades complex, however, is morally neutral. In order to civilize the complex Adler created a psychology of urbanity, a psychology of urban, rhetorical man, who is characterized by an agonistic consciousness and whose roots run back through Nietzsche into the traditions of chivalry and rhetoric. In his effort to win the Alcibiades complex, that is, the will to power, to the City, Adler reclaimed and repeated the great classical debate about power and then ultimately transcended the impasse on which it foundered by moving along Augustinian lines.;Thus Adler succeeded in transforming Alcibiades into a hero. Adlerian or Individual Psychology is the psychology of the hero. |
