Mim Pew Ferguson dropped out of nursing school to get married and start a family. But when she met renowned psychiatrist Dr. Rudolf Dreikurs at a classroom lecture in 1959, Pew Ferguson confessed that she was "smitten."
"He was so compelling and so exciting," she said in a YouTube video recounting her first meeting with Dreikurs, a psychoanalyst whose pioneering approach to using "social discipline" to work with misbehaving children grew out of the teachings of Alfred Adler.
Pew Ferguson became a Dreikurs protégée and, while raising five children, immersed herself in the emerging Adlerian approach to family counseling. At 42, she earned a master's degree in social work from the University of Minnesota and became instrumental in spreading Adler's concepts in the Midwest.
Pew Ferguson died of heart failure on Sept. 8. She was 88.
Her friendship with Dreikurs and admiration of Adler's theories of "individual psychology" spilled over to her first husband, Bill Pew, a pediatrician, who later became a child and adult psychiatrist.
"We became groupies," Pew Ferguson said.
In 1967, with Dreikurs' support, the couple helped launch the Minnesota Adlerian Society. Now based in Richfield, the Adler Graduate School trains and certifies hundreds of educators and mental health practitioners each year. A family education center at the school is named after Pew Ferguson.
Adler was a psychiatrist in Vienna in the late 1880s and a member of Freud's Vienna Circle. He split with Freud over philosophical differences and developed a more holistic approach of psychotherapy that emphasized mutual respect and self-responsibility.His renegade approach appealed to the young mother with a house full of children.
