INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF ALFRED ADLER
If a person knows how to cooperate with others, he will never become neurotic.
Psychologist Alfred Adler
Introduction: It is believed that people come to psychology, first of all, to solve their problems. Perhaps it was this principle that brought Alfred Adler into the ranks of psychoanalysts, even if he initially set himself somewhat different goals.
Biography: Alfred Adler - famous Austrian psychologist(1870-1937) in childhood he was often and seriously ill, therefore, having made a choice in favor of the profession of a doctor, he believed that this would help him and his loved ones in the fight against ailments. After graduating from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Vienna, he practiced as an ophthalmologist. However, due to his growing interest in the activity of the nervous system, Adler's field of study began to shift towards psychiatry and neurology.
So in 1902, Alfred Adler became one of the first four members of the circle that formed around the creator of a new psychological direction, Sigmund Freud. And in 1910, at the suggestion of Freud, Alfred became the head of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. However, he soon began to develop his ideas that contradicted the main provisions of Freud's psychoanalysis, psychology of Alfred Adler.
And the contradictions were quite significant. Adler denied the dominance of unconscious drives, which, as Freud insisted, determine human behavior. On the contrary, said Alfred Adler, behavior and life are determined by a sense of community with other people, a person's social contacts form a lifestyle.
And already in 1911, when these discrepancies escalated to the limit, Adler resigned from the presidency. And after a while he officially cut off his ties with psychoanalysis, and, leaving society with his supporters, he organized his own group, called the Association of Individual psychology of Alfred Adler... But, despite all the contradictions, Adler and Freud agreed that a person has some internal, inherent in him only nature, which affects the formation of personality. At the same time, Adler did not forget to emphasize the role of public interests.
After the First World War, he became interested in education, founded the first educational clinic within the Vienna school system, and then an experimental school, which brought his ideas to life in the field of education. Adler attached particular importance to classes with teaching lyami, as he believed it was extremely important to work with those who shapes the minds and characters of youth. To help parents in raising their children, they organized counseling centers for children at schools, where children and their parents could receive the advice and assistance they need. By 1930, there were 30 such centers in Vienna alone.
In 1935 he moved to the USA, where he continued to work aspsychiatrist, while serving as a professor of medicinepsychology. Individual psychology of Adler, interest in which decreased slightly after his death in 1937, again appeared was in the center of attention of psychologists in the 50s, significantly influencing the formation of humanistic psychology and a new under the way to the problem of personality. In total, he has written over 300 books and articles. Adler died while giving a lecture in 1939.
Essence:
The direction founded by Adler and continued by his daughter Alexandra is called individual psychology.
Individual psychology - Adler's personality theory, which emphasizes the uniqueness of each individual and the processes by which people overcome their shortcomings in the process of moving towards their life goals (individuum in Latin means indivisible).
Adler became the founder of a new, socio-psychological approach to the study of the human psyche. His theo ry, set out in the books "On the nervous character" (1912), "Theory and the practice of individual psychology "(1920)," Human Science "(1927)," The Meaning of Life "(1933), is a completely a new direction, very little connected with classical psychoana lease and constituting an integral system of personality development.
Adler's main idea was that he denied polo Freud and Jung's dominance of unconscious drives in personality and behavior of a person, drives that oppose a person to society... Not congenital drives, not congenital archetypes, but a sense of community with other people, stimulating social contact and orientation towards other people - this is the main force, which determines the behavior and life of a person, Adler believed.
- The main differences between the theory of A. Adler and the theory of S. Freud are:
- target determinism (as opposed to causal in Freud);
- recognition of the initially social nature of a person;
- human striving for excellence
- understanding of mental life as an integral individual, driven by life goals.
However, there is something in common that unites the concepts of these three psychologists: they all assumed that brow the century has some internal, inherent nature to it alone which has influence on personality formation... Wherein Freud emphasized sexual factors, Jung - primary types of thinking, and Adler emphasized the role of the public interest.
At the same time, Adler was the only one, who considered the most important trend in the development of human personality the desire to preserve their individuality in integrity, to be aware of and develop it. Freud, in principle, rejected the idea of the uniqueness of each human person, rather exploring the general that is inherent in the unconscious. Jung, although he came to the idea of the integrity and Self of personality, but much later, in the 50-60s. A thought of integrity and uniqueness of personality is Adler's invaluable contribution into psychology.
No less important is the idea he introduced about the creative “I”. In contrast to the Freudian Ego, which serves the purposes of innate drives and therefore completely determines the path of personality development in this direction, "I" Adler is a subjective a new and individualized system that can be changed topersonality development board, interpreting the life experience of dexterous and giving it a different meaning. Moreover, this "I" itself undertakes the search for such an experience that can facilitate for a specific person to create his own, unique style life.
Adler's personality theory is a well-structuredan established system and rests on several basic positions,explaining the many options and ways of development personally STI: 1) fictitious finalism, 2) striving for superiority, 3) sensibility inferiority and compensation, 4) public interest, 5) lifestyle, 6) creative "I".
Idea fictitious finalism was borrowed by Adler from the famous German philosopher Hans Feiginger, who wrote that all people are guided in life by means of constructions or fictions that organize and systematize reality, de terminating our behavior. From Feiginger, Adler also learned the idea that the motives of human actions are determined to a greater extent by hopes for the future, and not by the experience of the past. This ultimate goal may be a fiction, an ideal that cannot be implement, but nevertheless turns out to be quite real incentivethe scrap that determines the aspirations of a person. Adler also emphasizedshaft that a healthy person, in principle, can get rid of the influence fictitious hopes and see life and the future as they really are. At the same time, this is impracticable for neurotics, and the gap between reality and fiction further increases their tension.
Adler believed that of great importance in the formation of the structurea person's personality has his family, the people who surround him in the first years of life. The importance of the social environment was especially emphasized by Adler (one of the first in psychoanalysis), since he believed that a child is born not with ready-made personality structures, but only with their prototypes, which are formed throughout life. The most important structure he called the lifestyle.
Developing the idea of a lifestyle that shapes human behavior, Adler proceeded from the fact that this is the determinant that redistributes and systematizes human experience. Lifestyle is closely related engaged with a sense of community, one of the three innate unconscious feelings that make up the structure of "I". The sense of community, or public interest, is a kind of core that holds the entire structure of the lifestyle, determines its content and direction. The sense of community, although it is innate, can remain undeveloped. This underdevelopment of a sense of community becomes the basis of an asocial lifestyle, the cause of neuroses and human conflicts. The development of a sense of community is associated with close adults who surround the child from childhood, primarily with the mother. Rejected children growing up with cold, walled-off mothers do not develop a sense of community. It does not develop even in the spoiled children, since the feeling of community with the mother is not transferred to the other some people who remain strangers to the child. State of the art sense of community determines the system of ideas about oneself and the world, which is created by every person. The inadequacy of this system we create obstacles to personal growth, provoke development tie neuroses.
Forming his life style, a person is actually himselfis the creator of his personality, which he creates from raw material rial of heredity and experience. Creative "I", about which he writes Adler, is a kind of enzyme that can acts on the facts of the surrounding reality and transforms these facts into a person's personality, “a subjective personality, di dynamic, unified, individual and with a unique style. " The creative "I", from the point of view of Adler, gives meaning to a person's life, it creates both the very purpose of life and the means for achieving it. Thus, Adler considered the processes of the formation of a life goal, a lifestyle, in essence, as acts of creativity that give the human personality uniqueness, consciousness and the ability to control his own destiny. In contrast to Freud, he emphasized that people are not pawns in the hands of external forces, but conscious wholes, independently and creatively creating their lives.
If a sense of community determines the direction of life, its style,then two other innate and unconscious feelings - inferiority and striving for excellence - are sources of personality energy necessary for its development. Both of these feelings are positive, they are stimuli for personal growth, self-improvement. If the feeling of inferiority whoacts on a person, causing him to desire to overcome his prosperity, then the desire for excellence causes the desire to be better than everyone, not only to overcome the disadvantage, but also to become the most skillful and knowledgeable. These feelings, from the point of view of Adler, stimulate They promote not only individual development, but also the development of society as a whole thanks to self-improvement and discoveries made by individuals. There is also a special mechanism that helps the development of these feelings - compensation.
Adler identified four main types of compensation - incompletecompensation, full compensation, overcompensation and imaginary compensation, or withdrawal into illness. Connection of certain typescompensation with lifestyle and level of development of feelings community gave him the opportunity to create one of the first typologies personality development.
He believed that a developed sense of community, defining a social lifestyle, allows a child to create a sufficiently adequate scheme of apperception. At the same time, children with incomplete compensation feel less inferior, since they can be compensated with the help of other people, peers from whom they do not feel fenced off. This is especially important in case of physical defects, which often do not provide the possibility of their full compensation and thus can serve as a reason for the isolation of a child from peers, stop his personal growth and improvement.
In the case of overcompensation, such people try to convert their knowledge and skills for the benefit of people, their desire for excellence state does not turn into aggression against people. An example of such overcompensation of superiority in social life style for Adler served Demosthenes, who overcame his stuttering, F. Roosevelt, who overcame his physical weakness, many other Many wonderful people, not necessarily well-known, but of benefit to others.
At the same time, with an undeveloped sense of community in a child, various neurotic complexes begin to form in early childhood, which lead to deviations in the development of his personality. So, incomplete compensation contributes to the emergence of an inferiority complex, which makes inadequate apperception scheme, changes life style, making the child anxious, insecure, envious, conformable and tense wives. The inability to overcome their defects, especially physical ones, often leads to imaginary compensation, and the child, just like a later adult, begins to speculate on his shortcoming, trying to extract privileges from the attention and sympathy that surrounds him. However, this type of compensation is imperfect, since it stops personal growth and forms an inadequate, envious, egoistic personality.
In the case of overcompensation in children with an undeveloped sense of the generalThe desire for self-improvement is transformed into a neurotic complex of power, domination and domination. Such people use their knowledge to gain power over people, to enslave them, thinking not about the benefits for society, but about their own benefits. At the same time, an inadequate pattern of apperception is formed, which changes the lifestyle. Such people are tyrants and aggressors, they suspect others of wanting to take away their power and therefore become suspicious, cruel, vindictive, do not spare even their loved ones. For Adler, examples of such a lifestyle were Nero, Napoleon, Hitler and other authoritarian rulers and tyrants, not necessarily on a national scale, but also within the framework of their families and relatives. At the same time, from the point of view of Adler, the most authoritarian and cruel children become spoiled children, while rejected children are more inherent in the complexes of guilt and inferiority.
Thus, one of the main qualities of a person, which helps her to withstand the hardships of life, to overcome difficulties and achieve perfection is the ability to cooperate with others . Only through cooperation can a person overcome his feelings of inferiority, make a valuable contribution to the development of society. Adler wrote that if a person knows how to cooperate with others, he will never become neurotic, while a lack of cooperation is at the root of neurotic and ill-adapted lifestyles.
