Adler’s parents were Hungarian Jews, but the family attended synagogue only sporadically. He spent many of his boyhood years in Jewish neighborhoods, though the playground near his home was frequented by families of the Christian working class, and Stepansky notes that it was there that he established his primary social community. Whether this contributed to his conversion to Christianity in 1904 is hard to say, but even that affiliation—like his short-lived movement in socialist circles—appears not to have been the result of strong conviction so much as an intention to assimilate into Viennese culture and perhaps strengthen his professional connections.
It was during his socialist dabbling that he met Raissa Epstein, a young political activist from Moscow. The couple married in 1897 after a whirlwind courtship. Adler had earned his medical degree two years earlier from the University of Vienna. Like Raissa, he hoped to contribute to change in the world, although not through political means as did his young wife.
In 1898 the couple welcomed the first of their four children and Adler published the Health Book for the Tailoring Trade. The book is most significant for documenting that the theoretical basis for his psychology was already developing before any contact with Freud. Taking the tract far beyond a mere medical perspective, Adler wrote that diseases common to tailors must be treated holistically, with due consideration given to the social, economic and psychological factors that contributed to the physical symptoms these tradesmen tended to suffer. Adler’s contributions to the medical journal Ärztliche Standeszeitung a few years later were consistent with this holistic view. Stepansky calls these writings “a remarkable preliminary statement of Adlerian psychology.”