Sulloway, believing that firstborn children are “dethroned” by laterborns. But Sulloway is less interested in knocking down Adler’s theories than in disqualifying Marxism and Freudianism as important rival explanations of human behavior, and in establishing incontrovertible scientific proof for his own findings. Though he enters an early disclaimer—“individual behavior needs to be explained as the product of complex interactions between proximate and ultimate causes”—his so-called “interactionist perspective” reveals precious little interaction. The greater part of Sulloway’s book is an elaborate, complex, and really quite relentless systematic study not of “proximate causes” but of his one “ultimate cause.”