Although not all of Adler's theoretical propositions are mainlyassociated with the typology of the personality of children, the sequence of their birth, were confirmed in further experimental research, the very idea of the role of a sense of community and individual The idea of compensation as the main mechanism of mental development and behavior correction has become an invaluable contribution to psychology.
It is necessary to note the contribution of Adler to psychotherapy, since he was one of the first to investigate the role of play in overcoming neuro call and complexes. He believed that it was play that allowed Children to overcome their inferiority complex, which they used tortured in the world of the adults around them. Moreover, spontaneous children's play is already a good psychotherapeutic tool. In the same case, when it is required to overcome more serious complexes and the solution of special problems, the development of the game should but carried out and guided by adults.
Adler's theory became a kind of antithesis of the Freudian conhuman senses. She has had a tremendous influence on humanistic psychology, psychotherapy and personality psychology.
Basic principles of individual psychology - the integrity of the mental life of the individual, the desire for superiority as the main motivational force in the life of the individual, as well as the social belonging of a person.
Basic methods of individual psychology - interviews and analysis of early childhood memories.
Bibliography
1. N. V. Chepeleva. Individual psychology (A. Adler)
2. Martsinkovskaya TD History of psychology: Textbook. manual for students of higher. study. institutions. - M .: Publishing Center "Academy", 2002. - 544p.
· Adler's theory is based on seven basic concepts and principles. They are:
o 3) lifestyle;
o 4) creative self;
o5) the order of birth;
o6) fictitious finalism.
Let's take a look at some of these principles.
Adler dedicated his early works to the problem of organ inferiority and their compensation
... Based on his medical experience, he believes that in humans some organs are somewhat weaker than others. This weakness of organs leads to diseases (see Reader 2.3).
In accordance with the study of defective organs, the idea of certain mental phenomena that accompany organic deficiencies appears. It - feeling of inferiority.
Feeling of inferiority - a feeling and experience of their inability, poor quality in comparison with other people.
A moderately developed sense of inferiority leads to a desire to overcome their shortcomings, to cope with them and is an impulse for personal growth. The mechanism for overcoming deficiencies is compensation as a way to neutralize the painful feelings of inferiority. Compensation enhances mental activity and compensates for the perceived deficit. This process is carried out by training organs.
Along with compensation, the mechanism of overcompensation (or overcompensation) is considered as a way to overcome feelings of inferiority and achieve outstanding results. For example, with a lack of vision, a person developed the gift of an artist, a lack of articulation contributed to the development of the talent of an orator, and a lack of hearing contributed to the development of the gift of a musician.
“In almost all outstanding people, we find a defect in some organ; one gets the impression that they suffered greatly at the beginning of their life and overcame their difficulties,” wrote A. Adler.
With a strongly developed sense of inferiority, personality development can be slowed down or even disrupted. The feeling of inferiority is recorded, and the person deliberately arranges his defects, emphasizing and reinforcing them, considering them an ailment. This is how an inferiority complex arises.
Inferiority complex- a set of attitudes, ideas or actions expressing in a more or less disguised form a feeling of inferiority or related reactions. According to Adler, an inferiority complex is an arrangement of insufficiency.
The presence of a complex leads to a violation of the full functioning of the individual, a narrowing of the spheres of life, the rejection of a number of situations where a person could fully develop.
Defective organs and their assessment in the form of feelings of inferiority stimulate human development aimed at satisfying desires, which Adler considered fundamental. It is striving for excellence as striving for excellence. Striving for excellence means the need to overcome oneself, to develop one's abilities, potentially inherent capabilities. In earlier works, he believed that the main personality trait is aggressiveness as a strong initiative in overcoming experiences. This idea arose on the basis of F. Nietzsche's ideas about the "will to power". Later, Adler regards aggression and the will to power as a particular case of striving for superiority.
The drive for excellence is innate. Nevertheless, there are options for its manifestation. The criterion for these differences is social interest(social feeling, sense of community, sense of solidarity) - an innate instinct to give up selfish goals for the sake of community goals.
Low social interest indicates a neurotic path of development and is associated with the desire for personal excellence
, the desire to be the best. High social interest indicates a desire to overcome difficulties and a desire to constructive superiority... Social interest - according to Adler - is an indicator of mental health, a "barometer of normality" and a criterion for distinguishing between types of superiority.
The innate nature of social interest does not exclude the possibility of its development, which occurs through cooperation and cooperation.
Many goals of an adult are quite conscious, but still the main one is the life goal, which is formed in early childhood and may be unconscious. Associated with this concept is the concept of fictitious finalism, based on the concept of Hux Weinger, set out in the work "The Philosophy of the Possible". He argued that people's behavior is influenced by expectations, not past experiences. Such expectations are similar to ideals that cannot be tested in practice, correlated with reality, but which nevertheless make it possible to fill all human actions with meaning, to set the direction of life. Fictional goals structure the process of human development, organizing it in accordance with the meaning given in them.
The concepts of social interest, life goal are associated with lifestyle and Adler's general idea of human integrity. "The main task of individual psychology is to confirm this unity in each individual, in his thinking, feeling, acting, in his so-called consciousness and unconsciousness - in all expressions of his personality."
A life style is a unique way chosen by each individual to pursue his life goal.
According to Adler, signs of a healthy personality are movement from self-centeredness to social interest, striving for constructive superiority, cooperation.
· The reasons for the violation of progressive human development are:
ophysical disability, which leads to isolation, the development of selfishness, a sense of self-centeredness, a non-cooperative lifestyle;
ospoiledness, as a result of overprotection, which leads to a decrease in social interest, the ability to cooperate, and personal superiority;
orejection as a condition caused by isolation from parents and accompanied by a decrease in social interest and self-confidence.
A consequence of the influence of the three above-mentioned reasons can be neurosis as a natural, logical development of an individual with a low level of activity, egocentrically striving for superiority and therefore having a delay in the development of social interest.
Often Adler's individual psychology is called the psychology of "common sense" or "the psychology of everyday life."
His original findings were often viewed as arbitrary from psychoanalysis or as obvious, trivial, narrowly focused. K. Jung wrote that “both researchers (Freud and Adler. - N. Kh.) Consider the subject in relation to the object ... Adler focuses on the subject, which protects himself and seeks to achieve superiority over the object ... Freud, on the contrary, rests only on objects that, by virtue of their certain originality, either contribute or hinder the satisfaction of the subject's desire for pleasure. " (Jung K. Psychology of the unconscious. M .: Canon, 1994. S. 76). Jung solved this dilemma, as we know, with the help of typology, i.e. dividing people into those interested in the object (extroverts) and interested in themselves (introverts).
BASIC CONCEPTS AND PRINCIPLES
Adler was convinced that the main goal of personality theory- serve as an economical and useful guide for therapists, and by and large for any person on the path of changes towards psychologically healthier behavior (Adler, 1964). Unlike Freud, he formulated a very economical theory of personality in the sense that the entire theoretical structure is based on a limited number of key concepts and principles. The latter can be divided into seven points:
1) feelings of inferiority and compensation;
2) striving for excellence;
3) lifestyle;
4) social interest;
5) creative self;
6) the order of birth;
7) fictitious finalism.
Feelings of inferiority and compensation
Early in his career, while he was still collaborating with Freud, Adler published a monograph entitled Investigation of Organ Deficiency and Its Mental Compensation (Adler, 1907 / 1917b). In this work, he developed a theory about why one disease worries a person more than another, and why some parts of the body are affected more quickly than others. He suggested that each individual has some organs weaker than others, and this makes him more susceptible to diseases and lesions of these particular organs. Moreover, Adler believed that every person has a disease of precisely that organ, which was less developed, functioned less successfully and, in general, was "defective" from birth. For example, some people are born with severe allergies, which can damage, say, the lungs. These people may suffer from frequent bronchitis or upper respiratory infections. Adler subsequently observed that people with pronounced organic weakness or defect often try to compensate these defects through training and exercise, which often leads to the development of outstanding skill or strength: "In almost all outstanding people, we find a defect in any organ; it seems that they suffered a lot at the beginning of life, but fought and overcame their difficulties" ( Adler, 1931, p. 248).
History and literature provide many examples of exceptional achievement arising from efforts made to overcome organ failure. Demosthenes, a stutter since childhood, became one of the world's most prominent orators. Wilma Rudolph, who suffered from a physical ailment as a child, won three Olympic gold medals in athletics. Theodore Roosevelt, weak and sickly as a child, acquired a physical form that is exemplary both for an adult in general and for the President of the United States in particular. Thus, organ inferiority, that is, his congenital weakness or insufficient functioning, can lead to impressive achievements in a person's life. But it can also lead to an overly expressed feeling of self-inferiority, if the efforts aimed at compensating for the defect do not lead to the desired result.
Of course, the idea that the body tries to compensate for its weakness was nothing new. Doctors have long known that if, for example, one kidney functions poorly, the other takes over its functions and carries a double load. But Adler pointed out that this compensation process takes place in mental sphere: people often strive not only to compensate for organ failure, but they also have subjective feeling of inferiority which develops from the feeling of one's own psychological or social powerlessness.
An inferiority complex and its origins. Adler believed that feelings of inferiority began in childhood. He explained this as follows: a child goes through a very long period of dependence, when he is completely helpless and, in order to survive, must rely on his parents. This experience gives the child deep feelings of inferiority in comparison with other people in the family environment, stronger and more powerful. The emergence of this early sense of inferiority marks the beginning of a long struggle to achieve superiority over the environment, as well as the pursuit of excellence and impeccability. Adler argued that the pursuit of excellence is the main motivational force in a person's life.
Thus, according to Adler, virtually everything people do is aimed at overcoming feelings of inferiority and strengthening a sense of superiority. However, the feeling of inferiority for various reasons can become excessive in some people. As a result, an inferiority complex appears - an exaggerated sense of one's own weakness and failure. Adler distinguished between three types of suffering experienced in childhood, which contribute to the development of an inferiority complex: organ failure, overprotection and rejection by parents.
First, children with some kind of congenital physical disability may develop feelings of psychological disability. On the other hand, children whose parents overly indulge them, indulge them in everything, grow up not confident in their abilities, because others have always done everything for them. They are concerned about a deep-seated sense of inferiority, as they are convinced that they themselves are unable to overcome life's obstacles. Finally, parental neglect of children, rejection can cause them to develop an inferiority complex for the reason that rejected children generally feel unwanted. They go through life without sufficient confidence in their ability to be useful, loved, and appreciated by others. As we will see later, each of these three types of childhood suffering can play a decisive role in the onset of neuroses in adulthood.
