Alfred Adler, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Organ inferiority is the starting point — the medical and biological observation from which the whole of individual psychology grew. Every organ in the body has a developmental history that begins in the fetus. Where that development is arrested, incomplete, or deficient in its fetal stage, the organ carries into life a constitutional weakness — what I call inferiority.
This is not merely a matter of obvious disease. The inferiority may be morphological, a defect of form or size; or it may show itself only functionally, as a failure of control or performance under demand.1 The two are not always the same thing, and that is precisely what makes the concept clinically useful: an organ may appear structurally sound and yet betray its inferiority the moment conditions worsen — a change in working hours, in nourishment, in social circumstance — and what was hidden by favorable conditions suddenly declares itself.2
Heredity runs through the whole picture. Because the fetal defect originates in properties of the germ cells themselves, the inferiority tends to appear across a family, though not always in the same organ and not always in the same form — sometimes as morphological anomaly, sometimes as functional deficiency in a related organ, sometimes only as illness among relatives.3
This is why the childhood history matters so much to me diagnostically: compensation, once it sets in, can conceal the original inferiority entirely, and only the anamnestic record of early functional failures — difficulties in learning to walk or talk, disturbances of the vegetative organs, the pattern of childhood illness — reveals what the adult presentation has masked.4
Now, the crucial turn: organ inferiority does not remain a purely somatic fact. The possession of a definitely inferior organ lowers the child's self-esteem, raises his psychological uncertainty — and it is precisely out of this lowered self-esteem that there arises a struggle for self-assertion far more intense than one would otherwise expect.5
The compensated organ gains in functional scope; the predisposed child, in his sense of inferiority, reaches into his psychic resources for expedients to raise his own value, and among these the neurotic and psychotic formations occupy the most prominent place.6 The case of Demosthenes is the one I return to most readily: the stuttering boy becomes the greatest orator of Greece, and to this day one finds in orators, actors, and singers a remarkable heaping-up of the very defects of speech and mouth that one would have expected to disqualify them.7
That is the movement — from organic minus to psychic compensation, from felt deficiency to intensified striving. Organ inferiority is where the biology and the psychology meet, and it is where I parted from the purely anatomical pathology of my predecessors: they described the defect; I asked what the psyche does with it.
From the conditions of morphologic inferiority of an organ the cause of which is always fetal defect of development... a morphologic anomaly can be replaced by a functional defect.Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation
the favourableness of external conditions, public and private hygiene, enable the individual burdened with an inferiority to escape dangers to health, which present themselves at once when the social position, working time, home or nourishment, become worse.Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation
The heredity may not always be exhausted in the morphologic inferiority of one and the same organ, it can, as will be later shown, be proved by functional deficiency, by inferiority of a second organ, as was pointed out before, or by cases of illness among relatives.Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation
it is absolutely necessary to get the history of youth, or perhaps, better still, the childhood history of the organ, because at times it is possible to determine the inferiority which escapes the perception the moment compensation sets in.Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation
the possession of definitely inferior organs is reflected upon the psyche — and in such a way as to lower the self-esteem, to raise the child's psychological uncertainty; but it is just out of this lowered self-esteem that there arises the struggle for self-assertion which assumes forms much more intense than one would expect.The Neurotic Constitution
the predisposed child in his sense of inferiority selects out of his psychic resources expedients for the raising of his own value which are frequently striking in nature and among which may be noted as occupying the most prominent places those of a neurotic and psychotic character.The Neurotic Constitution
The stuttering boy Demosthenes becomes the greatest orator of Greece, and up to the present day we seldom find any such heaping up of defects of speech and signs of degeneration of the mouth, as are observed in orators, actors and singers.Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation