THEORIES OF
PERSONALITY
Seminar 5: Individual
Psychology – Alfred Adler
Adler – the person
Freud vs Jung vs Adler
Today, Individual Psychology – Basic Tenets
Inferiority Feelings
we’ll Striving for Superiority
discuss Fictional Finalism
Style of Life
Social Interest
Creative Self
Birth Order
Assessment in Adler’s Theory
Criticism
Alfred Adler
• Born in Vienna in 1870
• Adler was pampered by his mother initially, but then was
suddenly dethroned at the age of 2 by the arrival of
another baby
• Was his father’s favourite
• As a boy, he was weak & clumsy. Suffered from rickets &
pneumonia
• Worked hard to compensate for and overcome his
physical deficiencies
• Studied general medicine and practiced as a psychiatrist
• Was a charter member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society. Resigned later as he began to develop opposing
ideas and faced criticism from its members.
• Formed his own group, Society for Individual Psychology
• Post WW1, established child guidance clinics in the Vienna
school system
• Moved to the United States in 1935 This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA-N
Freud Jung Adler
Primordial thought
Sex Social interests
patterns
Past Past & Future Future
Determinism Both Free will
Both Similarities Uniqueness
Unconscious Both Conscious
Individual
Psychology
– Basic • Humans are motivated primarily by
social urges, they are inherently social
Tenets beings
• Emphasis on uniqueness of
personality – each person has their
own unique motives, traits, interests and
values
• Consciousness center of personality
– humans are aware of the reasons for
Inferiority Feelings
• Constant motivating force in all behavior
• Process begins in infancy - infants feel inferior to the larger people
around them
• Individual growth results from compensation - our attempts to
overcome our real or imagined inferiorities.
• Example – Demosthenes, stuttered as a child and became one of the
world’s greatest orators through intensive training
• Inferiority Complex - A condition that develops when a person is
unable to compensate for normal inferiority feelings.
• People with an inferiority complex have a poor opinion of themselves
and feel helpless and unable to cope with the demands of life.
• Inferiority complex can arise from three sources
- Organ inferiority : defective parts or organs of the body shape
personality through the person’s efforts to compensate for the defect or
weakness
- Spoiling : When confronted with obstacles to gratification, spoiled
children come to believe that they must have some personal deficiency
that is thwarting them; hence, an inferiority complex develops
- Neglect : lack of love and security because their parents are indifferent
or hostile results in feelings of worthlessness
• Humans are pushed by the need to overcome their inferiority and pulled
Striving for Superiority
• At first, he identified inferiority with a general feeling of weakness
or of femininity - compensation was a will or a drive toward power
in which aggression (masculine protest)
• Later replaced aggressive impulse in favor of ‘striving for
superiority’
• Drive for perfection – to make ourselves whole, complete
• Oriented towards the future, human motivation in terms of
expectations and aspirations for the future
• It is innate in nature. From birth to death, carries the person from
one stage of development to the next
• Each person has his or her own way of trying to achieve
perfection
• Increases rather than reduces tension - striving for perfection
requires great expenditures of energy and effort
• Manifested both by the individual and by society as a whole – we
strive for superiority or perfection not only as individuals but also
as members of a group.
Fictional
Finalism
• Finalism - idea that we have an ultimate goal, a final state of being,
and a need to move toward it.
• We strive for ideals that exist in us subjectively
• Our ultimate goals are fictional goals that can neither be tested or
confirmed against reality
– Eg – honesty is best policy, hard work pays, men are superior to women,
etc.
• Each individual’s quest for superiority defined by the fictional goals he/
she has adopted
• Fictional finalism, the notion that fictional ideas guide our behavior as
we strive toward a complete or whole state of being.
• Best formulation of this ideal developed by human beings so far is the
Style of Life
• Every person has the same goal of superiority, but
there are innumerable ways of striving for this goal
• We develop a unique pattern of characteristics,
behaviors, and habits, which Adler called style of
life
• Style of life - a pattern of behaviors designed to
compensate for inferiority.
• For eg. Intellectual (goal is intellectual superiority)
has one style of life, athlete has another
• The style of life is learned from social interactions
and is so firmly crystallized by the age of 4 or 5
that it is difficult to change thereafter.
• Guiding framework for all our later behavior
• Determines how a person confronts three life
problems of adulthood: social relations, occupation
and love/marriage
• When guided by social interest, ‘useful side of life’.
Four Styles of Life
• Each conceptualized in
terms of the degree of
social interest and
activity
• Social interest - feeling of
empathy for humans and
cooperation for social
advancement
• Degree of activity-
individual’s movement
towards solution of life
problems; energy level
• Social interest: individual’s innate
potential to cooperate with other people in
order to achieve personal and societal goals
• Social interest is innate, extent to which our
Social innate potential for social interest is
developed depends on our early social
Interest experiences
• For development of social interest, maternal
relationship is influential
• By working for the common good, humans
compensate for their individual weaknesses
The Creative
Self
• Adler resolved the deterministic nature of
his theory by proposing the concept of
creative power of life
• Style of life is developed by individual's
creative power
• Humans make their own personalities,
construct them out of raw material of
heredity and experience
• It acts upon the facts of the world and
transforms these into a personality which
is subjective, dynamic, unified, personal,
and uniquely stylized
• Gives meaning to life, creates goal as well
as means to the goal
• Style of life develops as function of ordinal position in family
• First born (oldest child) – given a good deal of attention till the second
child is born, suddenly dethroned and must share parents’ affection. May be
conditioned to hate people, protect him-or herself against sudden reversals
of fortune, insecurity
Birth Order • Second born (middle child) – ambitious, constantly trying to surpass its
older sibling . Rebellious and envious, better adjusted than folder or younger
sibling
• Youngest child –may be pampered by everyone, likely to experience
strong feelings of inferiority and lack of independence, high motivation to
surpass siblings
• Only Child – no siblings and pampering by parents, child expects
Assessment in
Adler’s Theory
• Adler developed his theory by analysing
his patients; that is, by evaluating their
verbalizations and behaviour during
therapy sessions
• Dream Analysis: dreams involve our
feelings about a current problem and
what we intend to do about it
• Criticized personality tests, thought
therapists should develop intuition
Criticism
• Freud charged that Adler’s psychology was
oversimplified
• Critics allege that Adler was inconsistent and
unsystematic in his thinking and that his
theory contains gaps and unanswered
questions. Are inferiority feelings the only
problem we face in life? Do all people strive
primarily for perfection? Can we become
reconciled to a degree of inferiority and no
longer try to compensate for it?
THAT’S ALL, FOLKS!