However, regardless of the circumstances that play the role of soil for the emergence of feelings of inferiority, the individual may in response to them appear overcompensated and, thus, develop what Adler called superiority complex... This complex is expressed in the tendency to exaggerate their physical, intellectual or social abilities. For example, a person may be convinced that he is smarter than others, but at the same time he does not consider it necessary to demonstrate his intelligence, listing, say, everything he knows about movie stars. Another believes that he should show everything he knows about movie stars, and does this at every opportunity, laying out his information to everyone who will listen to him. He may even reject all other topics, just to prove that he knows more about movie stars than anyone else. Anyway, welcome overcompensation represents an exaggeration of the healthy drive to overcome persistent feelings of inadequacy. Accordingly, a person with a superiority complex usually appears to be boastful, arrogant, self-centered, and sarcastic. It seems that this person is not able to accept himself (that is, he has a low opinion of himself); that he can feel his worth only when he "puts others in the galoshes".
Striving for excellence
As already noted, Adler believed that the feeling of inferiority is the source of all human aspirations for self-development, growth and competence. But what is the ultimate goal for which we are fighting and which provides a measure of the constancy and integrity of our life? Are we motivated by the need to simply get rid of feelings of inferiority? Or are we motivated by the desire to ruthlessly dominate others? Or maybe we need a high status? In search of answers to these questions, Adler's ideas have changed markedly over time. In his early reflections, he expressed the conviction that the great driving force behind human behavior is aggression. Later, he abandoned the idea of aggressive aspirations in favor of "striving for power." In this concept, weakness was equated with femininity, and strength with masculinity. This was the stage in the development of Adler's theory when he put forward the idea of "masculine protest" - a form of overcompensation that both sexes use in an attempt to supplant feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. However, over time, Adler abandoned the concept of masculine protest, considering it unsatisfactory for explaining the motivation of behavior in ordinary, normal people. Instead, he put forward a broader position that people strive for superiority, and this state is completely different from the superiority complex. Thus, in his reasoning about the ultimate goal of human life, there were three different stages: to be aggressive, to be powerful and to be unattainable.
In the last years of his life, Adler came to the conclusion that the pursuit of excellence is a fundamental law of human life; it is "something without which human life cannot be imagined" (Adler, 1956, p. 104). This "great need to rise" from minus to plus, from imperfection to perfection and from inability to the ability to boldly face life's problems is developed in all people. It is difficult to overestimate the importance that Adler attached to this driving force. He viewed the pursuit of excellence (achieving the greatest possible) as the main motive in his theory.
Adler was convinced that the desire for excellence is innate and that we will never free ourselves from it, because this desire is life itself. Nevertheless, this feeling must be nurtured and developed if we want to realize our human capabilities. From birth, we have it in the form of a theoretical possibility, and not a real given. Each of us only has to realize this opportunity in our own way. Adler believed that this process begins in the fifth year of life, when a life goal is formed as the focus of our striving for excellence. Being unclear and mostly unconscious at the beginning of its formation in childhood, this life goal eventually becomes a source of motivation, a force that organizes our life and gives it meaning.
Adler offered various complementary ideas about the nature and operation of the pursuit of excellence (Adler, 1964). First, he viewed it as a single fundamental motive, and not as a combination of separate motives. This motive is expressed in the child's realization that he is powerless and of little value in comparison with those around him. Secondly, he established that this great striving forward and upward is by its nature universal: it is common to all, in norm and pathology. Third, superiority as a goal can take both a negative (destructive) and a positive (constructive) direction. The negative direction is found in people with low adaptability, such as those who struggle for superiority through selfish behavior and a preoccupation with achieving personal glory at the expense of others. Conversely, well-adjusted people show their desire for excellence in a positive way, so that it correlates with the well-being of others. Fourth, Adler argued, the pursuit of superiority is associated with high energy expenditure and effort. As a result of the influence of this force, which imparts energy to life, the level of stress in the individual increases rather than decreases. And, fifthly, the desire for superiority is manifested both at the level of the individual and at the level of society. We strive to become perfect not only as individuals or members of society - we strive to improve the very culture of our society. Unlike Freud, Adler viewed the individual and society as necessarily in harmony with each other.
So, Adler described people living in harmony with the outside world, but constantly striving to improve it. However, the hypothesis that humanity has only one ultimate goal - to develop its culture - tells us nothing about how we, as individuals, try to achieve this goal. Adler solved this problem with the help of his concept of lifestyle.
Life style
The style of life, in the original version "life plan" or "guiding image", is the most characteristic feature of Adler's dynamic theory of personality. This concept, essentially ideographic, presents a unique way for an individual to adapt to life, especially in terms of goals set by the individual himself and ways to achieve them. According to Adler, life style includes a unique combination of traits, behaviors and habits that, taken together, define a unique picture of an individual's existence.
How does the individual's lifestyle manifest in action? To answer this question, we must briefly return to the concepts of inferiority and compensation, as these are the very foundations of our lifestyles. Adler came to the conclusion that in childhood we all feel inferior, either in imagination or in reality, and this prompts us to compensate in some way. For example, a child with poor coordination may focus their compensatory efforts on outstanding athletic performance. His behavior, guided by the awareness of his physical limitations, becomes, in turn, his style of life - a complex of behavioral activity aimed at overcoming inferiority. So, the lifestyle is based on our efforts to overcome feelings of inferiority and, through this, to strengthen the sense of superiority.
From Adler's point of view, the lifestyle is so firmly entrenched at the age of four or five that it subsequently almost does not lend itself to total changes. Of course, people continue to find new ways to express their individual life style, but this, in essence, is only the improvement and development of the basic structure laid down in early childhood. The lifestyle formed in this way is preserved and becomes the main pivot of behavior in the future. In other words, everything we do is shaped and guided by our one-of-a-kind lifestyle. It depends on him which aspects of our life and environment we will pay attention to, and which we will ignore. All of our mental processes (for example, perception, thinking and feeling) are organized into a single whole and take on meaning in the context of our lifestyle. Consider as an example a woman striving for excellence by expanding her intellectual capabilities. From the perspective of Adler's theory, her lifestyle predictably involves a sedentary lifestyle. She will focus on intensive reading, study, reflection - that is, on everything that can serve the purpose of increasing her intellectual competence. She can plan her daily routine down to the minute - rest and hobbies, communication with family, friends and acquaintances, social activity - again in accordance with her main goal. The other person, on the other hand, is working on his physical improvement and structures life in such a way that the goal is achievable. Everything he does is aimed at achieving superiority in the physical plane. Obviously, in Adler's theory, all aspects of human behavior derive from his lifestyle. The intellectual remembers, reflects, reasoning, feeling and acting is not at all the same as the athlete, since they are both psychologically opposite types, if we talk about them in terms of their respective lifestyles.
Personality types: attitudes associated with lifestyles. Adler reminds us that the constancy of our personality throughout life is due to our lifestyle. Our basic orientation towards the outside world is also determined by our lifestyle. He noted that the true form of our lifestyle can only be recognized if we know what ways and means we use to solve life's problems. Each person inevitably faces three global problems: work, friendship and love. From Adler's point of view, none of these tasks stands alone - they are always interconnected, and their solution depends on our lifestyle: and the same situation and the same problem - the need for living beings to preserve life and continue to live in the environment that they have "(Adler, 1956, p. 133).
Since every person has a unique lifestyle, the identification of personality types according to this criterion is possible only as a result of rough generalization. In keeping with this view, Adler was rather reluctant to propose a typology of lifestyle attitudes (Dreikurs, 1950). In this classification, types are distinguished on the basis of how three main life tasks are solved. The classification itself is built on the principle of a two-dimensional scheme, where one dimension is represented by "social interest", and the other - by "degree of activity." Social interest is a feeling of empathy for all people; it manifests itself in collaboration with others for the sake of overall success rather than for personal gain. In Adler's theory, social interest is the main criterion for psychological maturity; its opposite is selfish interest. Activity level has to do with how a person approaches life's problems. The concept of "degree of activity" coincides in meaning with modern concepts of "excitement" or "energy level". As Adler believed, each person has a certain energy level, within the boundaries of which he attacks his life problems. This level of energy or activity is usually established during childhood; it can vary from person to person, from lethargy, lethargy to constant violent activity. The degree of activity plays a constructive or destructive role only in combination with social interest.
Adler's first three lifestyles attitudes are control, gain, and avoidance. Each of them is characterized by insufficient expression of social interest, but they differ in the degree of activity. The fourth type, socially useful, has both a high social interest and a high degree of activity. Adler reminds us that no typology, however ingenious or seeming, can accurately describe the individual's pursuit of excellence, excellence, and wholeness. Nevertheless, the description of these attitudes, accompanying lifestyles, will to some extent facilitate the understanding of human behavior from the perspective of Adler's theory.
Control type. People are self-confident and assertive, with little social interest, if any. They are active, but not socially. Consequently, their behavior does not imply concern for the welfare of others. They are characterized by an attitude of superiority over the outside world. When faced with basic life tasks, they solve them in a hostile, antisocial manner. Juvenile delinquents and drug addicts are two examples of Adler's managerial type.
Avoidant type.People of this type have neither sufficient social interest nor the activity necessary to solve their own problems. They fear failure more than strive for success, their life is characterized by socially useless behavior and flight from solving life problems. In other words, their goal is to avoid all problems in life, and therefore they move away from anything that suggests the possibility of failure.
Socially useful type. This type of person is the embodiment of maturity in Adler's belief system. It combines a high degree of social interest and a high level of activity. Being socially oriented, such a person shows true concern for others and is interested in communicating with them. He perceives the three main tasks in life - work, friendship and love - as social problems. A person belonging to this type realizes that solving these life problems requires cooperation, personal courage and a willingness to contribute to the well-being of others.
In a two-dimensional theory of attitudes associated with lifestyles, one possible combination is missing; high social interest and low activity. However, it is impossible to have a high social interest and not be highly active. In other words, individuals with a high social interest have to do something that will benefit other people.
Social interest
Another concept that is crucial in Adler's individual psychology is social interest... The concept of social interest reflects Adler's strong belief that we humans are social creatures, and if we want to better understand ourselves, we must consider our relationships with other people and, even more broadly, the socio-cultural context in which we we live. But even to a greater extent, this concept reflects a fundamental, albeit gradual change in Adler's views on what constitutes a huge guiding force underlying all human aspirations.
At the very beginning of his scientific career, Adler believed that people are motivated by an insatiable desire for personal power and the need to dominate others. In particular, he believed that people are pushed forward by the need to overcome deep-seated feelings of inferiority and the desire for superiority. These views met with widespread protest. Indeed, Adler has received much criticism for emphasizing selfish motives while ignoring social ones. Many critics believed that Adler's position on motivation was nothing more than a disguised version of Darwin's doctrine that the fittest survive. However, later, when Adler's theoretical system was further developed, it took into account that people are largely motivated by social motives. Namely, people are encouraged to take certain actions by an innate social instinct that makes them abandon selfish goals for the sake of community goals. The essence of this view, which has found its expression in the concept of social interest, is that people subordinate their personal needs to the cause of social benefit. The expression "social interest" comes from the German neologism Gemeinschaftsgefuhl - a term whose meaning cannot be fully conveyed in another language in one word or phrase. It means something like “social feeling”, “feeling of community” or “feeling of solidarity”. It also includes the meaning of membership in the human community, that is, a sense of identification with humanity and similarity to each member of the human race.
