The Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler, 1870-1937. Adler started his medical career as an ophthalmologist but then, influenced by Freud's ideas, moved his interest to the study of mental disorders. Adler identified the cause of mental diseases in term of inferiority complex acquired during childhood. The child, being a small and powerless figure in a world dominated by adults, develops a painful consciousness of inferiority. Mental disorders in adult life are seen as efforts to obtain a kind of compensation". In 1919 Adler founded the first child guidance clinic in the Vienna school system."