In Adlers System an Inferiority Complex Leads to Continuous Improvement

Alfred Adler was born on February 7, 1870, in Rudolfsheim, a village near Vienna. His mother, Pauline, was a hard-working homemaker who kept busy with her seven children. His father, Leopold, was a middle-class Jewish grain merchant from Hungary. As a young boy, Adler was weak and sickly and at age 5, he nearly died of pneumonia. Thus, at age 5, he decided that his goal in life would be to conquer death. Several of Adler's earliest memories were concerned with the unhappy competition between his brother's good health and his own illness. Sigmund Adler, the childhood rival whom Adler attempted to surpass, remained a worthy opponent, and in later years he became very successful in business and even helped Alfred financially. Like Freud, Adler was affected by events surrounding World War I. Both men had financial difficulties, and both reluctantly borrowed money from relatives— Freud from his brother-in-law Edward Bernays and Adler from his brother Sigmund. Adler suggested that social interest and compassion could be the cornerstones of human motivation. Adler married a fiercely independent Russian woman, Raissa Epstein, in December of 1897. Raissa and Alfred had four children: Alexandra and Kurt, who became psychiatrists and continued their father's work; Valentine (Vali), who died as a political prisoner of the Soviet Union in about 1942; and Cornelia (Nelly), who aspired to be an actress. He died of a heart attack. Freud, who was 14 years older than Adler, had outlived his longtime adversary.

Alfred Adler was neither a terrorist nor a person driven mad by ambition. Indeed, his individual psychology presents an optimistic view of people while resting heavily on the notion of social interest, that is, a feeling of oneness with all humankind. In addition to Adler's more optimistic look at people, several other differences made the relationship between Freud and Adler quite tenuous.

First, Freud reduced all motivation to sex and aggression, whereas Adler saw people as being motivated mostly by social influences and by their striving for superiority or success; second, Freud assumed that people have little or no choice in shaping their personality, whereas Adler believed that people are largely responsible for who they are; third, Freud's assumption that present behavior is caused by past experiences was directly opposed to Adler's notion that present behavior is shaped by people's view of the future; and fourth, in contrast to Freud, who placed very heavy emphasis on unconscious components of behavior, Adler believed that psychologically healthy people are usually aware of what they are doing and why they are doing it.

To Adler, people are born with weak, inferior bodies—a condition that leads to feelings of inferiority and a consequent dependence on other people. Therefore, a feeling of unity with others (social interest) is inherent in people and the ultimate standard for psychological health. More specifically, the main tenets of Adlerian theory can be stated in outline form. The following is adapted from a list that represents the final statement of individual psychology (Adler, 1964).

1. The one dynamic force behind people's behavior is the striving for success or superiority.

2. People's subjective perceptions shape their behavior and personality.

3. Personality is unified and self-consistent.

4. The value of all human activity must be seen from the viewpoint of social interest.

5. The self-consistent personality structure develops into a person's style of life.

6. Style of life is molded by people's creative power.

1. Striving for Success or Superiority

The first tenet of Adlerian theory is: The one dynamic force behind people's behavior is the striving for success or superiority.

- Adler used the term masculine protest, which implied will to power or a domination of others. However, he soon abandoned masculine protest as a universal drive while continuing to give it a limited role in his theory of abnormal development

- Adler called the single dynamic force striving for superiority. In his final theory, however, he limited striving for superiority to those people who strive for personal superiority over others

- introduced the term striving for success to describe actions of people who are motivated by highly developed social interest

FINAL GOAL
According to Adler (1956), people strive toward a final goal of either personal superiority or the goal of success for all humankind. In either case, the final goal is fictional and has no objective existence. Nevertheless, the final goal has great significance because it unifies personality and renders all behavior comprehensible.

It is the product of the creative power, that is, people's ability to freely shape their behavior and create their own personality. By the time children reach 4 or 5 years of age, their creative power has developed to the point that they can set their final goal. Even infants have an innate drive toward growth, completion, or success. Because infants are small, incomplete, and weak, they feel inferior and powerless. To compensate for this deficiency, they set a fictional goal to be big, complete, and strong. Thus, a person's final goal reduces the pain of inferiority feelings and points that person in the direction of either superiority or success.

If children feel neglected or pampered, their goal remains largely unconscious. Conversely, if children experience love and security, they set a goal that is largely conscious and clearly understood.

The Striving Force as Compensation
People strive for superiority or success as a means of compensation for feelings of inferiority or weakness. Adler (1930) believed that all humans are "blessed" at birth with small, weak, and inferior bodies. These physical deficiencies ignite feelings of inferiority only because people, by their nature, possess an innate tendency toward completion or wholeness. People are continually pushed by the need to overcome inferiority feelings and pulled by the desire for completion.

Without the innate movement toward perfection, children would never feel inferior; but without feelings of inferiority, they would never set a goal of superiority or success. The goal, then, is set as compensation for the deficit feeling, but the deficit feeling would not exist unless a child first possessed a basic tendency toward completion (Adler, 1956).

In his final theory, Adler identified two general avenues of striving. The first is the socially nonproductive attempt to gain personal superiority; the second involves social interest and is aimed at success or perfection for everyone.

Striving for Personal Superiority
Some people strive for superiority with little or no concern for others. Their goals are personal ones, and their strivings are motivated largely by exaggerated feelings of personal inferiority, or the presence of an inferiority complex. Some people create clever disguises for their personal striving and may consciously or unconsciously hide their self-centeredness behind the cloak of social concern.

Striving for Success
In contrast to people who strive for personal gain are those psychologically healthy people who are motivated by social interest and the success of all humankind. These healthy individuals are concerned with goals beyond themselves, are capable of helping others without demanding or expecting a personal payoff, and are able to see others not as opponents but as people with whom they can cooperate for social benefit.

Their own success is not gained at the expense of others but is a natural tendency to move toward completion or perfection. People who strive for success rather than personal superiority maintain a sense of self, of course, but they see daily problems from the view of society's development rather than from a strictly personal vantage point. Their sense of personal worth is tied closely to their contributions to human society. Social progress is more important to them than personal credit (Adler, 1956).

2. Subjective Perceptions

Adler's second tenet is: People's subjective perceptions shape their behavior and personality.

People strive for superiority or success to compensate for feelings of inferiority, but the manner in which they strive is not shaped by reality but by their subjective perceptions of reality, that is, by their fictions, or expectations of the future.

Fictionalism
Our most important fiction is the goal of superiority or success, a goal we created early in life and may not clearly understand. This subjective, fictional final goal guides our style of life, gives unity to our personality. Adler's ideas on factionalism originated with Hans Vaihinger's book The Philosophy of "As If" (1911/1925). Vaihinger believed that fictions are ideas that have no real existence, yet they influence people as if they really existed.

Adler's emphasis on fictions is consistent with his strongly held teleological view of motivation. Teleology is an explanation of behavior in terms of its final purpose or aim. It is opposed to causality, which considers behavior as springing from a specific cause.

Physical Inferiorities
Because people begin life small, weak, and inferior, they develop a fiction or belief system about how to overcome these physical deficiencies and become big, strong, and superior. But even after they attain size, strength, and superiority, they may act as if they are still small, weak, and inferior.

Adler (1929/1969) insisted that the whole human race is "blessed" with organ inferiorities. These physical handicaps have little or no importance by themselves but become meaningful when they stimulate subjective feelings of inferiority, which serve as an impetus toward perfection or completion.

Adler (1929/1969) emphasized that physical deficiencies alone do not cause a particular style of life; they simply provide present motivation for reaching future goals. Such motivation, like all aspects of personality, is unified and self-consistent.

