Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Alfred Adler
Started reading
May 5, 2017
The fate of the individual is inextricably linked with the fate of his group. This is a fundamental principle of Adler's Individual Psychology. To understand a human being you must understand his relative situation in the human group in which he moves.
All human behavior, therefore, must be taken in its social relativity if it is to be understood.
The social life of the human race is an outgrowth of its weakness. Communal existence was probably the quickest and most effective way our ancestors could find to protect themselves. The pattern of the human race has been a pattern beginning in individual weakness, moving toward a goal of comparative security in social solidarity. All the strengths of the human race fit into this pattern; all its weaknesses are derived from the danger of isolation.
the psychological growth of the individual is a recapitulation of the psychological organization of the race.
In affirming the multiplex bonds that bind human being to human being, the normal mature individual gains a measure of peace, security, and a sense of totality and validity which make life worth living. The more of these bridges that a human being builds to his fellows the more secure he is. Speech, common sense, reason, logic, ideas, sympathy, love, science, art, religion, politics, responsibility, self-reliance, honesty, usefulness, play, love of nature, and the like, are among the most important bridges. To forego any of these techniques of communal life is to be only partially successful
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The human baby is the only living animal that experiences his own inadequacy because his mind develops faster than his body. It is in this situation that the feeling of inferiority, a cornerstone of Individual Psychology, is created.
Far from being a handicap, the inferiority feeling has proved itself the most cogent stimulus for the development of the human race.
The inferiority feeling to which every human being is heir because of his physical and biological constellation in the cosmos need not therefore be an individual liability. Man's history is replete with records of his conquest of inferiority.
Genius is probably no more than the expression of the urge to compensate for an individual defect in terms of social contribution.
When we speak of genius we are inclined to forget those unsung men who invented the lever, the wheel, the ax, the musical reed, weaving, writing, and the like, and remember solely our modern geniuses who have but combined these elements in some novel form. The true history...
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Each human being is capable of elaborating his personal defects into a useful contribution to society, yet a superficial survey of our society indicates that only a small proportion of the human race has gained the courage to effect such compensations.
inferiority may be an actual inferiority of certain organs or organ systems of his body. It may, however, be an unimportant physical anomaly, medically unimportant, but socially embarrassing,
exceptional beauty may eventually lead to an inferiority complex because the beautiful child believes that his beauty is the only contribution which society requires of him.
Members of any minority group, whether social, religious, or economic, suffer an accentuation of their inferiority feeling because of the additional difficulties of the world, contact with sordidness, vice, and crime.
Great riches, however, may also have a disastrous effect, because the proper stimulus to work is so frequently lacking where a child grows up in an atmosphere of affluence.
The only child derives his inferiority complex from his abnormal importance in the family, and his poor training for social adjustment. His life is all too frequently a search for the lost paradise of his youth.
The oldest child, having been an only child, and displaced by a younger rival, may be so discouraged by his fall from power that he can never muster sufficient courage to attack the problems of existence objectively.
He has always a pace-maker ahead of him and, in his aggressive striving to overtake the older child, may overshoot his mark and become an unobjective rebel.
While no position in the family is without its dangers, it is one of the most important teachings of Individual Psychology, the first science to point out the significance of the ordinal position of the child in the family constellation, that no position can compel a child to become neurotic.
The prejudice in favor of the males, however, is not without damage to them.
