Segue: Bluvshtein Discusses Adlerian Psychology Ahead of Oct. 1 Arts & Issues Lecture
Posted September 24, 2021
On this week’s episode of Segue, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s weekly radio program exploring the lives and work of the people on campus and beyond, College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) Dean Kevin Leonard, PhD, interviews Marina Bluvshtein, PhD, director of the Center for Adlerian Practice and Scholarship at Adler University in Chicago.
This episode of Segue airs at 9 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 26. Listeners can tune into WSIE 88.7 FM The Sound or siue.edu/wsie.
Bluvshtein earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1986 from Lomonosov Moscow State University and a master’s degree in Adlerian counseling and psychotherapy in 1997 from Adler Graduate School. She then earned a PhD in clinical psychology from Capella University in 2005. As part of a fellowship established at SIUE in 2017 by Dr. Eva Dreikurs Ferguson, daughter of Dreikurs, and her family, Bluvshtein will be visiting the SIUE campus for two weeks as the Dr. Rudolf Dreikurs Visiting Scholar.
“Welcome to Segue, Dr. Bluvshtein,” begins Leonard. “How did you become interested in psychology?”
“I was going in this direction for a very long time and, technically speaking, I’m a career change psychologist,” says Bluvshtein. “I got into the field about 27 years ago, but I see it more as a path adjustment or finding my voice through all the careers that I had before. I used to be a librarian, a construction engineer, a high school teacher for 10 years, and assistant principal for a couple of years. In some way, all these things are about psychology. I was probably a psychologist all my life, but I just started calling myself one when I got my license.”
“Now your focus has been on Adlerian psychology. Why don’t you tell us more about Alfred Adler?” prompts Leonard.
“Adler was an Austrian psychiatrist, but he was much more than that,” Bluvshtein explains. “He was born in 1870, the second of living children, but third of conceived, so he was a middle child by all accounts. He was quite sickly with several bouts of pneumonia, illness of the vocal chords, and later in life had tuberculosis. He lived in what we would now call a middle-class neighborhood.
“What’s interesting about his life and the time and place he lived in is that he lived through several large-scale world experiences, such as World War I in which he served as an army physician from 1916-1918. He saw the death and suffering and devastation first hand, and then coined the idea of ‘shell shock,’ which is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder.”
“What are the basic principles of Adlerian psychology?” asks Leonard.
“I think we want to start with the official name of the theory, Alfred Adler Individual Psychology,” Bluvshtein says. “A lot of times people think it’s individual versus family versus group, but the truth is that it was a poor translation from German. The reality is that individual in German in the context of the name of Adler’s theory is actually indivisible. It’s undividable. It’s holistic. This is one of the most fundamental things ibn Adlerian philosophy and the way we do therapy and the way we approach social issues.”
While Bluvshtein is visiting SIUE, she will also give a lecture as part of SIUE’s Arts & Issues series on Friday, Oct. 1 at 7:30 p.m. in the Dunham Hall Theater. Her topic will be, “Belongingness as a Goal of Personality Development and Social Evolution.” The event is free to the public, but tickets are required, which can be reserved here.
Tune in at 9 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 26, to WSIE 88.7 The Sound to hear the entire conversation.