3. Unity and Self-Consistency of Personality

The third tenet of Adlerian theory is: Personality is unified and self-consistent.

Adler wished to stress his belief that each person is unique and indivisible. Thus, individual psychology insists on the fundamental unity of personality and the notion that inconsistent behavior does not exist. Thoughts, feelings, and actions are all directed toward a single goal and serve a single purpose. When people behave erratically or unpredictably, their behavior forces other people to be on the defensive, to be watchful so as not to be confused by capricious actions.

Adler (1956) recognized several ways in which the entire person operates with unity and self-consistency.

Organ Dialect
According to Adler (1956), the whole person strives in a self-consistent fashion toward a single goal, and all separate actions and functions can be understood only as parts of this goal. The disturbance of one part of the body cannot be viewed in isolation; it affects the entire person. In fact, the deficient organ expresses the direction of the individual's goal, a condition known as organ dialect. Through organ dialect, the body's organs "speak a language which is usually more expressive and discloses the individual's opinion more clearly than words are able to do" (Adler, 1956, p. 223).

Conscious and Unconscious
A second example of a unified personality is the harmony between conscious and unconscious actions. Adler (1956) defined the unconscious as that part of the goal that is neither clearly formulated nor completely understood by the individual. With this definition, Adler avoided a dichotomy between the unconscious and the conscious, which he saw as two cooperating parts of the same unified system. Conscious thoughts are those that are understood and regarded by the individual as helpful in striving for success, whereas unconscious thoughts are those that are not helpful.

4. Social Interest

The fourth of Adler's tenets is: The value of all human activity must be seen from the viewpoint of social interest.

Social interest is Adler's somewhat misleading translation of his original German term, Gemeinschaftsgefühl. A better translation might be "social feeling" or "community feeling," but Gemeinschaftsgefühl actually has a meaning that is not fully expressed by any English word or phrase. Roughly, it means a feeling of oneness with all humanity; it implies membership in the social community of all people.

A person with well-developed Gemeinschaftsgefühl strives not for personal superiority but for perfection for all people in an ideal community. Social interest is the natural condition of the human species and the adhesive that binds society together (Adler, 1927). The natural inferiority of individuals necessitates their joining together to form a society. Without protection and nourishment from a father or mother, a baby would perish. Without protection from the family or clan, our ancestors would have been destroyed by animals that were stronger, more ferocious, or endowed with keener senses. Social interest, therefore, is a necessity for perpetuating the human species.

Origins of Social Interest
Social interest is rooted as potentiality in everyone, but it must be developed before it can contribute to a useful style of life. It originates from the mother-child relationship during the early months of infancy. Every person who has survived infancy was kept alive by a mothering person who possessed some amount of social interest. Thus, every person has had the seeds of social interest sown during those early months.

Adler believed that marriage and parenthood is a task for two. However, the two parents may influence a child's social interest in somewhat different ways. The mother's job is to develop a bond that encourages the child's mature social interest and fosters a sense of cooperation.

The father is a second important person in a child's social environment. He must demonstrate a caring attitude toward his wife as well as to other people. The ideal father cooperates on an equal footing with the child's mother in caring for the child and treating the child as a human being.

A father's emotional detachment may influence the child to develop a warped sense of social interest, a feeling of neglect, and possibly a parasitic attachment to the mother. A child who experiences paternal detachment creates a goal of personal superiority rather than one based on social interest. The second error—paternal authoritarianism—may also lead to an unhealthy style of life. A child who sees the father as a tyrant learns to strive for power and personal superiority.

Adler (1956) believed that the effects of the early social environment are extremely important. The relationship a child has with the mother and father is so powerful that it smothers the effects of heredity. Adler believed that after age 5, the effects of heredity become blurred by the powerful influence of the child's social environment. By that time, environmental forces have modified or shaped nearly every aspect of a child's personality.

5. Style of Life

Adler's fifth tenet is: The self-consistent personality structure develops into a person's style of life.

