Trauma Does Not Exist? What Adler Really Meant About Freud, Determinism and Breaking Free

It is one of those phrases that sounds less like psychology and more like a person picking a fight in a pub. But Adler was not denying suffering. He was challenging something far more entrenched: the habit of turning pain into destiny.

This is a guest post by a practising psychologist

“Trauma does not exist.”

It is the sort of phrase that makes readers spill their tea. At first glance, it sounds absurd. At second glance, offensive. By the third, one is tempted to throw the book across the room and wonder how long its author would last in a modern therapy clinic.

And yet Alfred Adler’s point, though badly served by the slogan, is neither foolish nor casually cruel. He is not saying abuse does not happen, that grief leaves no mark, or that violence is an illusion. He is saying something both sterner and more hopeful: suffering is real, but it does not have to become sovereign.

That is the argument. Not that pain is fake, but that it need not govern the whole of a person’s future. In an age that is very good at diagnosis and rather less good at hope, that is a point worth taking seriously.

The dispute turns on two ideas: etiology and teleology.

Etiology asks what caused a person to become the way they are. It is the familiar backward-looking model. You are anxious because of this childhood event, withdrawn because of that humiliation, distrustful because of some earlier betrayal. The past explains the present, and the future starts to look like an extension of old injuries.

Teleology asks a different question. Instead of only asking what caused a pattern, it asks what purpose the pattern serves now. What is it helping the person avoid? What position is it preserving? What risk is it protecting them from?

That is where Adler parts company with Freud.

Freud’s great achievement was to insist that suffering matters. He understood that childhood matters, that inner conflict matters, and that buried pain can continue to shape adult life. He gave people a language for psychic wounds, repression, repetition and the mind’s ability to hide things from itself while still being governed by them.

That was an enormous contribution. It remains one.

But Freud’s weakness lies close to his strength. Once you become very good at explaining the present through the past, you can become too good at it. Explanation can turn into enclosure. The wound becomes the key to the whole house. Every current difficulty is traced back to a prior cause. Before long, a person is no longer simply someone to whom painful things happened. They become the child of those things. The label settles over them and begins to act like fate.

That is the trap Adler attacks.

He thinks this kind of thinking, taken too far, turns human beings into machines pulled along by causes they did not choose. It sounds compassionate, because it says, “It isn’t your fault.” But it can become a prison too, because it quietly adds, “And this is why you will keep being this way.”

This is why Adler’s phrase “Trauma does not exist.” has to be read with care. Literally, it is nonsense. Trauma plainly exists in ordinary language, medicine and modern psychological practice. Adler’s real target is the idea that trauma must become destiny. He is not denying injury. He is denying inevitability.

He is clear that terrible experiences can have powerful effects. Abuse, loss, humiliation and fear all leave marks. No sensible reading of Adler can deny that. His claim is that these influences are not final rulers. They do not automatically determine the course of a person’s life. What matters is also the meaning a person gives those experiences now, in the present, and the way that meaning shapes choices and patterns.

That is what makes Adler sound both severe and liberating. He will not let a person settle forever into the sentence, “This happened to me, therefore I am fixed.” He insists on a harder question: yes, this happened, but how are you living in relation to it now?

Take the example of the young person who shuts himself away in his room. Adler’s point is not that his anxiety is fake. The suffering is real. The harder question is what this withdrawal is doing for him now: protecting him from risk, preserving attention, or shielding him from judgment, rejection and failure.

One can see at once why people dislike this argument. It can sound blaming if handled badly.

That is Adler’s weakness. In clumsy hands, his ideas can become a moral lecture masquerading as therapy. Real trauma can be minimised. People in pain can be made to feel blamed for their own distress. At such moments, Adlerian language can become cruelty in a cardigan.

There are times when people need specialist trauma work, safety, patience and proper clinical care. Fear is not always a philosophical position; sometimes it is a physiological fact. No one should use Adler as an excuse to dismiss serious suffering.

But Freud has an equal and opposite danger. In the wrong hands, his theory becomes a stately old mansion full of explanations and no exits. Every corridor leads backwards. Every present difficulty is traced to a buried cause. A person may come to understand themselves beautifully and still remain trapped.

So the choice is not between compassion and harshness. The better question is what each thinker gets right.

Freud gets this right: pain leaves traces. The past matters. Childhood matters. Wounds can continue to shape a life long after the event itself has ended.

Adler gets this right: traces are not chains. The fact that something shaped you does not mean it is entitled to own you forever.

Jung belongs more loosely in the same warning zone. He is not the main target of this Adlerian argument, but Jungian language too can become determinist in practice if people are not careful. Archetypes, complexes and inherited psychic patterns can all become ways of telling people that the map was drawn long before they arrived. Used wisely, Jung opens up meaning. Used badly, he can sound like a fortune teller with a library card.

That is the trouble with all powerful psychological systems. Once they become labels, they start to act like prophecies. A person hears that they are traumatised, wounded, avoidant, bound by a complex or destined to repeat a pattern, and before long the description begins to govern the life it was meant only to describe.

Adler’s enduring value is that he refuses to bow to that way of thinking.

He says, in effect, that understanding the past is not enough. Explanation is not liberation. At some point, the person has to ask not only, “Why did I become this way?” but “What am I doing now?” and “How else might I live?” That is why Adler is so closely tied to courage. He thinks the real difficulty is not merely that life has wounded us. It is that changing how we live is frightening. Old miseries can be oddly familiar. Freedom can be terrifying.

That is why Adler still matters. We live in a culture fluent in wounds, triggers, patterns and diagnoses. Some of that fluency is humane and overdue. Some of it has helped people feel seen for the first time. But there is also a risk that we become so proficient at explanation that we quietly lose our belief in movement.

A person can spend years learning why they hurt and still have no answer to the question of how to live.

Adler will not let us stop at the explanation. He insists there is a future tense. He insists that the past, however real, is not a dictatorship. He insists that bad things can happen without being allowed to become the whole constitution of the self.

That is the strongest reading of “Trauma does not exist.”

Not that suffering is unreal. Not that pain is trivial. Not that the wounded should be hectored into cheerful self-improvement.

It means this: trauma must not be allowed to become a theology of permanent defeat.

Freud, at his best, tells us why we bleed. Adler, at his best, reminds us that bleeding is not the same as being buried.

Freud can help a person understand the prison. Adler can help them look for the door and go through it

And in a wounded society, that matters.

Because bad things do happen. Some of them are vile. Some alter the nervous system, the imagination, the body and the ability to trust. None of that should be denied.

But nor should we give the past the freehold on the future.

What happened matters.

It is just not the whole verdict.

The Shepway Vox Team

Dissent is NOT a Crime