Adler believed that the premises of social interest are innate. Since each person possesses it to some extent, he is a social creature by nature, and not as a result of the formation of a habit. However, like other innate inclinations, social interest does not arise automatically, but requires that it be consciously developed. He is educated and results from the appropriate guidance and training.
Social interest develops in a social environment. Other people - first of all the mother, and then the rest of the family - contribute to the process of his development. However, it is the mother, the contact with whom is the first in the child's life and has the greatest influence on him, who makes great efforts to develop social interest. In fact, Adler views maternal contributions to parenting as a double labor: encouraging the development of mature social interests and helping them move beyond the sphere of maternal influence. Both functions are not easy to perform, and they are always influenced to one degree or another by the way the child explains the mother's behavior.
Since social interest arises in the child's relationship with the mother, her task is to foster in the child a sense of cooperation, a desire to establish relationships and companionship - qualities that Adler considered closely intertwined. Ideally, a mother shows true love for her child - love centered on his well-being rather than on her own maternal vanity. This healthy love springs from genuine concern for others and enables a mother to nurture a social interest in her child. Her tenderness for her husband, for other children and people in general serves as a role model for the child, who learns, thanks to this model of wide social interest, that there are other significant people in the world, and not just family members.
Many attitudes formed in the process of parenting can also suppress the child's sense of social interest. If, for example, a mother focuses exclusively on her children, she will not be able to teach them to transfer social interest to other people. If she prefers exclusively her husband, avoids children and society, her children will feel unwanted and deceived, and the potential for the manifestation of their social interest will remain unfulfilled. Any behavior that reinforces the feeling of being neglected and disliked in children leads to a loss of independence and an inability to cooperate.
Adler saw the father as the second most important source of influence on the development of the child's social interest. First, the father must have a positive attitude toward his wife, work, and society. In addition to this, his formed social interest should be manifested in relations with children. According to Adler, an ideal father is one who treats his children as equals and takes an active part, along with his wife, in their upbringing. The father must avoid two mistakes: emotional isolation and parental authoritarianism, which, oddly enough, have the same consequences. Children who feel alienated from their parents tend to pursue the goal of achieving personal superiority rather than superiority based on social interest. Parental authoritarianism also leads to defective lifestyles. Children of oppressive fathers also learn to fight for power and personal, not social, superiority.
Finally, according to Adler, the relationship between father and mother has a huge impact on the development of social feelings in a child. Thus, in the event of an unhappy marriage, children have little chance of developing social interest. If the wife does not provide emotional support to her husband and gives her feelings exclusively to the children, they suffer, since overprotection dampens social interest. If the husband is openly critical of his wife, the children lose respect for both parents. If there is discord between husband and wife, children start playing with one of the parents against the other. In this game, children ultimately lose: they inevitably lose a lot when their parents demonstrate a lack of mutual love.
Social interest as an indicator of mental health. According to Adler, the severity of social interest is a convenient criterion for assessing the mental health of an individual. He referred to it as a "barometer of normality" - an indicator that can be used to assess the quality of a person's life. That is, from Adler's point of view, our lives are valuable only to the extent that we contribute to increasing the value of the lives of other people. Normal, healthy people really care about others; their desire for excellence is socially positive and includes a desire for the well-being of all people. Although they understand that not everything in this world is right, they take on the task of improving the lot of humanity. In short, they know that their own life is not of absolute value until they dedicate it to their contemporaries and even those who have not yet been born.
On the other hand, poorly adapted people have insufficiently expressed social interest. As we will see later, they are egocentric, they fight for personal superiority and domination over others, they have no social goals. Each of them lives a life that has only personal meaning - they are absorbed in their own interests and self-defense.
Creative self
We noted earlier that the foundations of a lifestyle are laid during childhood. According to Adler, the lifestyle is so strongly crystallized by the age of five years of a child's life that then he moves in the same direction all his life. When interpreted one-sidedly, this understanding of life style formation might seem to point to a determinism as strong in Adler's reasoning as in Freud's. In fact, they both emphasized the importance of early experience in shaping the personality of an adult. But, unlike Freud, Adler understood that in the behavior of an adult not only early experiences come to life, but rather a manifestation of the characteristics of his personality, which was formed in the first years of life. Moreover, the concept of lifestyle is not as mechanistic as it might seem, especially when we turn to the concept of the creative self, which is part of Adler's frame of reference.
The concept of the creative Self is the most important construct of Adler's theory, its highest achievement as a personologist. When he discovered and introduced this construct into his system, all other concepts took a subordinate position in relation to him. It embodied the active principle of human life; what gives it meaning. This is what Adler was looking for. He argued that a lifestyle is shaped by the creative abilities of an individual. In other words, everyone is free to create their own lifestyle. Ultimately, people themselves are responsible for who they become and how they behave. This creative force is responsible for the goal of a person's life, determines the method of achieving this goal and contributes to the development of social interest. The same creative force influences perception, memory, fantasies and dreams. It makes every person a free (self-determining) individual.
Assuming the existence of a creative force, Adler did not deny the influence of heredity and environment on the formation of personality. Every child is born with unique genetic abilities and very soon has a unique social experience. However, humans are more than just the effects of heredity and the environment. People are creative beings who not only react to their environment, but also act on it, and also receive responses from it. A person uses heredity and environment as a building material for the formation of a personality building, however, his own style is reflected in the architectural solution. Therefore, in the final analysis, only the person himself is responsible for his lifestyle and attitudes towards the world.
Where are the origins of man's creative power? What motivates her to develop? Adler did not fully answer these questions. The best answer to the first question is likely to be that man's creative power is the result of a long history of evolution. People are creative because they are human. We know that creativity flourishes in early childhood, and this accompanies the development of social interest, but why and how it develops remains unexplained. However, their presence gives us the ability to create our own unique lifestyle, based on the abilities and capabilities given by inheritance and environment. In Adler's concept of the creative self, one can clearly hear his conviction that people are the masters of their own destiny.
Birth order
Based on the important role of the social context in the development of personality, Adler drew attention to the order of birth as the main determinant of attitudes accompanying the style of life. Namely: if the children have the same parents, and they grow up in approximately the same family conditions, their social environment is not the same. The experience of the oldest or youngest child in the family in relation to other children, the peculiarities of the influence of parental attitudes and values - all this changes as a result of the appearance of the next children in the family and strongly influences the formation of the lifestyle.
According to Adler, the birth order (position) of the child in the family is crucial. The perception of the situation is especially important, which most likely accompanies a certain position. That is, what importance the child attaches to the current situation depends on how the order of his birth will affect his lifestyle. Moreover, since this perception is subjective, children in any position can develop any lifestyle. However, on the whole, certain psychological characteristics turned out to be characteristic of the particular position of the child in the family.
Firstborn (oldest child). According to Adler, the position of the first child can be considered enviable as long as he is the only child in the family. Parents are usually very worried about the birth of their first child and therefore give themselves entirely to him, striving for everything to be "as it should be." The firstborn receives boundless love and care from the parents. He usually enjoys his safe and serene existence. But this continues until the next child deprives him of a privileged position by his appearance. This event dramatically changes the position of the child and his view of the world.
Adler often described the position of the firstborn at the birth of the second child as the position of "a monarch deprived of a throne," and noted that the experience can be very traumatic. When an older child watches his younger brother or sister win the competition for parental attention and affection, he will naturally be inclined to reclaim his dominance in the family. However, this battle for the return of the former central position in the family system is doomed to failure from the very beginning - the former cannot be returned, no matter how hard the firstborn tries. Over time, the child realizes that the parents are too busy, too twitchy or too indifferent to tolerate his infantile demands. In addition, the parents have much more power than the child, and they respond to difficult behavior (demanding attention to themselves) with punishment. As a result of this family struggle, the first-born "accustom himself to isolation" and learns the strategy of survival alone, not needing someone else's affection or approval. Adler also believed that the oldest child in the family was likely to be conservative, power-hungry, and a leader. Therefore, he often becomes the custodian of family attitudes and moral standards.
An only child. Adler believed that the position of an only child was unique because he had no other siblings to compete with. This circumstance, along with a particular sensitivity to maternal care, often leads the only child to intense rivalry with the father. He has been under the control of his mother for too long and too much and expects the same protection and care from others. The main feature of this lifestyle is dependence and self-centeredness.
Such a child continues to be the focus of family life throughout childhood. Later, however, he kind of suddenly wakes up and discovers that he is no longer in the spotlight. The only child never shared his central position with anyone, did not fight for this position with brothers or sisters. As a result, he often has difficulties in relationships with peers.
Second (middle) child. The second child is set from the very beginning by his older brother or older sister: the situation stimulates him to break the records of the older sibling. Due to this, the rate of its development is often higher than that of the older child. For example, the second child may start talking or walking earlier than the first. “He behaves as if he is in a race, and if someone gets ahead a couple of steps, he will hasten to get ahead of him. He is always racing at full speed” (Adler, 1931, p. 148).
As a result, the second child grows up to be competitive and ambitious. His lifestyle is determined by the constant desire to prove that he is better than his older brother or sister. So, the average child is characterized by an achievement orientation. To achieve superiority, he uses both direct and devious methods. Adler also believed that the average child could set exorbitant goals for himself, which in fact increased the likelihood of possible failure. It is interesting to note that Adler himself was the middle child in the family.
Last child (youngest). The position of the last child is unique in many ways. Firstly, he never experiences the shock of being "deprived of the throne" by another sibling and, being a "baby" or "darling" of the family, he can be surrounded by care and attention from not only parents, but, as is the case in large families, older brothers and sisters. Secondly, if parents are limited in means, he practically has nothing of his own, and he has to use the things of other family members. Third, the position of older children allows them to set the tone; they have more privileges than him, and therefore he experiences a strong sense of inferiority, along with a lack of a sense of independence.
Despite this, the younger child has one advantage: he is highly motivated to outperform older siblings. As a result, he often becomes the fastest swimmer, the best musician, the most ambitious student. Adler sometimes spoke of the "struggling youngest child" as a possible future revolutionary.
Each of the above examples is a stereotypical description of a "typical" oldest, single, middle, and youngest child. As noted earlier, not every child's lifestyle completely coincides with the general descriptions given by Adler. He argued only that the position of each child in the family presupposes the presence of certain problems (for example, the need to yield to the central position in the family after being the object of general attention, to compete with those who have more experience and knowledge, and the like). Adler's interest in relationships in the context of birth order was thus nothing more than an attempt to explore the types of problems children face and the decisions they can make to cope with those problems.
