Alfred Adler graduated from the Vienna Medical School as an ophthalmologist. Soon after, he published a work on mental health and was invited by Freud to participate with three more people in weekly neurosis discussions. Not long Adler retired from Freud's school because of some disagreement with a number of his views. Together with his adherents he founded a school of Individual Psychology, which later became a movement called the Society for Individual Psychology. Adler's first and main statement regarding personality development is based on the concept of personality unity. This concept emphasizes the need for the person to be considered as a set of characteristics whose specificity is attributed to a given behavior, and it can not be regarded as an independent unit unrelated to these characteristics. Everyone has a subjective vision of the world. In order to understand a person, one must understand his view of the world.
Also, psychoanalyst believes that people have their own choices in terms of their essence and not entirely a product of their past and heredity. The main force of the personality, according to the Adler concept of personality development, is the pursuit of superiority generated by the sense of inferiority. The feeling of inferiority is present in each and every one of us, and in essence is the impression of a person that in a particular respect it is less valuable than another. Similarly, the child feels less valuable than their parents, the inexperienced musician feels less valuable than virtuoso, and so on. Adler distinguishes two basic types of inferiority - physical and mental. The first feeling of inferiority arises from a physical disability or difference - stuttering, left-handedness, or more serious differences - organ failure. The second - the psychic is due to an individual's perception that he or she is more intellectually unfit than another, or, more generally, is inferior to certain qualities (perceptiveness, achievement) of the people he or she is comparing, to have over-ambitious parents who place their children with unachievable tasks or have high expectations for them, constantly increasing their uncertainty that they can cope. In all cases, there is a desire for compensation to eliminate the painful feeling. This compensation is most often in the direction of the source of inferiority. For example, a learner can become an orator, or a child with a physical disability, seeks to eliminate it through exercise (if possible). Also, people compensate for their sense of inferiority by enhancing their ability in another area. In both cases, the sense of inferiority could be preserved and even strengthened by turning neurosis into an inferiority complex. In some cases, a superiority complex appears. This is a strategy aimed at getting the person with a false sense of superiority. Such people always strive to give advice, teach, or command any situation, making themselves look strong and immovable. All of these methods aim to conceal the true weakness of the individual and save a large part of the possible threats. Moreover, Adler considers a particular kind of aspiration to superiority - laziness.
Psychoanalytics believes that in this way the child finds a way to get a high estimate of himself with the least possible effort as it only imposes a scale on which to evaluate and does not have to strive for the tops of the one that applies for the other children. In this way, it increases its chances of approval and success many times, as it can always lower the "bar" and make even less effort to skip it. On the other hand, this behavior causes parents to believe in the infinite possibilities of their child, which, however, has just decided not to use them. The child himself also starts to believe in his "unlimited" opportunities, which is a kind of reward for him. The other extreme that can be observed is excessive ambition. The child is burdened with enormous tension, which could be detrimental to him at a later stage. As a possible cause of such excessive ambition, the author points out a number of differences that some children may have compared to others such as organ failure, left-handed or stammering. In addition, parents could also be the reason for imposing tasks and goals beyond the child's mind, as in any case the child is abused. In this situation, it would undoubtedly want to win the well-being of their parents, which in some cases could be an impossible task and the consequences for the child would be extremely severe.
Interestingly, Adler's view of the relationship between the child's situation in the family and the way of his development is very interesting. He believes that the fact that the child was born in the family first, second, third, last, or no brothers or sisters at all, has a great significance in the sense of inferiority. As we already know, according to psychoanalyst, it plays a major role in the development of the personality. Adler thinks that the youngest children in the family are characterized by the fact that they always strive and feel the need to overcome everyone with whom they are in a state of competition. This is due to the fact that older brothers or sisters have gone through some difficulties and usually have more experience that makes them in the eyes of the smallest smarter and better. This creates the least sense of inferiority and leads to compensation. Compensation can, however, be at the other extreme - laziness. On the other hand, the older ones, who at some point enjoyed the full attention of their parents, and after the birth of younger siblings, were usually in the position of the stronger (both physically and mentally) are more inclined to accept the idea of despotism, excessive power and so on, as they themselves have been in a similar role - more or less. Also, the author draws attention to gender about the situation in the family - only a boy among many sisters or vice versa, and if there are two children - a bigger boy or vice versa. Each of these cases, as well as many other varieties, of a family situation where a child (two siblings, two sisters, a single child, and so on) may fall could be the cause of the child's development in one or other direction. Adler, however, firmly insists, despite the stereotypes he describes, that people are not necessarily placed in them, as each person's development is strictly individual.
Freud's Psychoanalysis tries to demonstrate that most of personality disorders come due to repression and everything that it's repressed will come back, and it will come back stronger than the first time it was repressed. Freud related and limited all of this to the sexual stages, but Adler wanted to show that personality disorders were more than that.
I think that if we recognised that each person has his or her own perception of their world a lot of hurt and sadness would be saved. Thanks for the interesting article.
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Alfred Adler, manifested that bad humor has to be considered as a sign of inferiority.