{"agent_id":"adler","agent_name":"Alfred Adler","slug":"inferiority-and-compensation","label":"Inferiority and compensation: is the striving to overcome felt inferiority the mainspring of the psyche?","topic":"Inferiority and compensation","question":"Is the striving to overcome felt inferiority the mainspring of the psyche?","position":"To be a human being is to feel inferior. Every one of us begins life as a small, weak, wholly dependent child in a world of larger and more capable others, and no one escapes the feeling of littleness that this leaves. That feeling is not a disease; it is the spur. From the felt minus the whole of life is a movement toward a plus — toward competence, security, significance, a place among others where one need not feel small. Compensation is the name of this movement, and it builds everything: the child who stammers becomes the orator, the sickly boy the athlete, the whole of culture is compensation for human weakness before nature. Neurosis is not a different thing from this but a miscarriage of it: an inferiority felt as unbearable, a goal of superiority pitched too high and too private, and a set of \"safeguarding\" devices — symptoms, hesitations, retreats — by which the person protects his fragile sense of worth by declining the tasks of life while seeming not to decline them. I do not make sexuality the master motive, as Freud did; I make the striving from below to above, and I find it under every symptom and every character, because it is the shape of a life lived forward from a helpless beginning.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"To be a human being is to feel inferior.","n":[]},{"t":"Every one of us begins life as a small, weak, wholly dependent child in a world of larger and more capable others, and no one escapes the feeling of littleness that this leaves.","n":[1]},{"t":"That feeling is not a disease; it is the spur.","n":[]},{"t":"From the felt minus the whole of life is a movement toward a plus — toward competence, security, significance, a place among others where one need not feel small.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Compensation is the name of this movement, and it builds everything: the child who stammers becomes the orator, the sickly boy the athlete, the whole of culture is compensation for human weakness before nature.","n":[]},{"t":"Neurosis is not a different thing from this but a miscarriage of it: an inferiority felt as unbearable, a goal of superiority pitched too high and too private, and a set of \"safeguarding\" devices — symptoms, hesitations, retreats — by which the person protects his fragile sense of worth by declining the tasks of life while seeming not to decline them.","n":[2,3]}],[{"t":"I do not make sexuality the master motive, as Freud did; I make the striving from below to above, and I find it under every symptom and every character, because it is the shape of a life lived forward from a helpless beginning.","n":[4,5]}]],"texts":"Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation (1907, the medical origin of the compensation idea); The Neurotic Constitution (1912, the systematic account of inferiority feeling, compensation, and the neurotic's safeguarding); Understanding Human Nature (1927, the popular statement); The Science of Living (1929). Reception: the entry of the 'inferiority complex' into ordinary language; the charge that the theory reduces all motivation to a single principle; the contrast with Freud's libido and Jung's individuation; the uptake of compensation and striving in later humanistic and cognitive psychologies; the Ansbachers' systematization.","works":["Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation (1907, the medical origin of the compensation idea)","The Neurotic Constitution (1912, the systematic account of inferiority feeling, compensation, and the neurotic's safeguarding)","Understanding Human Nature (1927, the popular statement)","The Science of Living (1929)"],"reception":"the entry of the 'inferiority complex' into ordinary language; the charge that the theory reduces all motivation to a single principle; the contrast with Freud's libido and Jung's individuation; the uptake of compensation and striving in later humanistic and cognitive psychologies; the Ansbachers' systematization.","status":"Adler's founding idea and his most enduring popular legacy: the \"inferiority complex\" is one of the few technical terms of depth psychology to become ordinary speech. Its influence is broad — compensation and the striving for competence run through the humanistic and cognitive psychologies — but it draws the standard objection leveled at all the first-generation schools: that it reduces the whole of human motivation to a single master principle, as Freud reduced it to sexuality and Jung enriched it toward the archetypal. Whether \"striving from inferiority to superiority\" is the key to the psyche or one motive among many, over-generalized into a system, is the live question; the Ansbachers' systematic edition made the mature, socially-embedded version of the doctrine available against the caricature.","era":"1870-1937","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Pattern of Life","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Every human being begins life as a relatively help- less, impotent, dependent parasite. Without the aid of his parents, the first community of the family, the human infant would perish miserably in a few hours. Under the fostering influence of parents the individual child grows in power and ability. During his growth he is a virtual parasite of the society that nurtures him.","label":"The Pattern of Life"},{"n":2,"work":"Problems of Neurosis","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"So efficiently may an individual train his whole mentality for this task that the entire current of his psychic life flowing ceaselessly from below to above — that is, from the feeling of inferiority to that of superiority — occurs automatically and escapes his own notice. ' It is not surprising, therefore, that we often receive a Negative reply when we ask a person whether he has a feeling of inferiority.","label":"Problems of Neurosis"},{"n":3,"work":"The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"These latter are frequently represented by attacks of pain, famting-spells or epileptic seizures. (Cf. \"Trotz und Gehorsam \" in Heilen und BildenJ) All neurotic symptoms have as their object the task of ensuring the safety of the patient's feeling of personality and the life-line with which he has identified himself.","label":"The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology"},{"n":4,"work":"The Pattern of Life","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The true history of human genius is the history of the caveman's struggle for existence. Each human being is capable of elaborating his per- sonal defects into a useful contribution to society, yet a superficial survey of our society indicates that only a small proportion of the human race has gained the courage to effect such compensations. Our neurotics far outnumber our geniuses.","label":"The Pattern of Life"},{"n":5,"work":"The Neurotic Constitution","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The aim to be great, to be strong, to be a man, to be \"above\" is symbolized in the person of the father, the mother, the teacher, the coach- man, the locomotive engineer, etc., and the con- duct, the attitude, the imitative gestures, the play of children and their wishes, the day dreams and favorite stories, ideas about their future vocation show us that the compensatory tendency is at 35 36 THE NEUROTIC…","label":"The Neurotic Constitution"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"fictional-finalism","label":"Fictional finalism: is a person pulled by a self-created future goal rather than pushed by past causes?"},{"slug":"the-masculine-protest","label":"The masculine protest: is women's felt inferiority socially made rather than inborn?"},{"slug":"the-unity-of-the-personality","label":"The unity of the personality: is the psyche an indivisible whole rather than a house divided?"}]}