“It is the feeling of inferiority, inadequacy and insecurity that determines the goal of an individual’s existence.”
“One motive is common to all forms of vanity. The vain individual has created a goal that cannot be attained in this life. He wants to be more important and successful than anyone else in the world, and this goal is the direct result of his feeling of inadequacy.”
“Every child is left to evaluate his experiences for himself, and to take care of his own personal development outside the classroom. There is no tradition for the acquisition of a true knowledge of the human psyche. The science of human nature thus finds itself today in the position that chemistry occupied in the days of alchemy.”
In a nutshell
What we think we lack determines what we will become in life.
In a similar vein
Erik Erikson Young Man Luther (p 84)
Anna Freud The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (p 104)
Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams (p 110)
Karen Horney Our Inner Conflicts (p 156)
In 1902 a group of men, mostly doctors and all Jewish, began meeting every Wednesday in an apartment in Vienna. Sigmund Freud’s “Wednesday Society” would eventually become the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, and its first president was Alfred Adler.
The second most important figure in the Viennese circle, and the founder of individual psychology, Adler never considered himself a disciple of Freud. While Freud was an imposing, patrician type who had come from a highly educated background and lived in a fashionable district of Vienna, Adler was the plain-looking son of a grain merchant who had grown up on the city’s outskirts. While Freud was known for his knowledge of the classical world and his collection of antiquities, Adler worked hard for better working-class health and education and for women’s rights.
The pair’s famous split occurred in 1911, after Adler had become increasingly annoyed with Freud’s belief that all psychological issues were generated by repressed sexual feelings. A few years earlier Adler had published a book, Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation, which argued that people’s perceptions of their own body and its shortcomings were a major factor in shaping their goals in life. Freud believed human beings to be wholly driven by the stirrings of the unconscious mind, but Adler saw us as social beings who create a style of life in response to the environment and to what we feel we lack. Individuals naturally strive for personal power and a sense of our own identity, but if healthy we also seek to adjust to society and make a contribution to the greater good.
Like Freud, Adler believed that the human psyche is shaped in early childhood, and that patterns of behavior remain remarkably constant into maturity. But while Freud focused on infantile sexuality, Adler was more interested in how children seek to increase their power in the world. Growing into an environment in which everyone else seems bigger and more powerful, every child seeks to gain what they need by the easiest route.
Adler is famous for his idea of “birth order,” or where we come in a family. Youngest children, for instance, because they are obviously smaller and less powerful than everyone else, will often try to “outstrip every other member of the family and become its most capable member.” A fork in the developmental path leads a child either to imitate adults in order to become more assertive and powerful themselves, or consciously to display weakness so as to get adult help and attention.
In short, every child develops in ways that best allow them to compensate for weakness; “a thousand talents and capabilities arise from our feelings of inadequacy,” Adler noted. A desire for recognition emerges at the same time as a sense of inferiority. A good upbringing should be able to dissolve this sense of inferiority, and as a result the child will not develop an unbalanced need to win at the expense of others. We might assume that a certain mental, physical, or circumstantial handicap we had in childhood was a problem, but what is an asset and what is a liability depends on the context. It is whether we perceive a shortcoming to be such that matters most.
The psyche’s attempt to banish a sense of inferiority will often shape someone’s whole life; the person will try to compensate for it in sometimes extreme ways. Adler invented a term for this, the famous “inferiority complex.” While a complex may make someone more timid or withdrawn, it could equally produce the need to compensate for that in overachievement. This is the “pathological power drive,” expressed at the expense of other people and society generally. Adler identified Napoleon, a small man making a big impact on the world, as a classic case of an inferiority complex in action.
Adler’s basic principle was that our psyche is not formed out of hereditary factors but social influences. “Character” is the unique interplay between two opposing forces: a need for power, or personal aggrandizement; and a need for “social feeling” and togetherness (in German, Gemeinschaftsgefühl).
The forces are in opposition, and each of us is unique because we all accept or reject the forces in different ways. For instance, a striving for dominance would normally be limited by a recognition of community expectations and vanity or pride is kept in check; however, when ambition or vanity takes over, a person’s psychological growth comes to an abrupt end. As Adler dramatically put it, “The power-hungry individual follows a path to his own destruction.”
When the first force, social feeling and community expectation, is ignored or affronted, the person concerned will reveal certain aggressive character traits: vanity, ambition, envy, jealousy, playing God, or greed; or nonaggressive traits: withdrawal, anxiety, timidity, or absence of social graces. When any of these forces gains the upper hand, it is usually because of deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. Yet the forces also create an intensity or tension that can give tremendous energy. Such people live “in the expectation of great triumphs” to compensate for those feelings, but as a result of their inflated sense of self lose some sense of reality. Life becomes about the mark they will leave on the world and what others think of them. Though in their mind they are something of a heroic figure, others can see that their self-centeredness actually restricts their proper enjoyment of the possibilities of life. They forget that they are human beings with ties to other people.
