Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler is invoked as a predecessor whose account of human motivation Sartre finds methodologically inadequate, and as a psychoanalyst who explains children’s attraction to holes through infantile sexuality. Sartre rejects that explanation as a starting point: the hole has an ontological meaning that must be understood before sexuality can give it a more specific significance.

Adler as a Theoretical Predecessor

Sartre groups Adler with theories that posit a fundamental drive in advance of investigation. He describes Adler’s will to power as an unmethodical generalization from empirical data, arguing that its lack of method permits a departure from psychoanalytic method’s basic principles. In Sartre’s view, such a postulate cannot be justified simply by the findings it later organizes: consequences cannot establish the principle from which inquiry began.

This criticism is part of a broader dispute over how psychoanalysis should define its object. Sartre also challenges explanations organized around sexuality, death, or birth trauma when they treat one of these as an a priori key to human reality. He proposes an ontological starting point instead: human reality is a choice of being, expressed directly or through the appropriation of the world. On that account, the analyst should first investigate how things disclose being and how a person relates to it, rather than assume that their meaning derives from a drive such as Adler’s will to power.

The Hole and Its Meaning

Adler’s account enters the discussion through the question of why holes attract children. Sartre reports that psychoanalysts explain this attraction by reference to infantile anal sexuality, prenatal shock, or anticipation of adult sexual experience. He refuses these explanations as sufficient accounts of the hole’s original meaning. In particular, relating the hole to a sexual organ presupposes an experience or presentiment that cannot be established; explaining it through the child’s own body also overlooks that the child does not encounter a bodily part as an objective feature of the world in the way another person may describe it.

Sartre reverses the proposed direction of explanation. The hole encountered as an objective feature of the world helps the child understand the body’s objective structure and gives transcendent meaning to sensations that had previously been lived without that interpretation. The child’s relation to the bodily feature is therefore mediated by another person’s words, rather than originating in a supposedly self-evident correspondence between bodily sensation and the worldly hole. For Sartre, the hole first symbolizes a mode of being; its sexual associations belong to a later explanatory layer.

A Dispute About Psychoanalytic Method

Sartre does not deny that infantile sexuality exists, or that sexual symbolism may be found in nature. His objection is to making sexuality the primary principle that explains the child’s encounter with matter and form. He treats sexual symbolism as secondary and reducible, dependent on an account of presexual structures. Thus Adler’s explanation may identify a connection that matters to human sexuality, but it cannot, in Sartre’s argument, explain how the hole first acquires significance.

The dispute also clarifies the difference between a general symbol and an individual project. A hole has an ontological meaning for existential psychoanalysis, but people may define themselves differently in relation to it. The analyst’s task is not to replace Adler’s single explanatory drive with another fixed personal trait; it is to interpret how a particular person’s freely chosen project takes shape through their relation to such meanings. Adler consequently serves both as a representative of a contested method and as a specific example of why Sartre insists that psychoanalysis establish its principles from ontology.