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Rudolf Dreikurs (February 8, 1897, Vienna - May 25, 1972, Chicago) was an American psychiatrist and educator who developed psychologist Alfred Adler's system of individual psychology into a pragmatic method for understanding the purposes of reprehensible behaviour in children and for stimulating cooperative behaviour without punishment or reward.

He suggested that human misbehavior is the result of feeling a lack of belonging to one's social group. When this happens the child acts from one of four "mistaken goals": undue attention, power, revenge or avoidance (inadequacy).

Dreikurs' main theory dealt with misbehavior of pre-adolescents. He reasoned that these students will “act out” based on the four, principled, "mistaken goals." The first reason for their misbehavior is that they desire undue attention. If they do not receive the attention they crave through their actions (good or bad, e.g. doing well on a paper or throwing a tantrum), they move onto seeking power (e.g. they may refuse to complete a paper). If their power struggle is thwarted, they try to get revenge. If even revenge does not get the desired response, they begin to feel inadequate. His books list many ways to combat these behaviors. His overall goal was that students would learn to cooperate reasonably without being penalized or rewarded because they would feel that they are valuable contributors to the classroom.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Rudolf Dreikurs", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0