Alfred Adler: Individual Psychology 2

Inferiority

General feeling of weakness or of femininity

Masculine Protest

A will or drive toward power

Inferiority Feelings

A universal sense of inadequacy or imperfection that arises during childhood. These feelings drive individuals to strive for growth, achievement, and self-improvement.

Compensation

A healthy mechanism where individuals work to overcome their inferiority feelings by developing skills, abilities, or traits that lead them toward striving for superiority or perfection. This is part of natural human growth and self-improvement.

Inferiority Complex

When individuals are unable to compensate for their feelings of inferiority, they develop a pervasive sense of inadequacy and helplessness. Adler identified specific causes of this:

• Organic Inferiority: Physical disabilities or limitations.

• Spoiling: Overindulgence leading to a lack of coping skills.

• Neglecting: Emotional deprivation or lack of support during childhood.

Overcompensation

An exaggerated attempt to overcome inferiority feelings, often leading to extreme behavior to mask insecurity.

Superiority Complex

A defensive mechanism resulting from overcompensation, where an individual displays an inflated sense of self-worth to hide deep-seated feelings of inferiority.

Striving for Superiority or Perfection

A healthy and innate drive to overcome inferiority feelings and improve oneself, aiming for mastery, growth, or self-fulfillment. This is a central concept in Adler's view of human motivation.

Fictional Finalism

There is an imagined or potential goal that guides behavior

Style of Life

Unique pattern of characteristics, behaviors, and habits

Creative Power

the ability to create an appropriate style of life

Dominant Type

These people are characterized early on by a tendency to be generally aggressive and dominant over others, possessing an intense energy that overwhelms anything or anybody who gets in their way

Getting Type

Individuals of this type are sensitive, and while they may put a shell up around themselves to protect themselves, they end up relying on others to carry them through life’s challenges.

Avoiding Type

People of this type have such low energy they recoil within themselves to conserve it, avoiding life as a whole, and other people in particular.

Socially Useful Type

People of this type are basically healthy individuals, possessed of adequate, but not overbearing, social interest and energy

Social Interest

Individual’s innate potential to cooperate with other people in order to achieve personal and societal goals

Gemeinschaftsgefühl

German term that means Social Interest

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

Aggression

safeguards a person exaggerated superiority complex, that is, to protect their fragile self-esteem

Depreciation

undervalue other’s achievements

Accusation

blaming others for one’s failures

Self-accusation

people devalue themselves in order to inflict suffering on others while protecting their own magnified feelings of self-esteem

Withdrawal

running away from difficulties

Psychologically moving backward

psychologically revert to a more secure period of life to elicit sympathy

Standing still

avoid all responsibility by ensuring themselves against any threat or failure

Hesitating

vacillate when faced with difficult problems; procrastination

Constructing Obstacles

a defensive mechanism where individuals deliberately create barriers or difficulties for themselves

Organ Dialect

refers to the way physical symptoms or bodily expressions can serve as a form of communication or expression of psychological struggles.

Early Recollections

Earliest memories, whether real events or fantasies, are assumed to reveal the primary interest of our life

Dream Analysis

Involve our feelings about a current problem and what we intend to do about it

Measures of Social Interest

Supported the use of memory and intelligence tests but criticized the use of personality tests