Do Humans Seek and Create Meaning (Part 4)?
November 11, 2016 – 4:29 pm | No Comment

Article #918
It is through our perception and connection with all life that we can experience meaning and have a fulfilling life.

Read the full story »
Confidence Building

Articles to help you learn to build and keep genuine self confidence.

Motivation

Articles that will help you motivate yourself and others.

Getting Organized

Articles that will help to organize and bring order to our chaotic lives.

Boosting Creativity

Articles and tips that will help you boost and improve your personal creativity.

Inspirational

Articles to help inspire you each and everyday.

Home » Behavior, Featured, Headline, Identity, Mental Health, Psychology

Adler’s Inferiority Complex

Submitted by on October 21, 2014 – 2:13 amNo Comment

One of the most complex and well developed theories on the inferiority complex is that of Alfred Adler. If you want to understand this concept well, his theory will provide significant help.

Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor and is considered one of the founders of psychoanalysis. His ideas in this field quickly became appreciated and they soon turned into a unified theory on the human personality.

Adler was intrigued by the phenomena and inferiority and claimed that all human beings have an inferiority complex. In his view, to come into this world equals to feeling inferior. When a child notices his shortcomings in comparison with adults, he feels inferior.

This complex of inferiority motivates the child to develop and to strive for great things. As he achieves those things and his inferiority complex is surpassed, it is then triggered again by other shortcomings and creates a new motivation for achievement.

The Adler inferiority complex is thus a motivator for self-growth and achievement, but it is also something that makes the individual feel uncomfortable with their own person, which is why they will commonly try to hide this feeling and even to repress it.

The inferiority complex creates a strive for superiority. An interesting phenomenon can often occur from this: compensation. What it means is that a person will try to compensate their shortcomings by achieving something extraordinary in another area of their lives.

Thus, a short man with an inferiority complex because of his height can be driven by this feeling to study hard, work hard and become, for example, a successful and respected lawyer. According to Adler, many of the great people in society have gotten to where they are by compensating for a feeling of inferiority.

Adler’s inferiority complex was later taken by other psychoanalysts and further developed. This way, it became one of the most well known and often used concepts in the field of human psychology.

It also breached beyond the area of this discipline and entered into the mainstream culture. TodayArticle Submission, almost any educated person knows about the concept of the inferiority complex and may apply it in explaining certain behaviors.

Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eduard coaches people who want to overcome an inferiority complex. Also check out his empathy vs sympathy article on his people skills blog.

Leave a comment!

Add your comment below, or trackback from your own site. You can also subscribe to these comments via RSS.

Be nice. Keep it clean. Stay on topic. No spam.

You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

This is a Gravatar-enabled weblog. To get your own globally-recognized-avatar, please register at Gravatar.

Leave us a suggestion for articles you would like to see. We will do our best to suit your needs! Did this information help? I hope so. Change can be difficult sometimes. Like I always say in my workshops, It’s not always easy, but it’s worth it because you’re worth it! Donations fund Self Esteem Workshops for teens, supply books to schools for the continual support of character education across America, and are tax deductable. Thank you from Self Help Guides!