Fictional finalism
As we mentioned, Adler believes that everything we do in life is marked by our desire for excellence. The goal of this aspiration is to achieve perfection, completeness and wholeness in our life. Adler believed that this universal motivational tendency takes a concrete form in the form of striving for a subjectively understood defining goal. To appreciate this reasoning, it is necessary to consider the Adler concept fictitious finalism- the idea that the behavior of the individual is subordinated to them by their very intended goals for the future.
Soon after Adler broke with Freud's entourage, he was influenced by Hans Weiinger, the eminent European philosopher. Weinger, in his book The Philosophy of the Possible (Vaihinger, 1911), developed the idea that people are more influenced by their expectations of the future than actual past experiences. He argued that many people throughout their lives act as if the ideas they are guided by were objectively correct. In Weinger's understanding, people are prompted to certain behavior not only by what is true, but also by what they believe to be. Weinger's book made such a strong impression on Adler that he incorporated some of his concepts into his theory.
Adler developed the idea that our main goals (those goals that determine the direction of our life and its purpose) are bogus targets, the correlation of which with reality can neither be verified nor confirmed. Some people, for example, may structure their lives around the idea that hard work and a little bit of luck will help you achieve almost everything. From Adler's point of view, this statement is simply fiction because many who work hard don't get anything they deserve. Another example of a fiction that has a profound effect on countless people is the belief that God will reward them in heaven for living a righteous life on earth. The very belief in God and the afterlife can be considered largely fiction, since there is no empirical or logical proof of its existence. However, such claims are real for those who adopt a religious belief system. Other examples of fictitious beliefs that can influence the course of our lives are: "Honesty is the best policy", "All people are created equal", "Men are superior to women."
According to Adler, the individual's striving for superiority is governed by a fictitious goal chosen by him. He also believed that superiority as a fictitious goal is the result of self-made decisions; this goal is shaped by the individual's own creative power, which makes it individually unique. Thus, the pursuit of superiority as a fictitious goal, being a subjectively understood ideal, is of great importance. When the fictitious goal of the individual is known, all subsequent actions are filled with meaning, and his "life story" acquires an additional explanation.
Although fictitious goals are unparalleled in reality, they often help us solve life's problems more effectively. Adler insisted that if such goals do not serve as a guide in everyday life, they should either be changed or discarded. It sounds strange that fiction can be useful, but one example will clarify this point. A female doctor strives to achieve a higher professional level than her colleagues. But superiority has no clear boundaries. She can always learn something else new in her specialty. Of course, she can devote more time to reading medical journals. In addition, she can deepen her knowledge by attending meetings of professional societies and medical seminars. But the ultimate goal - the achievement of superiority - she will never, in fact, fully achieve. However, her desire to achieve the highest professional level is rewarding and healthy. Both she and her patients are likely to benefit from this endeavor.
Bogus goals can also be dangerous and detrimental to the individual. Imagine, for example, a hypochondriac acting as if he were really sick. Or a person who is paranoid and acts as if they were really being persecuted. And perhaps the most powerful example of a destructive fiction is the Nazi belief in the superiority of the Aryan race over all others. This idea had no real basis, and yet Adolf Hitler convinced many Germans to act on the premise that the Aryans were an outstanding race.
In conclusion, it should be said that the concept of fictitious finalism shows what importance Adler attached to a teleological or goal-oriented approach to the problem of human motivation. In his understanding, the personality is more influenced by subjective expectations of what can happen than past experience. Our behavior is guided by the awareness of a fictitious life purpose. This goal does not exist in the future, but in our present perception of the future. While fictitious goals do not objectively exist, they nonetheless have a tremendous impact on our pursuit of excellence, excellence, and integrity.
Individual psychology (A. Adler) The basic principles of individual psychology are the integrity of the mental life of the individual, the striving for superiority as the main motivational force in the life of the individual, as well as the social belonging of a person. According to Adler, people try to compensate for their sense of their own. failure, developing their own unique lifestyle, in which they strive to achieve fictitious goals focused on superiority or excellence. The lifestyle of a person develops in a child in the first four to five years of life and is most clearly manifested in her attitudes and behavior, aimed at solving three basic life tasks: professional, cooperation and love. Adverse childhood situations, among which Adler emphasizes organ inferiority, excessive guardianship and rejection by parents, contribute to the development of a feeling of inadequacy into an inferiority complex, an exaggeration of one's own. weakness and failure. The second driving force of personality development is social interest, defined by Adler as the desire to cooperate with other people to achieve common goals. Social interest has innate inclinations, but is finally formed in the course of upbringing. With t. Z. Adler, the severity of social interest is an indicator of mental health, its underdevelopment can cause neuroses, drug addiction, crime and other social and psychopathological deviations. Based on the assessment of the severity of social interest and the degree of activity of the individual in solving the main life tasks, Adler identifies four types of attitudes that accompany the lifestyle: managing, receiving, avoiding, and socially useful. The emergence of neuroses, according to Adler, is associated with an erroneous lifestyle and insufficient development of social interest. In this regard, psychotherapy should be aimed at correcting an erroneous lifestyle, eliminating false goals and forming ...
(1870-1937) can be called non-Freud. He was the first to offer an alternative explanation of personality, which supplanted psychoanalysis and became the basis of the humanistic direction. He can also be called the first social psychologist.
Adler argued that personality development is most influenced by social environment from family relationships to belonging to different social groups or classes. The severity of social interest is, according to Adler, the main criterion for assessing mental health.
The main key principles Adler's theories:
1) feelings of inferiority and compensation; 2) striving for excellence; 3) lifestyle; 4) social interest; 5) creative self; 6) the order of birth; 7) fictitious finalism.
Life style includes a unique mix of traits, behaviors and habits. Determines a unique picture of existence and how exactly a person will overcome his inferiority, work, make friends and love. Firmly anchored at the age of four or five.
Subjective feeling of inferiority develops from the feeling of one's own psychological or social powerlessness. People with pronounced organic weakness or defect often try to compensate these defects through training and exercise, which often leads to the development of outstanding skill or strength. Adler suggested that a similar mechanism works in psychological reality. Feelings of inferiority have their origins in childhood and are associated with parents and birth order.
Everything that people do is aimed at overcoming feelings of inferiority and strengthening a sense of superiority.
Birth order the child is the basis for the formation of a lifestyle. The experience of the oldest or youngest child in the family in relation to other children, the peculiarities of the influence of parental attitudes and values - all this changes as a result of the appearance of the next children in the family and strongly influences the formation of the lifestyle.
Allocate the first child (striving for team leadership), middle (striving for achievement), youngest (possible revolutionary) and the only (spoiled) child.
The striving for excellence is manifested both at the level of the individual and at the level of society and all of humanity.
Striving for excellence(achieving the greatest possible) is, according to Adler, the fundamental law of human life. An innate feeling: we will never free ourselves from it, because this aspiration is life itself. The process begins in the fifth year of life, when the life goal as the focus of our endeavor. Over time, the goal becomes a source of motivation, a force that organizes our life and gives it meaning.
Excellence as a goal can take a negative (destructive) and positive (constructive) direction. The negative direction is found in people with poor adaptability, such as those who struggle for superiority through selfish behavior; the positive takes into account the well-being of other people (developed social interest).
The essence of the concept of social interest is that people subordinate their personal needs to the cause of social benefit. The expression "social interest" comes from the German neologism Gemeinschaftsgefuhl - a term whose meaning cannot be fully conveyed in another language in one word or phrase. It means something like “social feeling”, “feeling of community” or “feeling of solidarity”. The prerequisites for social interest are innate, but require conscious development in the social environment (primarily the family).
Fictitious finalism- all people are guided in life by means of self-created mental structures (or fictions) that organize and systematize reality, determining behavior. The motives of human actions are determined hopes for / visions of the future(fictitious goals), not past experiences. [This postulate crosses out the entire psychoanalysis at once.]The ultimate goal is fiction, an ideal that exists in imagination. It cannot be fully realized, but it is because of it that a person strives for the future. Many people throughout their lives act as if the ideas they are guided by were objectively correct.
A person can replace any such (fictitious) goal for himself.
Creative "I" gives meaning to a person's life, it creates both the very (fictitious) goal of life and the means for achieving it (lifestyle). Everyone has the opportunity to freely create and change at will, your goals and your own lifestyle.
People are completely responsible for who they become, where they go and how they behave. Human creativity is the result of a long history of evolution: humans are creative because they are human.
Introduction
Alfred Adler
Individual psychology of Adler
1 Fictional finalism
2 Feelings of Inadequacy and Compensation
3 Striving for excellence
4Lifestyle
5Social interest
6Creative "I"
7Birth order
Conclusion
Introduction
Alfred A ?Dler (February 7, 1870 - May 28, 1937) - Austrian psychologist, psychiatrist and thinker, one of the predecessors of neo-Freudianism, the creator of the system of individual psychology. His own life path, perhaps, was an important help in creating the concept of an individual theory of personality.
Like Jung, he was one of Freud's first and most talented students. Adler, like many others, unconditionally recognized the genius and authority of Sigmund Freud and was ready to develop his main ideas, supplementing (and sometimes reasonably replacing or correcting) their own theoretical and practical searches. But Freud, despite all his genius, suffered from incredibly vulnerable pride and vanity. He considered any slightest deviation from his canons an encroachment on his own greatness and immediately and finally expelled those who doubted. But, every cloud has a silver lining. Adler, having parted with his teacher, completely left the shadow of his glory and pressure, and created his own original, extremely interesting psychoanalytic direction, giving rise to many ideas and schools.
Having got acquainted with the life and creative activity of Alfred Adler, we will consider the main provisions of his individual psychology, since Adler made a significant contribution to our understanding of personality, and some of his ideas are still relevant today.
Alfred Adler
Alfred was the third of six children in a poor Jewish family. He fought hard against his physical weakness. Whenever possible, young Alfred ran and played with other children, who always gladly accepted him into their company. He seemed to find among his friends that sense of equality and self-respect, which he lacked at home. The impact of this experience can be seen in subsequent work by Adler, when he emphasizes the importance of empathy and shared values, calling it a social interest, through which, in his opinion, an individual can fulfill his potential and become a useful member of society.
As a child, Adler was close to death several times. When Alfred was 3 years old, his younger brother died in the crib where they slept together. In addition, Adler was almost killed twice in street accidents, and at the age of five he had severe pneumonia. The family doctor considered the case as hopeless, but another doctor managed to save the boy. After this story, Adler decided to become a doctor.
In his youth, Adler was very fond of reading. Subsequently, a good acquaintance with literature, the Bible, psychology and German classical philosophy brought him popularity in Viennese society, and later worldwide fame as a lecturer.
