Inferiority and the Individual
Alfred Adler (1870–1937) was another early associate of Freud’s who eventually broke away to pursue his own vision of the human psyche (Adler, 1956). Although they had never met, Freud invited Adler to join an elite group of physicians and psychiatrists (later known as the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society) in 1902 after Adler had publicly defended Freud’s recently published The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud & Brill, 1913; first published in 1900) from attacks in a local newspaper. While Adler attended this group for more than eight years, and was its president in 1910, he was never personally close to Freud, and left the group in 1911, in protest, with nine other members, and would shortly form his own organization, the Association for Individual Psychology, under which title he would continue to formulate and disseminate his own ideas (Bottome, 1957). While it is oft-misstated that Adler was a student or pupil of Freud’s in the beginning, this is not true, and was an idea that Adler himself vehemently denied for the rest of his life (Hoffman, 1988, p. 105).
Adler’s individual psychology was based on a much different set of views than Freud’s darkly sexual and deterministic vision. Adler felt that childhood sexuality, while certainly important, took a backseat to the individual’s drives for power and superiority, as well as the relationship of the individual to society (Adler, 1924). Individual psychology was the first version of an “ego psychology.” Adler’s focus on conscious, rational processes, outward behavior, goal-seeking, and values separates his work from “depth psychology,” which is much more interested with the dynamics of the unconscious mind and its causal relationship to neuroticism. Adler’s individual psychology was to have a major impact on family therapy, child guidance, education, and psychotherapy (Frick, 1991, p. 21). His theories have become so absorbed into the fabric of twentieth-century psychology as a field, and our shared cultural language, that often Adler has been forgotten as the source of those influences. Adler made a serious impact on the psychology of his day and was a noted influence on many other famous psychologists who followed, including Carl Rogers, Rollo May, and Abraham Maslow (Ansbacher, 1990; Hoffman, 1988, p. 102). However, after his death in 1937, his influence and notoriety began to wane, and it was not until near the end of the twentieth century that Adler’s ideas and reputation began a resurgence of popularity.
Following are some of the main concepts that Adler contributed to psychology.
Will to Power
Borrowing Friedrich Nietzsche’s term “will to power” (Nietzsche & Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress, 1908; first published in 1883), Adler made the striving for superiority the central theme of his psychology (Adler, 1958). According to Adler, young children feel a strong sense of inadequacy, weakness, and frustration when surrounded by adults with their relative control over bodily functions and the environment. From the child’s perspective, power is the first “good thing” and weakness the first “bad thing” that they confront in their psychological life. The child’s struggle to attain power and autonomy is their earliest compensation for this feeling of inferiority. Adler felt this will to power was much more central to human motivation and development than prepubescent sexual conflict (à la Freud), and this fundamental difference was at the heart of his break with psychoanalysis. To conceptualize this concept, he coined the term “inferiority complex,” which has since found its way deeply into the popular vernacular (Frager & Fadiman, 2005, pp. 95–96). He also developed the notion of “compensation” for feelings of inferiority, which he felt drove much of human striving and accomplishment, something that Freud might well have reduced to the sublimation of inappropriate unconscious sexual desires. Moderate feelings of inferiority Adler considered normal, and in adults might well lead to admirable accomplishments when tempered with appropriate social concern (the genuine caring about others). But strong feelings of inferiority were the drivers of neurosis and could easily lead to maladaptation and unhealthy self-centeredness.
In the inherent striving for power, individuals could either show a healthy bent toward accomplishment and a striving for self-perfection (a foundational notion of Abraham Maslow’s theory of self-actualization, discussed later), or a much less healthy desire to dominate others or impose control over them. Both of these adaptions can have very useful implications in character-building in certain contexts. We will explore the application of these various lenses later in the chapter.