Adler noted that vain or prideful people usually try to keep their outlook hidden, saying that they are simply “ambitious,” or even more mildly “energetic.” They may camouflage their true feelings in ingenious ways: To show that they are not vain, they may purposely pay less attention to dress or be overly modest. But Adler’s piercing observation of the vain person was that everything in life comes down to one question: “What do I get out of this?”
Adler wondered: Is great achievement simply vanity put in the service of humankind? Surely self-aggrandizement is a necessary motivation in order to want to change the world, to be seen in a good light? His answer was that it isn’t. Vanity plays little part in real genius, and in fact only detracts from the worth of any achievement. Really great things that serve humanity are not spurred into existence by vanity, but by its opposite, social feeling. We are all vain to some extent, but healthy people are able to leaven their vanity with contribution to others.
Vain people, by their nature, do not allow themselves to “give in” to society’s needs. In their focus on achieving a certain standing, position, or object, they feel that they can shirk the normal obligations to the community or family that others take for granted. As a result, they usually become isolated and have poor relationships. So used to putting themselves first, they are expert at putting the blame on others.
Communal life involves certain laws and principles that an individual cannot get around. Each of us needs the rest of the community in order to survive both mentally and physically; as Darwin noted, weak animals never live alone. Adler contended that “adaptation to the community is the most important psychological function” that a person will master. People may outwardly achieve much, but in the absence of this vital adaptation they may feel like nothing and be perceived as such by those close to them. Such people, Adler said, are in fact enemies of society.
A central idea in Adlerian psychology is that individuals are always striving toward a goal. Whereas Freud saw us as driven by what was in our past, Adler had a teleological view—that we are driven by our goals, whether they are conscious or not. The psyche is not static but must be galvanized behind a purpose—whether selfish or communal—and continually moves toward fulfillment of that. We live life by our “fictions” about the sort of person we are and the person we are becoming. By nature these are not always factually correct, but they enable us to live with energy, always moving toward something.
It is this very fact of goal directedness that makes the psyche almost indestructible and so resistant to change. Adler wrote: “The hardest thing for human beings to do is to know themselves and to change themselves.” All the more reason, perhaps, for individual desires to be balanced by the greater collective intelligence of the community.
In highlighting the twin shaping forces of personal power and social feeling, Adler’s intention was that by understanding them we would not be unknowingly shaped by them. In the vignettes of actual people presented in his book we may see something of ourselves: Perhaps we have cocooned ourselves in our family or community, forgetting the career dreams we once had; or maybe we see ourselves as a “king of the world,” able to defy social convention at will. In both cases, there is an imbalance that will lead to restriction of our possibilities.
Much of Understanding Human Nature reads more like philosophy than psychology, overloaded with generalizations about personal character that are anecdotal rather than empirical. This absence of scientific support is one of the main criticisms of Adler’s work. However, notions such as the inferiority complex have become a part of everyday usage.
While both Freud and Adler had strong intellectual agendas to pursue, Adler had a more humble aim, influenced by his socialist leanings: a practical understanding of how childhood shapes adult life, which in turn might benefit society as a whole. Unlike the culturally élitist Freud, Adler believed that the work of understanding human nature should not be the preserve of psychologists alone but a vital task for everyone, given the bad consequences of ignorance. This approach to psychology was unusually democratic, and appropriately Understanding Human Nature is based on a year’s worth of lectures at the People’s Institute of Vienna. It is a work that anyone can read and understand.
Adler was born in Vienna in 1879, the second of seven children. After a severe bout of pneumonia at the age of 5 and the death of a younger brother, he committed himself to becoming a doctor.
He studied medicine at the University of Vienna and qualified in 1895. In 1898 he wrote a medical monograph on the health and working conditions experienced by tailors, and the following year met Sigmund Freud. Adler remained involved with the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society until 1911, but in 1912 broke away with eight others to form the Society of Individual Psychology. At this time he also published his influential The Neurotic Constitution. Adler’s career was put on hold during the First World War, when he worked in military hospital service, an experience that confirmed his antiwar stance.
After the war, he opened the first of 22 pioneering clinics around Vienna for children’s mental health. When the authorities closed the clinics in 1932 (because Adler was a Jew), he emigrated to the United States, taking up a professorship at the Long Island College of Medicine. He had been a visiting professor at Columbia University since 1927, and his public lectures in Europe and the US had made him well known.
Adler died in 1937, suddenly of a heart attack. He was in Aberdeen, Scotland, as part of a European lecture tour. He was survived by his wife Raissa, whom he had married in 1897. They had four children.
Other books include The Science of Living, The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology, and the popular What Life Could Mean to You.