On Adlerian-Existential and Relational Foundations
The clinical traditions I draw from share a recognition that human beings are not primarily symptom-bearers to be returned to baseline. We are meaning-makers operating within social and developmental contexts that shape what is possible for us.
Alfred Adler, working in early twentieth-century Vienna alongside and eventually in distinction from Freud, developed an understanding of human psychology organized around several central ideas that remain clinically useful.
First, human beings strive — we are oriented toward goals, often unconscious ones, that organize our behavior in ways that make sense once the goals are understood. The striving is not primarily toward pleasure or away from pain. It is toward significance, meaning, mastery, and connection.
Second, we develop our characteristic patterns in the context of early family relationships and social positioning, and these patterns continue operating in adult life even when the original conditions that produced them have changed.
Third, what looks like dysfunction often makes sense as compensation for felt inferiority or as movement toward what Adler called a fictional final goal — an imagined endpoint that organizes a person's life trajectory even when the goal itself is unexamined.
The clinical implication of Adler's framework is that symptoms and patterns are not random. They are organized. They serve purposes the person has not necessarily made conscious. The work of therapy involves bringing the organization into view, examining whether the goals being pursued are the goals the person actually wants to pursue, and developing the capacity to act from a more conscious relationship with one's own striving.
Existential thinking adds the dimension of how human beings face fundamental conditions of existence — mortality, freedom, isolation, the requirement to construct meaning in a world that does not supply it. The existential tradition recognizes that much of psychological difficulty involves how we manage or avoid these conditions rather than how we resolve them. The work involves developing the capacity to live with what cannot be resolved while acting authentically within the freedom we have.
Relational psychoanalytic thinking adds attention to how the patterns we developed in early relationships continue to operate in current relationships, including the therapeutic relationship itself. Our adult ways of relating are not invented from scratch in adulthood. They are extensions and modifications of patterns laid down in our earliest attachments. Working with these patterns in the present, including in the relationship with the therapist, is part of how they become available for change.
In my practice, these approaches work together, not separately. I'm not using Adlerian techniques in one session and existential techniques in another. Instead, I bring all of them to how I listen to what you share with me — paying attention to the goals behind your patterns, the deeper challenges of being human that you're facing, the relational patterns you developed early in life and still carry, and the meaning you're building — or working hard to build — in your life right now.
These approaches also explain why I named my practice Third Alternative Counseling. Adler's framework points to the goals driving our behavior, often without our even realizing it. Existential thinking points to the conditions of being human that shape all of us, whether we recognize them or not. Relational thinking points to patterns we carry forward from earlier in our lives. Each of these perspectives opens up something that stays hidden when we only look at the surface of a struggle. When a third alternative appears, it grows out of that deeper understanding.
I also want to be honest about something that matters to me: I don't believe any single theoretical approach, by itself, makes therapy work. What makes therapy work is real presence — a therapist who is genuinely engaged with the person in front of them, guided by years of clinical experience. The frameworks I draw on shape how I listen and pay attention to what you bring. They don't replace that attention. They support it.