In Adler’s writing, he often used the term “aggression” to describe an individual’s attempts to achieve power; however, his use of the word was more in the spirit of initiative to overcome obstacles than as a form of outright hostility. Later in his life, as his theory evolved, he began to look at the will to power and aggression used in its pursuit more as part of a general motivation toward superiority and perfection (Adler, 1970). Adler came to believe that all healthy individuals are motivated to strive toward perfecting their potentials and continuous self-improvement. For Adler, the overriding goal of superiority had its roots in Darwin’s evolutionary theory, which proposed a continuous and implicit effort to adapt to the environment or face extinction (Frager & Fadiman, 2005, p. 96).
Life Goals and Lifestyle
Another area of Adlerian thought that has found its way so deeply into our shared cultural milieu as to be taken for granted is life goals and lifestyle. Individual psychology holds that people develop specific, overriding life goals that become the focus of their internal striving and external achievements. These life goals are influenced by personal experiences, values, attitudes, and personality traits, and are not necessarily consciously held, but can very well influence our decisions and behaviors as unconscious frameworks and drivers (Adler, 1927). Life goals in general tend to be unrealistic, but can become neurotically overinflated if the person suffers from too great an inferiority complex. One of Adler’s favorite questions to ask his patients was, “What would you do if you had not got in this trouble?” Inevitably, the patients’ answers would reveal what their symptoms were helping them to avoid in their life (Frager & Fadiman, 2005, p. 97).
Adler, following the philosophy of Hans Vaihinger, who proposed the concept of social fictions as critical determinants of human behavior, also brought the idea into psychology, where he postulated that our life goals are inherently fictional. What he meant by this was that people, confronted with the facts and experiences of life, tend to create systems for organizing and relating to those experiences (which may or may not be based on an accurate interpretation of reality or their personal circumstances). Then they assume that these self-created fictional beliefs are the unalterable truth about the world that they confront. These self-fictions can have a powerful influence on lifestyle, fundamentally orienting one toward suspicion and aggression or compassion and trust. In the end, these fictional beliefs become some of the strongest influencers on our behavioral orientation toward the world. According to both Adler and Vaihinger, who had influenced him, people are more affected by their expectations, formed based on their own social fictions, than they are on their actual experiences. This position poses some interesting questions for character-building. For instance, how much of a character’s behavior is governed by what they expect to get under the circumstances of the drama, as opposed to what actually happens to them during the action of the story? Depending on a character’s deepest orientations toward the world (suspicious, optimistic, alienated, etc.), their responses within any particular scene could be quite different.
In many ways, Adler’s concept of the life goal is similar to Stanislavsky’s “super objective” (Stanislavsky, 1989, pp. 293–295; text reset 2003) except in the context of a person’s life instead of a character’s given circumstances in a particular play or script. A person’s life goal becomes their hidden motivation, a way of defending against current feelings of inferiority by providing a bridge from the unsatisfying “now” to the bright, powerful, and fulfilling “future.” In the neurotic, fantasies of great personal superiority and scenarios of inflated self-esteem receive more attention than more grounded goals involving real achievement, leading to self-defeating behaviors and alienation from others. It is almost always an interesting exercise to envision a character’s overriding life goal and then play it out in both healthy and neurotic expressions through the lines of the scene.
Lifestyle, for Adler, was the unique way in which an individual chose to pursue their life goal. It is an integrated and repetitive pattern of adapting to and interacting with a person’s life in general, a type of orienting framework that drives action and desire, the answer to the question “What do you really want?”
Early Childhood Recollections and the Birth Order Affect on Development
Adler believed that one of the most important keys to understanding someone’s personality was their earliest recollections. He felt that one’s earliest recollections and memories, far from being random occurrences, were telling reflections that express and reinforce the most important aspects of the current personality and lifestyle. Oftentimes these memories might not reflect accurate recollections of linear events, so much as important indicators of one’s life goals, feelings of inferiority/superiority, philosophy of life, and anxieties. It is your consistent current lifestyle that informs what your earliest recollections will be and how you interpret and express them. Having his patients ponder and reveal their earliest childhood memories was an important technique that Adler used in therapy to unearth hidden goals and motivations.
