4 - Inferiority feelings and Superiority striving

Speaking of subjectivity of perception as we did last time, one thing we cannot avoid perceiving subjectively is ourselves. From the very beginning of life, or at least of self-consciousness, we observe ourselves in relation to our own efforts and actions (and their results), our environment, and the other people around us. Adler saw that the result was usually a feeling of inferiority, especially in the young child. It is the self-assessment of, compared with others, being less than they are: slower, weaker, and more needy and dependent.

Adler’s best-known idea comes from a book he wrote early in his career (Study of Organ Inferiority and its Physical Compensation: a Contribution to Clinical Medicine, 1904). Inferiority feelings are a result of comparisons with others, with older siblings and our parents and other adults. Coming off second best, we rate ourselves as “below” and everyone else as “above.”

Such self-definitions, internalized and carried forward into adult life, can result in over-compensation by a will to power (a phrase he borrowed from Nietzsche) which becomes a superiority striving toward an “above” position. At first, Adler limited his explanation to physical or organ inferiority, and later expanded it to include social factors. Initially he spoke of inferiority feelings. “Complex” came
later, perhaps when a reporter wrote of Adler as “the father of the inferiority
complex,” and Adler was stuck with it. Here's what Adler said:

I shall consequently speak of a general goal of man. A thoroughgoing
study has taught us that we can best understand the manifold and diverse movements of the psyche as soon as our most general pre-supposition, that the psyche has as its nature the goal of superiority, is recognized. This goal of complete superiority, with its strange appearance at times, does not come from the world of reality.  inherently we must place it under “fictions” and “imaginations.” Of these Vaihinger…rightly says that their importance lies in the fact that whereas in themselves they are without meaning, they nevertheless
possess in practice the greatest importance. For our case this coincides to such an extent that we may say that this fiction of a goal of superiority so ridiculous from the viewpoint of reality, has become the principal conditioning factor of our life as hitherto known.

Adler had a positive view of human beings. He believed that people have freedom of will and are able to make choices rather than be limited by external forces such as environment or heredity). In Understanding Human Nature (1927) he wrote:

Every child occupies an inferior position in life. Were it not for the social feeling of his family, he would be incapable of independent existence. The beginning of every life is fraught with a deep feeling of inferiority when one sees the weakness and helplessness of every child. Sooner or later, every child becomes conscious of his inability to cope single-handed with the challenges of existence. This is the driving force, the starting point from which every childish striving originates. It determines how this child acquires peace and security in life, it determines the very goal of his existence, and prepares the path along which this goal may be reached.

When he spoke of inferiority in children he was not blaming them for being who and what they are: when compared with others, weak, slow, unskilled, lacking in many ways. He meant only to recognize the reality of early childhood and that a child makes choices about Self compared with Others. This learned response becomes the basis for a life-long self-definition, the Guiding Problem, the Guiding Goal, the Guiding Line, and the Ideal Self Image...among everything else.

Childhood, like all of life, involves problems and problem solving. Adler believed that, from all of childhood’s problems, one would emerge as unable to be solved by the child. Yet it must be solved if life is to have meaning, for until it is solved one will remain inferior and vulnerable. Thus to solve it will provide safety, mastery and power. The belief that there is a Perfect Solution and that one spend the rest of one’s life to find it, becomes what Adler called the individual’s fictional final goal that underlies and explains all other behaviors.

Next time: Centrality of community; Social Embeddedness; the “Iron law of communal life”