The Standard Edition of the works of Freud is readily available. The works of Jung exist through the Bollingen Foundation. However, there is no standard edition of the collected works of Alfred Adler. We do have some new translations first released by Oneworld Publications in England and now by the Hazelden Foundation of Minnesota. I have been disappointed that the Adler School of Professional Psychology could not see fit to contribute to this adventure, but neither has NASAP. Fortunately, we have had the translations and editions by Heinz and Rowena Ansbacher that have served us greatly in making the works of Alfred Adler available in English. We owe them much gratitude for all their publications.

Now we have a new beginning, Volume 1, The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution - oops, The Neurotic Character - finally a title change. Now there is forward movement anew on this important venture, and it is correcting no small number of mistakes and misperceptions about Adler's thought. Subtitled the "Fundamentals of Individual Psychology & Psychotherapy," we owe Henry Stein editor, and Cees Koen, translator, a great debt of thanks.

The text is based upon the 1927 fourth edition of Uber Den Nervosen Charakter, with endnotes derived from Karl Witte's 1999 German critical edition. But further complicating the problem of translating this book is not only the task of translating from German to English, but of expressing it in relevant English without doing an injustice to what Adler actually wrote. There is also the problem of names, words and phrases in the German edition unlikely to be known by the average reader today. This difficulty is nicely solved by Stein's use of extensive editorial notes. It makes this edition both scholarly and informative. This new translation and the editorial notes will not only go a long way to correcting some misperceptions about Adler's psychology, it should help make Adler more relevant for today's readers and bring his name once more to the forefront of psychology. Particularly useful is Stein's editorial references to other works by Adler. This allows readers to follow the development of Adler's ideas across time and connect earlier writing to later works. I have not yet put in sufficient study to trace all of the connections, but I suspect some will show continuity and others disparity. After all, Adler used many different terms for the same idea. While a general continuity of theory is evident, Adler was not the best of authors when it came to clear, concise expository writing. But some of that confusion was due to faulty translations from German expressed in English that used the words and phrases of more than two generations past.

About the translator, Cees Koen, Stein says, "He is Dutch and married to Janny who is also Dutch. When I met them in 1994, they had moved from Holland to Santa Cruz, California. Since that time they have moved to Japan, Belgium and recently to Germany. Janny is a research biologist and they travel for her research. Cees is fluent in Dutch, German, French and English and awesomely literate and articulate. But he is a modest person who seems to prefer to keep his work, rather than himself, in the spotlight."

This new edition also includes several prefaces: Adler's "To The Reader" (1911), the "Original Publisher's Preface" (1912) and Adler's "Preface to the First Edition" (1912), "Second Edition" (1919) and "Third Edition" (1922). It makes for interesting reading to follow the history of this book through these editions. Stein even offers editorial endnotes to these prefaces. The index is especially useful because it helpfully provides numerous page numbers to locate all the names, key words and phrases one might want to reference. Finally, the book concludes with an appendix, "Classical Adlerian Theory and Practice" by Henry Stein and Martha Edwards. This appendix is taken from an earlier published chapter in Marcus and Rosenberg's Psychoanalytic Versions of the Human Condition and Clinical Practice.

Stein's plan for the next volume in the series is to include a dozen or more of Adler's early journal articles and perhaps "Health Book for the Tailoring Trade" (1898), "The Penetration of Social Forces into Medicine" (1902) and Study of Organ Inferiority (1907).

I would like to give more details about this book, but space is limited and your time would be better spent studying this book. It is a valuable addition to Individual Psychology, and even more so to psychology at large. Thank you Cees and Henry for all your effort on this important task.

(Dr. Mark Stone is a member of the Doctoral Core Faculty and a Distinguished Service Professor at the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago.)

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