Another highly useful perspective Adler introduced through his individual psychology was the notion of birth order and its affect on psychological development. From a postmodern perspective, Adler’s birth order analysis was based exclusively on the nuclear family model, which has declined significantly in Western culture since Adler made his formulations. In 2006–2010, the probability of a first marriage lasting at least 10 years was 68% for women and 70% for men. Looking at 20 years, the probability that the first marriages of women and men would survive was 52% for women and 56% for men in 2006–2010. Based on a study released in 2012, these levels were virtually identical to estimates based on vital statistics from the early 1970s (Copen, Daniels, Vespa, & Mosher, 2012). Obviously, there are far more incidents of nontraditional nuclear family relationships than in Adler’s time, and these various combinations and adaptations can be taken into account by a creative actor attempting to formulate a family order schema as part of the character development process. However, here I will present the four types of familial relationships Adler used in his original speculations.
According to Adler, the order of birth (within a traditional nuclear family structure) was an important factor in childhood development, and thus on the ways that adults interpret and interact with the world. Depending on the birth order, the psychological environment, even for children growing up in the same household with the same parents, can be significantly different. These different kinds of family constellations can lead to very different coping and goal-seeking strategies, as well as overall lifestyle.
The firstborn, or oldest child, must eventually face a “dethronement” crisis when a new sibling arrives in the family. This would also be the case whether the family was divorced or single-parent. With the arrival of the new brother or sister, the oldest child will most likely feel displaced, their power and control (over who gets attention, for instance) lessened or demeaned. As a result of this power crisis, oldest children may later in life enjoy demonstrations of authority, tend toward conservativism, and exaggerate the importance of rules or laws. Adler noted that an older child was more likely to act out or become a “problem” child than children born farther down the family hierarchy (Frick, 1991, p. 27). If the family structure is stable and the oldest child feels loved and prepared for the arrival of the sibling, the more negative potential aspects of dethronement may be mitigated. As with most of Adler’s other theories, the relative sense of security or inferiority is the deciding factor between neurotic or healthy responses in the personality.
The second child position comes with a different set of challenges and developmental hurdles. The second child must share the family’s attention from the very beginning of life. One of the primary motivations in a second child’s development is to first catch up and eventually surpass the older sibling. The second child can often behave as if they were in a race or competition with the older sibling, and thereby set their goals unrealistically high as a result. Adler’s generalization for the second-born child was that often the second-born was more talented and successful than the oldest child in a family.
The youngest child has the advantage of the example of their older siblings, and, much like the second child, tends to be highly motivated to exceed the accomplishments of the older siblings. Adler noted that the ultimate success of a youngest child over the older siblings was a common theme in many myths and fairy tales from across cultures (what Jung would identify as an archetype). However, because of an overexaggerated desire to excel, the youngest child runs the risk of never fully developing a central ambition or life goal, dissipating their energies in later life across too many aspirations and interests. The youngest child, according to Adler, also tends to be pampered, which he considered a detriment to holistic development, and as a result might fail to develop a solid sense of independence, leading to feelings of inferiority later in life.
By contrast, an only child, having no siblings with whom to interact, may tend to focus all of their feelings on the mother and father. According to Adler, only children are often pampered, again an impediment to proper development, and may become timid and non-adventurous as a result of an overprotective home environment, leading once again to feelings of inferiority. In Adler’s judgment, only children tended to be spoilt and ran a risk of becoming neurotically self-centered and attention-craving as adults.
While family structures may have changed significantly over the last 100 years, the affects of family dynamics on early childhood development have not. So, Adler’s lens of birth order dynamics still makes an intriguing perspective to bring to character analysis and development. Does your character show qualities of an “oldest child”? Second or “middle child”? How about “youngest child” or “only child”? This type of birth order analysis can be particularly useful in looking at realistic characters whose family relationships are part of the dramatic structure of the play.
