Lucrecia Kasilag and Adler's Individual Psychology: Her Life Through Another Psychological Lens
Alfred Adler, the founder of Individual Psychology, believed that the primary motivation of people is striving for superiority. According to him, each individual naturally has feelings of inferiority, whether one admits it or not. Once a person acknowledges his/her inferiorities, the person tries to develop and improve, resulting into a striving for success instead of a mere superiority over others.
In this sense, a well-adjusted individual has the ability to improve oneself despite one’s limitations. With this, we look at the life of Lucrecia Roces Kasilag who was labelled a“genius” in her school age years, flourished in the field of arts, and awarded National Artist in Music in 1989. Using Adler’s theory on the development of personality, we will walk through Lucrecia Kasilag’s family in understanding how she developed her ingenuity and creativity in music.
Adler and Individual Psychology
Alfred Adler was a world renowned philosopher and psychiatrist who stressed the need to understand individuals within their social context, such as parenting style, influence of birth order, and style of life. Adler believed that individual is a unity of body and spirit, thus, the physical body of the psyche affect each other.
A person’s beliefs and expectations of the future, dubbed by Adler as “fictions”, can guide his or her behavior and act in accordance to these fictional ideals because the person acts as if these fictions are true. Adler emphasized on a concept called“creative power” that gives us the freedom to create one’s style of life and the freedom to act and determine our own fate. In other words, the child is his or her own creator,guided by one’s personal beliefs (Abrason, 2016).
Furthermore, Adler believed that the person is an indivisible whole, part of larger systems such as family, community, even part of a community as large as human kind or the planet. Our way of responding to our first social system, our family, eventually becomes the prototype of our worldview and attitude towards life. In Adler’s theory, the family constellation refers to the birth order, the gender of the siblings, and the age gap between the children.
An individual’s position in the family structure greatly affects the worldview, upon which they operate (Croake & Olson, 1977). For example, the oldest child has experiences for some time the situation of being the only child and thus, he is compelled to adapt himself to a new situation at the birth of the second child. On the other hand, the second child will always be trying to keep up with the eldest’s pace,the second child being born in a world where there is always a child ahead of him in age and development.
Moreover, the youngest can never be dethroned because he is the perceived “baby” of the family, and thus, probably the most pampered of all the children (Manaster, 1977). Grounding these assumptions on the life of Lucrecia Kasilag, one has to look into her relationship with her family.
Kasilag’s Parents
The Kasilags
The Kasilags were a well-off family. Lucrecia Kasilag’s father, Marcial Kasilag, was acivil engineer from Rosario, Batangas. He was sent to America with the first group of government pensionados in 1904 and graduated from Purdue University in 1908 with a civil engineering degree.
Purdue University
Marcial Kasilag has many notabilities: being the first Filipino head of the Bureau of Public Works and the first Filipino chief of the National Power Corporation. Kasilag describes her father as a disciplinarian, but a fair one, who ultimately focused on Lucrecia and her siblings’ intellectual growth, introducing them to many books.
Her mother, Asuncion Roces, was from Boac, Marinduque, a solfeggio and violin instructor, and was whom
Kasilag and her siblings initially honed and developed their musical talents from. On Saturday afternoons, for example, her mother would give the three eldest children solfeggio lessons, lessons so regular that Lucrecia and their siblings would even shirk these lessons in their mother’s unintended siestas (Kasilag,2000).
Kasilag’s Siblings
These were the children in the Kasilag family: Octavio, Natividad, Lucrecia, Mina, Marcialito, and Pedring. Octavio, otherwise known as OK, grew up to be a pianist and a businessman, graduating in Commerce in De La Salle University
The second eldest, Natividad, started out with the torotot, and then the violin, and is known as a guerrilla heroine married to Macario Peralta, Jr. Lucrecia was the third eldest who was consistently the top in her class, and was accelerated twice in music after she graduated valedictorian in high school.
After earning an undergraduate degree in AB English, and graduating cum laude, she earned her Music Teacher’s Diploma from Saint Scholastica’s College in 1930 and enrolled again to earn her Bachelor of Music degree. Her younger siblings are Mina, who grew up to be physician, Pedring, who became a lawyer and a jazz pianist, and Marcialito who ended up as an electrical engineer (Kasilag, 2000).
St. Scholastica's College
Lucrecia Kasilag grew up surrounded by her family of achievers and was raised with encouragement from her parents to strive for greatness.
From Adler’s perspective, this concept of “striving” can also refer to “mastery”,“perfection”, and “superiority”. Humans have a tendency towards competency or self-mastery, what Adler calls “striving for perfection”. This refers to the individual’s creative and compensatory response to what life throws at him/her.
It is also natural human desire to move from a perceived negative position to a perceived positive one, characterized in the person’s desire for self-improvement(Watts & Ergüner-Tekinalp, 2017). Lucrecia’s family played a big part in shaping her attitude to the world, and influenced her to channel her creativity in music.
Music for Creativity and Wellness
In relation to individual psychology, music provides a structure within which there is individual freedom. It accommodates individual interpretation and creativity such that no two people are expressing themselves in precisely the same way. Hence, it is a highly structured art form that provides a format for “learning about one’s own unique manner of approaching the creative process, expressing one’s self, interacting with others, and organizing and interpreting artistic material” (Eriksson, 2017).
Music can be used as a form of therapy, making use of its elements as an “intervention in medical, educational, and everyday environments with individuals, groups, families,or communities” (Eriksson, 2017). Adler introduced the concept of Gemeinschaftgefühl, or taking an active interest in the interest of others. This can also be referred to as“social interest”, a sense of community, and being in harmony with the cosmos.
This social interest is shown to describe the world’s greatest scientists, artists, and musicians in their own creative moments of originality. For example, Beethoven may be viewed as a musical therapist, as well as a master artist, with how he connected himself to the world with his music that induces feelings of harmony and belonging. Music, therefore, can be used to promote wellness, creativity, and originality (Eriksson,2017).
Lucrecia Kasilag, aside from being a National Artist, can also be seen as a contributor to the field of music therapy as her family background had shaped her to express her ingenuity and creativity in this unique art form that engenders harmony and promotes well being,
References
Abramson, Z. (2016). Freud and Adler: Differences. Journal Of Individual Psychology, 72 (2), 140-147.
Croake, J. W. (1975). An Adlerian view of life style. Journal Of Clinical Psychology, 31 (3), 513-518.
Croake, J. W., & Olson, T. D. (1977). Family constellation and personality. Journal Of Individual Psychology (00221805), 33 (1), 9.
Cultural Center of the Philippines (1998). The national artists of the Philippines . Pasig City, Philippines: Anvil Publishing.
Eriksson, C. (2017). Adlerian Psychology and Music Therapy: The Harmony of Sound and Matter and Community Feeling. Journal Of Individual Psychology, 73 (3),243-264.
Kasilag, L. (2000). Lucrecia Roces Kasilag: My story . Manila, Philippines: Philippine Women’s University.
Manaster, G. J. (1977). Birth order: An overview . Journal Of Individual Psychology, 33 (1), 3-8.
Overholser, J. C. (2013). A True Sense of Community Has No Boundaries: A Simulated Interview with Alfred Adler. Journal Of Individual Psychology, 69 (1), 7-23.
Watts, R. E., & Ergüner-Tekinalp, B. (2017). Positive Psychology: A Neo-Adlerian Perspective. Journal Of Individual Psychology, 73 (4), 328-337.doi:10.1353/jip.2017.0027