Style of life is the term Adler used to refer to the flavor of a person's life. It includes a person's goal, self-concept, feelings for others, and attitude toward the world. It is the product of the interaction of heredity, environment, and a person's creative power.

A person's style of life is fairly well established by age 4 or 5. After that time, all our actions revolve around our unified style of life. Although the final goal is singular, style of life need not be narrow or rigid. Psychologically unhealthy individuals often lead rather inflexible lives that are marked by an inability to choose new ways of reacting to their environment.

People with a healthy, socially useful style of life express their social interest through action. They actively struggle to solve what Adler regarded as the three major problems of life—neighborly love, sexual love, and occupation—and they do so through cooperation, personal courage, and a willingness to make a contribution to the welfare of another. Adler (1956) believed that people with a socially useful style of life represent the highest form of humanity in the evolutionary process and are likely to populate the world of the future.

6. Creative Power

The final tenet of Adlerian theory is: Style of life is molded by people's creative power.

Each person, Adler believed, is empowered with the freedom to create her or his own style of life. Ultimately, all people are responsible for who they are and how they behave. Their creative power places them in control of their own lives, is responsible for their final goal, determines their method of striving for that goal, and contributes to the development of social interest. In short, creative power makes each person a free individual. Creative power is a dynamic concept implying movement, and this movement is the most salient characteristic of life. All psychic life involves movement toward a goal, movement with a direction (Adler, 1964).

Adler (1929/1964) used an interesting analogy, which he called "the law of the low doorway." If you are trying to walk through a doorway four feet high, you have two basic choices. First, you can use your creative power to bend down as you approach the doorway, thereby successfully solving the problem. This is the manner in which the psychologically healthy individual solves most of life's problems. Conversely, if you bump your head and fall back, you must still solve the problem correctly or continue bumping your head. Neurotics often choose to bump their head on the realities of life. When approaching the low doorway, you are neither compelled to stoop nor forced to bump your head. You have a creative power that permits you to follow either course.

Abnormal Development
Adler believed that people are what they make of themselves. The creative power endows humans, within certain limits, with the freedom to be either psychologically healthy or unhealthy and to follow either a useful or useless style of life.

According to Adler (1956), the one factor underlying all types of maladjustments is underdeveloped social interest. Besides lacking social interest, neurotics tend to (1) set their goals too high, (2) live in their own private world, and (3) have a rigid and dogmatic style of life. These three characteristics follow inevitably from a lack of social interest. In short, people become failures in life because they are overconcerned with themselves and care little about others. Maladjusted people set extravagant goals as an overcompensation for exaggerated feelings of inferiority. These lofty goals lead to dogmatic behavior, and the higher the goal, the more rigid the striving.

To compensate for deeply rooted feelings of inadequacy and basic insecurity, these individuals narrow their perspective and strive compulsively and rigidly for unrealistic goals.

The exaggerated and unrealistic nature of neurotics' goals sets them apart from the community of other people. They approach the problems of friendship, sex, and occupation from a personal angle that precludes successful solutions.

External Factors in Maladjustment
Why do some people create maladjustments? Adler (1964) recognized three contributing factors, any one of which is sufficient to contribute to abnormality: (1) exaggerated physical deficiencies, (2) a pampered style of life, and (3) a neglected style of life.

Exaggerated Physical Deficiencies
People with exaggerated physical deficiencies sometimes develop exaggerated feelings of inferiority because they overcompensate for their inadequacy. They tend to be overly concerned with themselves and lack consideration for others. They feel as if they are living in enemy country, fear defeat more than they desire success, and are convinced that life's major problems can be solved only in a selfish manner (Adler, 1927).