Social Context and Cooperation
For Adler, the human being was a social being and could not be understood outside of that context. A healthy person is someone who takes a social interest in others and the community in which they live, while a neurotic is self-centered and driven by a desire to dominate others out of a need to ameliorate deep-seated feelings of inferiority. This social interest, sometimes translated as “community feelings,” is a critical sense of connection with the human community, an interest in the interests of others (Frager & Fadiman, 2005, p. 100). Without this community feeling, the individual is doomed to feeling isolated, alone, and alienated from others, and will generally perceive the world as a hostile and dangerous place.
Adler’s idea about social interest and community feelings grew out of an evolutionary perspective where cooperation with the community in food-gathering, hunting, and defense against predators was the most effective adaptation to the environment and a necessity for the survival of the species. Therefore, cooperation, from Adler’s perspective, was a biological necessity. Only by cooperating with the community and becoming a productive member of society can an individual hope to conquer their own feelings of inferiority, or their actual biological inferiority in relationship to the environment. A lack of cooperation will ultimately result in feelings of inadequacy and failure, which are at the heart of all neurotic and maladaptive lifestyles.
Adler’s basic emphasis on cooperation and “fitting in” with society may seem somewhat at odds with the idea of individualism and the “outsider” orientation to which many actors aspire, and on some levels it is. However, once again, as an interesting lens through which to view the world of a character, and that character’s relationships and orientations within the world of the story, this perspective can be very enlightening, and remains a good tool for assessing a particular character’s sense of self.
Individual Psychology Activities for Actors
Adler introduced a number of concepts to Western psychology that were predicated on a view of humans as socially embedded rather than reducible to the components of their psyches. In other words, Adler felt that you could not evaluate (or help) people outside of their social context, a very different view from either Freud or Jung, who both were more interested in the affects of the unconscious mind on conscious life. In the following exercise, you will be asked to answer a number of questions about your feelings and behavior that touch on many of Adler’s most salient perspectives. By answering these questions honestly, you will develop an “Adlerian portrait” of your personality that can act as a starting point for exploring yourself, your attitudes related to the world in which you live, and the characters you wish to create within the social constructs provided by the given circumstances of the play/script/story.
The Adler Inventory
Below are a number of statements followed by related questions. Read the statement, and then answer the questions as fully and honestly as you can. You may want to write your answers in your private journal for later review.
1. All behavior occurs within a social context; therefore, people cannot be studied or understood outside of their social context. Cooperation and community feeling is a biological/evolutionary necessity, not a contrived social construct. It is important for the individual to develop a feeling of being an integral part of a larger social whole.
Questions: What are the most important ways you fit in with your current social environment? Where are you most useful/helpful to others? In what social contexts are you most comfortable?
List the social groups to which you belong. How would you be different without them? How would you be different in other social groups? What are the social groups to which you wished you belonged?
In what areas of your life are you an “outsider”? Where do you not fit in, and are you comfortable or uncomfortable in that role? In what social contexts do you wish you fit in better?
2. A person’s psychological whole is more important than the individual components of consciousness. All aspects of the personality are subordinate to the person’s overriding life goal and lifestyle. The central motivation for the individual is to strive for perfection or superiority, which is another evolutionary quality of natural human growth.
Questions: In what areas of your life are you actively striving for perfection? What do you desire the most to improve about yourself? What are your weakest areas of self-development?
Articulate, as best you can, your single most important life goal. What are some of your lifestyle choices that are helping you reach toward it? What behaviors hold you back from that goal?
3. Behavior is based on how we perceive reality, not necessarily reality itself. Our life goals are often fictional constructs based on an ideal we have invented from the perceptions, emotions, and circumstances of early childhood.
Questions: In what ways are your most important life goals unrealistic or overly idealistic? Can you remember when your life goal first developed or became conscious, or the circumstances that most led you to strive toward your life goal in general? If your childhood had been different, how might your current life goal be different?
