Style of life

The term style of life (German: Lebensstil) was used by psychiatrist Alfred Adler as one of several constructs describing the dynamics of the personality.

It reflects the individual's unique, unconscious, and repetitive way of responding to (or avoiding) the main tasks of living: friendship, love, and work. This style, rooted in a childhood prototype, remains consistent throughout life, unless it is changed through depth psychotherapy.

The style of life is reflected in the unity of an individual's way of thinking, feeling, and acting. The life style was increasingly seen by Adler as a product of the individual's own creative power, as well as being rooted in early childhood situations. Clues to the nature of the life style are provided by dreams, memories (real or constructed), and childhood/adolescent activities.

Often bending an individual away from the needs of others or of common sense, in favor of a private logic, movements are made to relieve inferiority feelings or to compensate for those feelings with an unconscious fictional final goal.

At its broadest, the life style includes self-concept, the self-ideal (or ego ideal), an ethical stance and a view of the wider world.

Classical Adlerian psychotherapy attempts to dissolve the archaic style of life and stimulate a more creative approach to living, using the standpoint of social usefulness as a benchmark for change.

Adler felt he could distinguish four primary types of style. Three of them he said to be "mistaken styles".

These include:

The fourth life style considered by Adler is the socially useful type: people with a great deal of social interest and activity.

Adler used life style as a way of psychologising religion, seeing evil as a distortion in the style of life, driven by egocentrism, and grace as first the recognition of the faulty life style, and then its rectification by human help to rejoin the human community.

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