The volume includes Alfred Adler's writings from the period 1904 to 1912, that is the period of his participation in Freud's "Wednesday Society" until he founded his own school of psychotherapy, the "Association for Free Psychoanalytical Research" (from 1913 the "Association for Individual Psychology "). The essays document Adler's early Freudian orientation and the unfolding of the new concepts with which he moved away from Freud. This initially includes his psychosomatic theories (organ inferiority and compensation) and the introduction of the "aggression drive". Finally, with the dynamics of inferiority and compensation, he develops a bipolar "hermaphroditic" structure of personality ("male protest") and sees the hallmarks of the neurotic character in the deepened feeling of inferiority, in the striving for security and personal superiority.