You can repeat this inventory for a character you are developing to create a baseline assessment of the character’s social engagement and awareness.
Earliest Recollections Exercise
Write down your earliest recollections. Take some time to contemplate this carefully and recall as many details as possible. Try to describe both the circumstances and your feelings at the time, as best as you can recall. Keep in mind you are writing down specific memories (i.e., on my first day of school, a group of other kids made fun of my clothes, which made me cry in the hallway and feel embarrassed), rather than general reports (i.e., I remember we always drove to my aunt’s house for Thanksgiving dinner).
Read over your entries and try the following suggestions:
If your memories seem inconsistent, or even contradictory, look for recurring patterns or unifying themes. Make notes.
Trivial events may actually be more meaningful than spectacular ones. Try to identify which memories hold the greatest emotional charge or affect your outlook today. Make notes.
In your recollections, does the world seem safe and comfortable? Or is your environment hostile and threatening? Are your memories mostly warm and pleasing, or are they of accidents, punishments, and confrontations that make your world in these reflections seem dangerous or unfriendly? Make notes.
Were any of your memories about the birth of a sibling? If so, were there any feelings of competition or jealousy that you recall (dethronement issues)? Make notes.
In your recollections, are you usually alone, or in a group with family members or friends? Are you cooperative or competitive? Feeling secure or insecure? Make notes.
In your recollections, are you an active participant or passive observer? Make notes.
Is one of your recollections about the first day of school or first time at any social institution? If so, is this a pleasant or unpleasant memory? Does it reflect how you feel today about entering a new social situation? Make notes.
If you were able to complete this exercise in some detail, you now should have some interesting self-knowledge about your own sense of security (or insecurity) and orientation toward the world. This is all very useful material for contrasting with the lives of the characters you play. You can start, for example, by asking yourself: How is my character’s orientation to the outside world similar or different from my own? How relatively secure or insecure do they feel?
Adler tended to be forward-focused instead of looking at the past as a source of motivation. He felt that people’s hopes for the future had a greater impact on their current behavior than where they had already been in life. He was always trying to understand what people’s dreams for the future were, and to help them have a better self-understanding and style of life that was more likely to help them achieve those goals rather than hinder their journey.
Life Goals and Your Daily Activities
In your journal, write down a list of what you currently think of as your most important life goals. Do not be overly concerned if they seem generic, abstract, or trivial; just write what comes into your mind without judgment. You may want to consider different aspects of your life, such as the personal, family, career or school, social, community, and spiritual.
On a new page, write a brief essay about how you would like to spend the next five years of your life. Cover things you would like to accomplish, adventures you would like to have, and how you would generally hope to actualize the life goals you have already explored.
Now imagine that you just found out you have three months to live. Write another brief essay about how you would spend the rest of your time. Who would you visit? Would you deliver any overdue apologies or make amends to those you had harmed? What experiences would you seek out in the short time you had left? Are any of your choices different than in the essay about the next five years? Did you learn anything about what you feel is most important to you?
Finally, consider all of the goals you have explored in the previous pages and write down the three you consider the most important to you. Are there any common themes among these goals? Are they socially oriented or personally focused? Are these goals also on your first list? Are these goals different in some way from the goals in your essays, and if so, how?
After completing this exercise, you should have a clearer view of your personal goals and how they relate to your daily life. You may find that your daily behaviors align with and support what you feel to be most important. Or you may find a dissonance between what you commonly do and “what you really want.” This is all important self-information for an actor to have. As with most of the other exercises in this book, you can repeat the process from the fictional perspective of a character you are investigating to give you a fresh perspective on what that character might want and feel.
The Wishing Exercise
Pretend you have been given three wishes. They are granted by magic, and you can have anything your heart desires, except that the wishes should be in the realm of human attainability. In other words, while they may be fantastic leaps in imagination from your current position, they should still remain possible in the realistic world; someone could believably attain what you ask for.