Pampered Style of Life
A pampered style of life lies at the heart of most neuroses. Pampered people have weak social interest but a strong desire to perpetuate the pampered, parasitic relationship they originally had with one or both of their parents. They expect others to look after them, overprotect them, and satisfy their needs. They are characterized by extreme discouragement, indecisiveness, oversensitivity, impatience, and exaggerated emotion, especially anxiety. They see the world with private vision and believe that they are entitled to be first in everything (Adler, 1927, 1964).

Neglected Style of Life
The third external factor contributing to maladjustment is neglect. Children who feel unloved and unwanted are likely to borrow heavily from these feelings in creating a neglected style of life. Neglect is a relative concept. No one feels totally neglected or completely unwanted. The fact that a child survived infancy is proof that someone cared for that child and that the seed of social interest has been planted (Adler, 1927).

Safeguarding Tendencies
Adler believed that people create patterns of behavior to protect their exaggerated sense of self-esteem against public disgrace. These protective devices, called safeguarding tendencies, enable people to hide their inflated self-image and to maintain their current style of life.

Adler's concept of safeguarding tendencies can be compared to Freud's concept of defense mechanisms.

Freudian defense mechanisms operate unconsciously to protect the ego against anxiety, whereas Adlerian safeguarding tendencies are largely conscious and shield a person's fragile self-esteem from public disgrace. Also, Freud's defense mechanisms are common to everyone, but Adler (1956) discussed safeguarding tendencies only with reference to the construction of neurotic symptoms.

Excuses
The most common of the safeguarding tendencies are excuses, which are typically expressed in the "Yes, but" or "If only" format. In the "Yes, but" excuse, people first state what they claim they would like to do—something that sounds good to others—then they follow with an excuse. The "If only" statement is the same excuse phrased in a different way. " If only my husband were more supportive, I would have advanced faster in my profession." " If only I did not have this physical deficiency, I could compete successfully for a job." These excuses protect a weak—but artificially inflated—sense of self-worth and deceive people into believing that they are more superior than they really are (Adler, 1956).

Aggression
Another common safeguarding tendency is aggression. Adler (1956) held that some people use aggression to safeguard their exaggerated superiority complex, that is, to protect their fragile self-esteem. Safeguarding through aggression may take the form of depreciation, accusation, or self-accusation.

Depreciation is the tendency to undervalue other people's achievements and to overvalue one's own. This safeguarding tendency is evident in such aggressive behaviors as criticism and gossip.

Accusation, the second form of an aggressive safeguarding device, is the tendency to blame others for one's failures and to seek revenge, thereby safeguarding one's own tenuous self-esteem.

The third form of neurotic aggression, self-accusation, is marked by self-torture and guilt. Some people use self-torture, including masochism, depression, and suicide, as means of hurting people who are close to them. Guilt is often aggressive, self-accusatory behavior.

Withdrawal
Personality development can be halted when people run away from difficulties. Adler referred to this tendency as withdrawal, or safeguarding through distance. Some people unconsciously escape life's problems by setting up a distance between themselves and those problems. Adler (1956) recognized four modes of safeguarding through withdrawal: (1) moving backward, (2) standing still, (3) hesitating, and (3) constructing obstacles.

Moving backward is the tendency to safeguard one's fictional goal of superiority by psychologically reverting to a more secure period of life.

            Psychological distance can also be created by standing still. This withdrawal tendency is similar to moving backward but, in general, it is not as severe. People who stand still simply do not move in any direction; thus, they avoid all responsibility by ensuring themselves against any threat of failure.

         Closely related to standing still is hesitating. Some people hesitate or vacillate when faced with difficult problems. Their procrastinations eventually give them the excuse "It's too late now."

            The least severe of the withdrawal safeguarding tendencies is constructing obstacles. Some people build a straw house to show that they can knock it down. By overcoming the obstacle, they protect their self-esteem and their prestige. If they fail to hurdle the barrier, they can always resort to an excuse.