At the age of 18, Adler entered the University of Vienna at the Department of Medicine. At university, he became interested in the ideas of socialism and participated in several political meetings. At one of them, he met his future wife Raisa, a Russian student who studied at the university. By the end of his studies, Adler had become a staunch Social Democrat. In 1895, Adler received his medical degree. He began his practice, first as an ophthalmologist, then as a general practitioner. Later, due to his growing interest in nervous system functions and adaptation, Adler's professional aspirations shifted towards neurology and psychiatry.
In 1901, Adler, a promising young doctor, actively defended Freud's new book, The Interpretation of Dreams, in print. Although Freud was not previously familiar with Adler, he was deeply moved by Adler's bold defense of his work and sent him a letter of thanks and an invitation to participate in the newly formed discussion group on psychoanalysis. As a medical practitioner, in 1902 he joined Freud's circle. Nevertheless, Adler was never a supporter of the Freudian thesis about the universal role of child sexuality in the development of the human psyche. In 1907, Adler published a book "Investigation of organ failure", in which he outlined his views on the formation of the human psyche, which caused a negative reaction from Freud. Adler stated that "psychoanalysis should not be limited to only one way", in response to this Freud spoke sharply about the "willfulness of individual psychoanalysts." In 1910, Adler was elected president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. In the meantime, relations between Freud and Adler deteriorated sharply. Freud, who back in November 1910 in his letters to Jung called Adler "quite a decent and very intelligent man", by the end of the year declared him "paranoid" and his theories "incomprehensible." “The crux of the matter — and this really worries me — is that it nullifies sexual desire, and our opponents will soon be able to talk about an experienced psychoanalyst whose conclusions are radically different from ours. Naturally, in my attitude towards him, I am torn between the conviction that his theories are one-sided and harmful, and the fear of being branded an intolerant old man who does not allow youth to develop, ”Freud wrote to Jung.
Freud often referred to his enemies as "paranoid." He believed that repressed homosexual feelings were the cause of paranoia. Freud made a retrospective analysis of his lost friend, Wilhelm Fleece, and called Adler "Fleece's little relapse." He even admitted to Jung that he was so upset by the quarrel with Adler, because "it opens up the old wounds of the Fleece affair." On February 8, 1911, at a regular meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Freud sharply criticized Adler's views. In response, Adler and Vice President Steckler, who was also a supporter of Adler's views, resigned. In June, Adler left the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. In October of the same year, the remaining followers of Adler were ordered to choose one of the two camps. In total, ten members of the movement left with Adler, who decided to form their own circle - the Society for Free Psychoanalytic Research, which was later renamed the Association for Individual Psychology. Freud wrote about this event in his letter to Jung: "I am very glad that I finally got rid of Adler's gang." By Freud's decision, no contact was allowed between members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and the breakaway "Adler Gang".
In 1912, Adler published On the Nervous Character, which summarized the basic concepts of individual psychology. In the same year, Adler founded the Journal of Individual Psychology, which was soon interrupted by the First World War. For two years, Adler served as a military doctor on the Russian front, and after returning to Vienna in 1916, he headed a military hospital. In 1919, with the support of the Austrian government, Adler organized the first children's rehabilitation clinic. Alfred Adler attached particular importance to classes with teachers, as he believed that it was extremely important to work with those who shape the minds and characters of youth. To help parents in raising their children, counseling centers were set up at schools, where children and their parents could receive the advice and assistance they need.
A few years later, in Vienna, there were already about thirty such clinics in which Adler's students worked. The staff of each clinic consisted of a doctor, psychologist and social worker. Adler's activities gained international fame. Similar clinics soon appeared in Holland and Germany, then in the USA, where they still function. In 1922, the publication of the journal, previously interrupted by the war, was resumed under a new name - "International Journal of Individual Psychology". Since 1935, a journal in English has been published under the editorship of Adler (since 1957 - "Journal of Individual Psychology").
In 1926, Adler received an invitation to become a professor at Columbia University in New York. In 1928, he traveled to the United States, where he lectured at the New School for Social Research in New York. After becoming a fellow at Columbia University, Adler spent only the summer months in Vienna, continuing to teach and treat patients. With the Nazis coming to power, Adler's followers in Germany were repressed and forced to emigrate. The first and most famous experimental school, in which teaching was carried out according to the principles of individual psychology, founded in 1931 by Oskar Spiel and F. Birnbaum, was closed after the Austrian Anschluss in 1938. At the same time, the International Journal of Individual Psychology was banned. In 1946, after the end of the Second World War, the experimental school reopened, at the same time the publication of the journal was resumed.
In 1932, Adler finally moved to the United States. In the last years of his life, he was actively engaged in lecturing activities in many higher educational institutions in the West. On May 28, 1937, after arriving in Aberdeen, Scotland to deliver a series of lectures, he unexpectedly died of a heart attack at the age of 67.
Two of Adler's four children, Alexandra and Kurt, became, like their father, psychiatrists.
.Individual psychology of Adler
Adler became the founder of a new, socio-psychological approach to the study of the human psyche. It was in the development of new ideas of his concept that he parted with Freud. His theory, set forth in the books "On the Nervous Character" (1912), "Theory and Practice of Individual Psychology" (1920), "Human Science" (1927), "The Meaning of Life" (1933), is a completely new direction, very little connected with classical psychoanalysis and constituting an integral system of personality development.
Adler's personality theory is a well-structured system and rests on several basic principles that explain the many options and paths of personality development: 1) physical finalism, 2) feelings of inferiority and compensation 3) striving for superiority, 4) lifestyle, 5) social interest, 6) creative "I", 7) birth order.
2.1Fictional finalism
According to Adler, everything we do in life is marked by our desire for excellence. The goal of this aspiration is to achieve perfection, completeness and wholeness in our life. Adler believed that this universal motivational tendency takes a concrete form in the form of striving for a subjectively understood defining goal. To appreciate this reasoning, it is necessary to consider Adler's concept of fictitious finalism - the idea that the behavior of the individual is subordinated to his own intended goals for the future.
Soon after Adler broke with Freud's entourage, he was influenced by Hans Weiinger, the eminent European philosopher. Weinger, in his book The Philosophy of the Possible, developed the idea that people are more influenced by their expectations of the future than actual past experiences. He argued that many people throughout their lives act as if the ideas they are guided by were objectively correct. In Weinger's understanding, people are prompted to certain behavior not only by what is true, but also by what they believe to be. Weinger's book made such a strong impression on Adler that he incorporated some of his concepts into his theory.
Adler developed the idea that our main goals (those goals that determine the direction of our life and its purpose) are fictitious goals, the correlation of which with reality can neither be verified nor confirmed. Some people, for example, may structure their lives around the idea that hard work and a little bit of luck will help you achieve almost everything. From Adler's point of view, this statement is just a fiction, because many who work hard do not get anything they deserve. Another example of a fiction that has a profound effect on countless people is the belief that God will reward them in heaven for living a righteous life on earth. The very belief in God and the afterlife can be considered largely fiction, since there is no empirical or logical proof of its existence. However, such claims are real for those who adopt a religious belief system. Other examples of fictitious beliefs that can influence the course of our lives are: "Honesty is the best policy", "All people are created equal", "Men are superior to women."
According to Adler, the individual's striving for superiority is governed by a fictitious goal chosen by him. He also believed that superiority as a fictitious goal is the result of self-made decisions; this goal is shaped by the individual's own creative power, which makes it individually unique. Thus, the pursuit of superiority as a fictitious goal, being a subjectively understood ideal, is of great importance. When the fictitious goal of the individual is known, all subsequent actions are filled with meaning, and his "life story" acquires an additional explanation.
Although fictitious goals are unparalleled in reality, they often help us solve life's problems more effectively. Adler insisted that if such goals do not serve as a guide in everyday life, they should either be changed or discarded. It sounds strange that fiction can be useful, but one example will clarify this point. A female doctor strives to achieve a higher professional level than her colleagues. But superiority has no clear boundaries. She can always learn something else new in her specialty. Of course, she can devote more time to reading medical journals. In addition, she can deepen her knowledge by attending meetings of professional societies and medical seminars. But the ultimate goal - the achievement of superiority - she will never, in fact, fully achieve. However, her desire to achieve the highest professional level is rewarding and healthy. Both she and her patients are likely to benefit from this endeavor.
Bogus goals can also be dangerous and detrimental to the individual. Imagine, for example, a hypochondriac acting as if he were really sick. Or a person who is paranoid and acts as if they were really being persecuted. And perhaps the most powerful example of a destructive fiction is the Nazi belief in the superiority of the Aryan race over all others. This idea had no real basis, and yet Adolf Hitler convinced many Germans to act on the premise that the Aryans were an outstanding race.
Thus, the concept of fictitious finalism shows what importance Adler attached to a teleological or goal-oriented approach to the problem of human motivation. In his understanding, the personality is more influenced by subjective expectations of what can happen than past experience. Our behavior is guided by the awareness of a fictitious life purpose. This goal does not exist in the future, but in our present perception of the future. While fictitious goals do not objectively exist, they nonetheless have a tremendous impact on our pursuit of excellence, excellence, and integrity.
2.2Feelings of inferiority and compensation
At the very beginning of his career, while he was still collaborating with Freud, Adler published a monograph entitled "Investigation of Organ Deficiency and Its Psychic Compensation." In this work, he developed a theory about why one disease worries a person more than another, and why some parts of the body are affected more quickly than others. He suggested that each individual has some organs weaker than others, and this makes him more susceptible to diseases and lesions of these particular organs. Moreover, Adler believed that every person has a disease of precisely that organ, which was less developed, functioned less successfully and, in general, was "defective" from birth. For example, some people are born with severe allergies, which can damage, say, the lungs. These people may suffer from frequent bronchitis or upper respiratory infections. Adler, as a psychotherapist, subsequently observed that people with pronounced organic weakness or defect often try to compensate for these defects through training and exercise, which often leads to the development of outstanding skill or strength: “In almost all outstanding people we find a defect in some organ; it seems that they suffered a lot at the beginning of their lives, but fought and overcame their difficulties. "
History and literature provide many examples of exceptional achievement arising from efforts made to overcome organ failure. Demosthenes, a stutter since childhood, became one of the world's most prominent orators. Theodore Roosevelt, weak and sickly as a child, acquired a physical form that is exemplary both for an adult in general and for the President of the United States in particular. Thus, organ inferiority, that is, its congenital weakness or insufficient functioning, can lead to impressive achievements in a person's life. But it can also lead to an overly expressed feeling of self-inferiority, neurosis or depression, if the efforts aimed at compensating for the defect do not lead to the desired result.