Now write down your three wishes.
Starting with the first one, write this single wish out in detail, with the benefits, consequences, and implications if this wish were your most important life goal. What would you do to attain this goal? How would it affect your current relationships? What kind of changes, if any, would you make if this were your central life goal?
Repeat this for each wish on your list.
After you are through, go back and read what you have written. Does any one of these now seem more appealing than the others? Is any one of them more achievable than the others?
Make note of any feelings you might have had while doing this exercise. Did the detailed exploration of your wishes (life goals) bring up any surprising emotions? Were you inspired? Disturbed? Investigate your feelings and write down what you find.
The three wishes exercise is another perspective on exploring your personal life goals and becoming sensitized to the power of the concept of a life goal in general.
Dominance/Power Relationships (an Improvisation Exercise)
Work with a scene partner or imagine the other characters’ responses. Work with a scene you are already familiar with. Perform the scene (or run an improv with conflicting objectives for each player) with one character feeling in control or powerful, and the other feeling insecure or inferior. After you complete the scene, run it again, only this time switch who feels the power and who is insecure.
Notice any difference in the relationships between the characters? Usually, this is a very useful exercise in exploring both the dynamics of an unbalanced power relationship as well as the internal feelings related to dominance and inferiority.
You can try this exercise another time, only in this version have the players play against their primary feeling of either power or insecurity by hiding it (compensating) from the other character during the course of the scene. Does that change the emotional tone or choices of actions in the scene?
Birth Order and Cooperation Improv
After discussing Adler’s model of birth order dynamics, experiment with improv to discover how these play out in an imaginary life situation. Assign a group of actors a scene that involves solving a conflict or accomplishing an important task. Each player is assigned a birth order, first child, middle child, youngest child, or only child. Play the scene or improv out under these circumstances. Now have the players switch birth order roles and do the scene again.
For discussion, explore how each player felt enacting the scene from each perspective. Did one role provoke feelings of aggression or dominance more than another? Was there one role that was more comfortable or familiar than another? If so, was that role correlated with the actor’s actual birth order or not?
Adler’s individual psychology provides us with a useful and very different set of perspectives from the other theorists we have explored so far. This material, as with the rest, can best be used in the dual purpose of providing self-realization and understanding, as well as an exploratory method of building a character.
References
Adler, A. (1924). The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology. London/New York: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co/Harcourt, Brace & Company.
Adler, A. (1927). Understanding Human Nature. New York: Greenberg.
Adler, A. (1956). The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler: A Systematic Presentation in Selections from His Writings. New York: Basic Books.
Adler, A. (1958). What Life Should Mean to You. New York: Capricorn Books.
Adler, A. (1970). Superiority and Social Interest: A Collection of Later Writings (2nd ed.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Ansbacher, H. L. (1990). Alfred Adler’s influence on the three leading cofounders of humanistic psychology. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 30(4), 45–53. doi:10.1177/002216789003000404
Bottome, P. (1957). Alfred Adler: A Portrait from Life. New York: Vanguard.
Copen, C. E., Daniels, K., Vespa, J., & Mosher, W. D. (2012). First Marriages in the United States: Data from the 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth. Retrieved from www.cdc.gov/nchs/govdelivery.htm.
Frager, R., & Fadiman, J. (2005). Personality and Personal Growth (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Freud, S., & Brill, A. A. (1913). The Interpretation of Dreams. London: G. Allen & Company.
Frick, W. B. (1991). Personality Theories: Journeys into Self (2nd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.
Hoffman, E. (1988). The Right to Be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow. Los Angeles, CA/New York: J.P. Tarcher/St. Martin’s Press.
Nietzsche, F. W., & Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress (1908). Also sprach Zarathustra: ein Buch für Alle und Keinen. Leipzig: Insel-Verlag.
Stanislavsky, K. (1989). An Actor Prepares. New York: Routledge.