Masculine Protest

In contrast to Freud, Adler (1930, 1956) believed that the psychic life of women is essentially the same as that of men and that a male-dominated society is not natural but rather an artificial product of historical development. According to Adler, cultural and social practices—not anatomy—influence many men and women to overemphasize the importance of being manly, a condition he called the masculine protest.

Applications of Individual Psychology

Family Constellation
In therapy, Adler almost always asked patients about their family constellation, that is, their birth order, the gender of their siblings, and the age spread between them.

Although people's perception of the situation into which they were born is more important than numerical rank, Adler did form some general hypotheses about birth order.

Firstborn children occupy a unique position, being an only child for a time and then experiencing a traumatic dethronement when a younger sibling is born. This event dramatically changes the situation and the child's view of the world. If firstborn children are age 3 or older when a baby brother or sister is born, they incorporate this dethronement into a previously established style of life. If they have already developed a self-centered style of life, they likely will feel hostility and resentment toward the new baby, but if they have formed a cooperating style, they will eventually adopt this same attitude toward the new sibling. If firstborn children are less than 3 years old, their hostility and resentment will be largely unconscious, which makes these attitudes more resistant to change in later life.

To some extent, the personalities of second born children are shaped by their perception of the older child's attitude toward them. If this attitude is one of extreme hostility and vengeance, the second child may become highly competitive or overly discouraged. The typical second child, however, does not develop in either of these two directions. Instead, the second born child matures toward moderate competitiveness, having a healthy desire to overtake the older rival. If some success is achieved, the child is likely to develop a revolutionary attitude and feel that any authority can be challenged. Again, children's interpretations are more important than their chronological position.

Only child: Living in an adult world, they often develop an exaggerated sense of superiority and an inflated self-concept. Adler (1931) stated that only children may lack well-developed feelings of cooperation and social interest, possess a parasitic attitude, and expect other people to pamper and protect them.

Early Recollections
To gain an understanding of patients' personality, Adler would ask them to reveal their early recollections (ERs). Although he believed that the recalled memories yield clues for understanding patients' style of life, he did not consider these memories to have a causal effect.

People reconstruct the events to make them consistent with a theme or pattern that runs throughout their lives. Adler (1929/1969, 1931) insisted that early recollections are always consistent with people's present style of life and that their subjective account of these experiences yields clues to understanding both their final goal and their present style of life.

Adler believed that highly anxious patients will often project their current style of life onto their memory of childhood experiences by recalling fearful and anxiety-producing events, such as being in a motor vehicle crash, losing parents either temporarily or permanently, or being bullied by other children. In contrast, self-confident people tend to recall memories that include pleasant relations with other people. In either case the early experience does not determine the style of life. Adler believed that the opposite was true; that is, recollections of early experiences are simply shaped by present style of life.

Dreams
Although dreams cannot foretell the future, they can provide clues for solving future problems. Adler (1956) applied the golden rule of individual psychology to dream work, namely, "Everything can be different" (p. 363). If one interpretation doesn't feel right, try another.

Psychotherapy
Adlerian theory postulates that psychopathology results from lack of courage, exaggerated feelings of inferiority, and underdeveloped social interest. Thus, the chief purpose of Adlerian psychotherapy is to enhance courage, lessen feelings of inferiority, and encourage social interest.

"Everybody can accomplish everything."

· Very high on free choice and optimism

· Very low on causality

· Moderate on unconscious influences

· High on social factors

· High on uniqueness of individuals

· One of Adler's most important concepts—the assumption that present style of life determines early memories rather than vice versa—is difficult to either verify or falsify.

· Research activity on these scales and on birth order, early recollections, and style of life gives Adlerian theory a moderate to high rating on its ability to generate research.

· Adler's practical view of life's problems allows us to rate his theory high on its ability to make sense out of what we know about human behavior.

· Although Adlerian theory is a model for self-consistency, it suffers from a lack of precise operational definitions. Terms such as goal of superiority and creative power have no scientific definition.

· The term creative power is an especially illusory one.

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