Of course, the idea that the body tries to compensate for its weakness was nothing new. Doctors have long known that if, for example, one kidney functions poorly, the other takes over its functions and carries a double load. But Adler pointed out that this process of compensation takes place in the mental sphere: people often strive not only to compensate for organ failure, but they also develop a subjective feeling of inferiority, which develops from a feeling of their own psychological or social powerlessness.
Adler believed that feelings of inferiority began in childhood. He explained this as follows: a child goes through a very long period of dependence, when he is completely helpless and, in order to survive, must rely on his parents. This experience gives the child deep feelings of inferiority in comparison with other people in the family environment, stronger and more powerful. The emergence of this early sense of inferiority marks the beginning of a long struggle to achieve superiority over the environment, as well as the pursuit of excellence and impeccability. Adler, as a psychoanalyst, argued that the pursuit of excellence is the main motivational force in human life.
Thus, according to Adler, virtually everything people do is aimed at overcoming feelings of inferiority and strengthening a sense of superiority. However, the feeling of inferiority for various reasons can become excessive in some people. As a result, an inferiority complex appears - an exaggerated sense of one's own weakness and failure. It was Adler who introduced the concept of "inferiority complex" into science. To transform feelings of inadequacy into an "inferiority complex", a combination of three conditions is necessary:
) the problem faced by the person;
) his unpreparedness to solve it;
) his conviction that he cannot solve it.
Adler distinguished between three types of suffering experienced in childhood that contribute to the development of an inferiority complex: organ failure, overprotection, and parental rejection.
First, children with some kind of congenital physical disability may develop feelings of psychological disability. On the other hand, children whose parents overly indulge them, indulge them in everything, grow up not confident in their abilities, because others have always done everything for them. They are concerned about a deep-seated sense of inferiority, as they are convinced that they themselves are unable to overcome life's obstacles. Finally, parental neglect of children, rejection can cause them to develop an inferiority complex for the reason that rejected children generally feel unwanted. They go through life without sufficient confidence in their ability to be useful, loved, and appreciated by others. As we will see later, each of these three types of childhood suffering can play a decisive role in the onset of neuroses in adulthood.
Adler identified four main types of compensation - incomplete compensation, full compensation, overcompensation, and imaginary compensation, or withdrawal into illness. The combination of certain types of compensation with a life style and the level of development of a sense of community gave him the opportunity to create one of the first typologies of personality development.
He believed that a developed sense of community, defining a social lifestyle, allows a child to create a sufficiently adequate scheme of apperception. At the same time, children with incomplete compensation feel less inferior, since they can be compensated with the help of other people, peers from whom they do not feel fenced off. This is especially important in case of physical defects, which often do not provide the possibility of their full compensation and thus can serve as a reason for the isolation of a child from peers, stop his personal growth and improvement.
In the case of overcompensation, such people try to turn their knowledge and skills to the benefit of people, their desire for superiority does not turn into aggression against people. An example of such overcompensation of superiority in a social life style for Adler was the same Demosthenes, who overcame his stuttering, F. Roosevelt, who overcame his physical weakness, many other wonderful people, not necessarily widely known, but benefiting others.
In the case of overcompensation in children with an undeveloped sense of community, the desire for self-improvement is transformed into a neurotic complex of power, domination and domination. Such people use their knowledge to gain power over people, to enslave them, thinking not about the benefits for society, but about their own benefits. At the same time, an inadequate pattern of apperception is formed, which changes the lifestyle. Such people are tyrants and aggressors, they suspect others of wanting to take away their power and therefore become suspicious, cruel, vindictive, do not spare even their loved ones. For Adler, examples of such a lifestyle were Nero, Napoleon, Hitler and other authoritarian rulers and tyrants, not necessarily on a national scale, but also within the framework of their families and relatives. At the same time, from the point of view of Adler, the most authoritarian and cruel children become spoiled children, while rejected children are more inherent in the complexes of guilt and inferiority.
3Striving for excellence
As already noted, Adler believed that the feeling of inferiority is the source of all human aspirations for self-development, growth and competence. But what is the ultimate goal for which we are fighting and which provides a measure of the constancy and integrity of our life? Are we motivated by the need to simply get rid of feelings of inferiority or loneliness? Or are we motivated by the desire to ruthlessly dominate others? Or maybe we need a high status? In search of answers to these questions, Adler's ideas have changed markedly over time. In his early reflections, he expressed the conviction that the great driving force behind human behavior is aggression. Later, he abandoned the idea of aggressive aspirations in favor of "striving for power." In this concept, weakness was equated with femininity, and strength with masculinity. This was the stage in the development of Adler's theory of psychoanalysis when he put forward the idea of "masculine protest" - a form of overcompensation that both sexes use in an attempt to supplant feelings of failure and inferiority. However, over time, Adler abandoned the concept of masculine protest, considering it unsatisfactory for explaining the motivation of behavior in ordinary, normal people. Instead, he put forward a broader position that people strive for superiority, and this state is completely different from the superiority complex. Thus, in his reasoning about the ultimate goal of human life, there were three different stages: to be aggressive, to be powerful and to be unattainable.
In the last years of his life, Adler came to the conclusion that the pursuit of excellence is a fundamental law of human life; it is "something without which a person's life cannot be imagined." This "great need to rise" from minus to plus, from imperfection to perfection and from inability to the ability to boldly face life's problems is developed in all people. It is difficult to overestimate the importance that Adler attached to this driving force. He viewed the pursuit of excellence (achieving the greatest possible) as the main motive in his theory.
Adler was convinced that the desire for excellence is innate and that we will never free ourselves from it, because this desire is life itself. Nevertheless, this feeling must be nurtured and developed if we want to realize our human capabilities. From birth, we have it in the form of a theoretical possibility, and not a real given. Each of us only has to realize this opportunity in our own way. Adler believed that this process begins in the fifth year of life, when a life goal is formed as the focus of our striving for excellence. Being unclear and mostly unconscious at the beginning of its formation in childhood, this life goal eventually becomes a source of motivation, a force that organizes our life and gives it meaning.
Adler offered various complementary ideas about the nature and operation of the pursuit of excellence. First, he viewed it as a single fundamental motive, and not as a combination of separate motives. This motive is expressed in the child's realization that he is powerless and of little value in comparison with those around him. Secondly, he established that this great striving forward and upward is by its nature universal: it is common to all, in norm and pathology. Third, superiority as a goal can take both a negative (destructive) and a positive (constructive) direction. The negative direction is found in people with low adaptability, such as those who struggle for superiority through selfish behavior and a preoccupation with achieving personal glory at the expense of others. Conversely, well-adjusted people show their desire for excellence in a positive way, so that it correlates with the well-being of others. Fourth, Adler argued, the pursuit of superiority is associated with high energy expenditure and effort. As a result of the influence of this force, which imparts energy to life, the level of stress in the individual increases rather than decreases. And, fifthly, the desire for superiority is manifested both at the level of the individual and at the level of society. We strive to become perfect not only as individuals or members of society - we strive to improve the very culture of our society. Unlike Freud, Adler viewed the individual and society as necessarily in harmony with each other.
So, Adler described people living in harmony with the outside world, but constantly striving to improve it. However, the hypothesis that humanity has only one ultimate goal - to develop its culture - tells us nothing about how we, as individuals, try to achieve this goal. Adler solved this problem with the help of his concept of lifestyle.
4Lifestyle
For the first time the term "life style" was used by Adler in 1926. Prior to that, he used other terms - "guiding image", "form of life", "line of life", "life plan", "line of development of an integral personality."
Life style is "the value that a person attaches to the world and to himself, his goals, the direction of his aspirations and the approaches that he uses in solving life problems." The life style is characterized by: 1) very early formation; 2) erroneousness; 3) stability.
How does the individual's lifestyle manifest in action? To answer this question, we must briefly return to the concepts of inferiority and compensation, as these are the very foundations of our lifestyles. Adler came to the conclusion that in childhood we all feel inferior, either in imagination or in reality, and this prompts us to compensate in some way. For example, a child with poor coordination may focus their compensatory efforts on outstanding athletic performance. His behavior, guided by the awareness of his physical limitations, becomes, in turn, his style of life - a complex of behavioral activity aimed at overcoming inferiority. So, the lifestyle is based on our efforts to overcome feelings of inferiority and, through this, to strengthen the sense of superiority.
From Adler's point of view, the lifestyle is so firmly entrenched at the age of four or five that it subsequently almost does not lend itself to total changes. Of course, people continue to find new ways to express their individual life style, but this, in essence, is only the improvement and development of the basic structure laid down in early childhood. The lifestyle formed in this way is preserved and becomes the main pivot of behavior in the future. In other words, everything we do is shaped and guided by our one-of-a-kind lifestyle. It depends on him which aspects of our life and environment we will pay attention to, and which we will ignore. All of our mental processes (for example, perception, thinking and feeling) are organized into a single whole and take on meaning in the context of our lifestyle. Consider as an example a woman striving for excellence by expanding her intellectual capabilities. From the perspective of Adler's psychology, her lifestyle predictably involves a sedentary lifestyle. She will focus on intensive reading, study, reflection - that is, on everything that can serve the purpose of increasing her intellectual competence. She can plan her daily routine down to the minute - rest and hobbies, communication with family, friends and acquaintances, social activity - again in accordance with her main goal. The other person, on the other hand, is working on his physical improvement and structures life in such a way that the goal is achievable. Everything he does is aimed at achieving superiority in the physical plane. In Adler's theory, all aspects of human behavior derive from their lifestyle. The intellectual remembers, reflects, reasoning, feeling and acting is not at all the same as the athlete, since they are both psychologically opposite types, if we talk about them in terms of their respective lifestyles.
Life style inevitably manifests itself in the way a person solves three main problems:
The professional problem is "how to find an occupation that would allow one to survive under all the limitations of the earthly world."
The problem of cooperation and friendship is "how to find such a place among people so that you can cooperate with them and enjoy the benefits of cooperation with them."
The problem of love and marriage is "how to adapt to the fact that we exist in two sexes and that the continuation and development of human life depends on our love life."
Adler notes that “solving one of these problems helps to get closer to solving others ... They represent different aspects of the same situation and the same problem - the need for living beings to survive and continue to live in the environment that they are ... Solving these three problems, each person inevitably manifests his deep sense of the essence of life. "
Since every person has a unique lifestyle, the identification of personality types according to this criterion is possible only as a result of rough generalization. In keeping with this view, Adler was rather reluctant to propose a typology of lifestyle attitudes. In this classification, types are distinguished on the basis of how three main life tasks are solved. The classification itself is built on the principle of a two-dimensional scheme, where one dimension is represented by "social interest", and the other - by "degree of activity." Social interest is a feeling of empathy for all people; it manifests itself in collaboration with others for the sake of overall success rather than for personal gain. In Adler's theory, social interest is the main criterion for psychological maturity; its opposite is selfish interest. The degree of activity has to do with how a person approaches the solution of life's problems. The concept of "degree of activity" coincides in meaning with modern concepts of "excitement" or "energy level". As Adler believed, each person has a certain energy level, within the boundaries of which he attacks his life problems. This level of energy or activity is usually established during childhood; it can vary from person to person, from lethargy, lethargy to constant violent activity. The degree of activity plays a constructive or destructive role only in combination with social interest.
