This article compares the radical, holistic understanding of body and mind in the individual psychology of Alfred Adler with Wilhelm Reich's functional identity of psyche and soma. Both start with the immediate, subjective experience of the individual and as such this makes their approaches in principle to phenomenologies of the body in the sense of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. The author develops the view that from two different starting points Adler and Reich came to almost identical conclusions about body and mind. He demonstrates the discrepancies in Reich's criticism of Adler's concept of finality in organics, which arise through his insistence on physical causality. He shows that the fundamental pioneering work of both Adler and Reich lies in the fact that they each established independently of one another that the basic state of the human being is primarily unneurotic, consistent, autonomous and social. Today this assumption forms the basis for all humanistic therapies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]