Adler's first three lifestyles attitudes are control, gain, and avoidance. Each of them is characterized by insufficient expression of social interest, but they differ in the degree of activity. The fourth type, socially useful, has both a high social interest and a high degree of activity. Adler reminds us that no typology, however ingenious or seeming, can accurately describe the individual's pursuit of excellence, excellence, and wholeness. Nevertheless, the description of these attitudes, accompanying lifestyles, will to some extent facilitate the understanding of human behavior from the perspective of Adler's theory.
In a two-dimensional theory of attitudes associated with lifestyles, one possible combination is missing; high social interest and low activity. However, it is impossible to have a high social interest and not be highly active. In other words, individuals with a high social interest have to do something that will benefit other people.
The concepts of social interest, life goal are associated with lifestyle and Adler's general idea of human integrity. "The main task of individual psychology is to confirm this unity in each individual, in his thinking, feeling, acting, in his so-called consciousness and unconsciousness - in all expressions of his personality." A life style is a unique way chosen by each individual to pursue his life goal.
According to Adler, signs of a healthy personality are movement from self-centeredness to social interest, striving for constructive superiority, cooperation.
The reasons for the violation of progressive human development are:
physical disability, which leads to isolation, the development of selfishness, a sense of self-centeredness, a non-cooperative lifestyle;
spoiledness, as a result of overprotection, which leads to a decrease in social interest, the ability to cooperate, and personal superiority;
rejection as a condition caused by isolation from parents and accompanied by a decrease in social interest and self-confidence.
5Social interest
Another concept that is crucial in Adler's individual psychology is social interest. The concept of social interest reflects Adler's strong belief that we humans are social creatures, and if we want to better understand ourselves, we must consider our relationships with other people and, even more broadly, the socio-cultural context in which we we live. But even to a greater extent, this concept reflects a fundamental, albeit gradual change in Adler's views on what constitutes a huge guiding force underlying all human aspirations.
At the very beginning of his scientific career, Adler believed that people are motivated by an insatiable desire for personal power and the need to dominate others. In particular, he believed that people are pushed forward by the need to overcome deep-seated feelings of inferiority and the desire for superiority. These views met with widespread protest. Indeed, Adler has received much criticism for emphasizing selfish motives while ignoring social ones. Many critics believed that Adler's position on motivation was nothing more than a disguised version of Darwin's doctrine that the fittest survive. However, later, when Adler's theoretical system was further developed, it took into account that people are largely motivated by social motives. Namely, people are encouraged to take certain actions by an innate social instinct that makes them abandon selfish goals for the sake of community goals. The essence of this view, which has found its expression in the concept of social interest, is that people subordinate their personal needs to the cause of social benefit. The expression "social interest" comes from the German neologism Gemeinschaftsgefuhl - a term whose meaning cannot be fully conveyed in another language in one word or phrase. It means something like “social feeling”, “feeling of community” or “feeling of solidarity”. It also includes the meaning of membership in the human community, that is, a sense of identification with humanity and similarity to each member of the human race.
Subsocial objects are inanimate objects, situations or activities (science, art, etc.). The interest shown in them has nothing to do with the individual's own "I". The ability for such an internal interest is the foundation of the individual's future contribution to the development of humanity. But whether a person makes such a contribution or not, largely depends on the development of focus on the second category of objects.
Social objects include all living things. Social interest here manifests itself as the ability to value life and accept the point of view of another. At the same time, interest in social objects proper comes later than interest in subsocial objects; therefore, we can talk about the corresponding stages of the development of social interest. So, for example, at the subsocial stage, a child can play with interest with kittens and at the same time torment them, hurt them. At the social stage, he is already more respectful and reverent about life.
Suprasocial objects are both living and non-living objects. Social interest here means complete going beyond oneself and unity with the fullness of the world, this is "a cosmic feeling and a reflection of the community of the entire cosmos and life in us", "a close union with life as a whole."
The process of social interest can be directed to objects of three kinds.
Table 3.1. Feelings, thoughts and characteristics of a person's command, reflecting the development of his social interest
Adler believed that the premises of social interest are innate. Since each person possesses it to some extent, he is a social creature by nature, and not as a result of the formation of a habit. However, like other innate inclinations, social interest does not arise automatically, but requires that it be consciously developed. He is educated and results from the appropriate guidance and training.
Social interest develops in a social environment. Other people - first of all the mother, and then the rest of the family - contribute to the process of his development. However, it is the mother, the contact with whom is the first in the child's life and has the greatest influence on him, who makes great efforts to develop social interest. In fact, Adler views maternal contributions to parenting as a double labor: encouraging the development of mature social interests and helping them move beyond the sphere of maternal influence. Both functions are not easy to perform, and they are always influenced to one degree or another by the way the child explains the mother's behavior.
Since social interest arises in the child's relationship with the mother, its task is to foster in the child a sense of cooperation, a desire to establish relationships and companionship - qualities that Adler considered closely intertwined. Ideally, a mother shows true love for her child - love centered on his well-being rather than on her own maternal vanity. This healthy love springs from genuine concern for others and enables a mother to nurture a social interest in her child. Her tenderness for her husband, for other children and people in general serves as a role model for the child, who learns, thanks to this model of wide social interest, that there are other significant people in the world, and not just family members.
Many attitudes formed in the process of parenting can also suppress the child's sense of social interest. If, for example, a mother focuses exclusively on her children, she will not be able to teach them to transfer social interest to other people. If she prefers exclusively her husband, avoids children and society, her children will feel unwanted and deceived, and the potential for the manifestation of their social interest will remain unfulfilled. Any behavior that reinforces the feeling of being neglected and disliked in children leads to a loss of independence and an inability to cooperate.
Adler saw the father as the second most important source of influence on the development of the child's social interest. First, the father must have a positive attitude toward his wife, work, and society. In addition to this, his formed social interest should be manifested in relations with children. According to Adler, an ideal father is one who treats his children as equals and takes an active part, along with his wife, in their upbringing. The father must avoid two mistakes: emotional isolation and parental authoritarianism, which, oddly enough, have the same consequences. Children who feel alienated from their parents tend to pursue the goal of achieving personal superiority rather than superiority based on social interest. Parental authoritarianism also leads to defective lifestyles. Children of oppressive fathers also learn to fight for power and personal, not social, superiority.
Finally, according to Adler, the relationship between father and mother has a huge impact on the development of social feelings in a child. Thus, in the event of an unhappy marriage, children have little chance of developing social interest. If the wife does not provide emotional support to her husband and gives her feelings exclusively to the children, they suffer, since overprotection dampens social interest. If the husband is openly critical of his wife, the children lose respect for both parents. If there is discord between husband and wife, children start playing with one of the parents against the other. In this game, children ultimately lose: they inevitably lose a lot when their parents demonstrate a lack of mutual love.
According to Adler, the severity of social interest is a convenient criterion for assessing the mental health of an individual. He referred to it as a "barometer of normality" - an indicator that can be used to assess the quality of a person's life. That is, from Adler's point of view, our lives are valuable only to the extent that we contribute to increasing the value of the lives of other people. Normal, healthy people really care about others; their desire for excellence is socially positive and includes a desire for the well-being of all people. Although they understand that not everything in this world is right, they take on the task of improving the lot of humanity. In short, they know that their own life is not of absolute value until they dedicate it to their contemporaries and even those who have not yet been born.
On the other hand, poorly adapted people have insufficiently expressed social interest. As we will see later, they are egocentric, they fight for personal superiority and domination over others, they have no social goals. Each of them lives a life that has only personal meaning - they are absorbed in their own interests and self-defense.
6Creative "I"
We noted earlier that the foundations of a lifestyle are laid during childhood. According to Adler, the lifestyle is so strongly crystallized by the age of five years of a child's life that then he moves in the same direction all his life. When interpreted one-sidedly, this understanding of life style formation might seem to point to a determinism as strong in Adler's reasoning as in Freud's. In fact, they both emphasized the importance of early experience in shaping the personality of an adult. But, unlike Freud, Adler understood that in the behavior of an adult not only early experiences come to life, but rather a manifestation of the characteristics of his personality, which was formed in the first years of life. Moreover, the concept of lifestyle is not as mechanistic as it might seem, especially when we turn to the concept of the creative “I”, which is part of Adler's frame of reference.
The concept of the creative "I" is the most important construct of Adler's theory, its highest achievement as a personologist. When he discovered and introduced this construct into his system, all other concepts took a subordinate position in relation to him. It embodied the active principle of human life; what gives it meaning. This is what Adler was looking for. He argued that a lifestyle is shaped by the creative abilities of an individual. In other words, everyone is free to create their own lifestyle. Ultimately, people themselves are responsible for who they become and how they behave. This creative force is responsible for the goal of a person's life, determines the method of achieving this goal and contributes to the development of social interest. The same creative force influences perception, memory, fantasies and dreams. It makes every person a free (self-determining) individual.
Assuming the existence of a creative force, Adler did not deny the influence of heredity and environment on the formation of personality. Every child is born with unique genetic abilities and very soon has a unique social experience. However, humans are more than just the effects of heredity and the environment. People are creative beings who not only react to their environment, but also act on it, and also receive responses from it. A person uses heredity and environment as a building material for the formation of a personality building, however, his own style is reflected in the architectural solution. Therefore, ultimately, only the person himself is responsible for his lifestyle and attitudes towards the world.
Where are the origins of man's creative power? What motivates her to develop? Adler did not fully answer these questions. The best answer to the first question is likely to be that man's creative power is the result of a long history of evolution. People are creative because they are human. We know that creativity flourishes in early childhood, and this accompanies the development of social interest, but why and how it develops remains unexplained. However, their presence gives us the ability to create our own unique lifestyle, based on the abilities and capabilities given by inheritance and environment. In Adler's concept of the creative "I" one can clearly hear his conviction that people are the masters of their own destiny.
7Birth order
Proceeding from the important role of the social context in the development of personality, Adler drew attention to the order of birth as the main determinant of attitudes accompanying the style of life. Namely: if the children have the same parents, and they grow up in approximately the same family conditions, their social environment is still not identical. The experience of the oldest or youngest child in the family in relation to other children, the peculiarities of the influence of parental attitudes and values - all this changes as a result of the appearance of the next children in the family and strongly influences the formation of the lifestyle.
According to Adler, the birth order (position) of the child in the family is crucial. The perception of the situation is especially important, which, most likely, accompanies a certain position. That is, what importance the child attaches to the current situation depends on how the order of his birth will affect his lifestyle. Moreover, since this perception is subjective, children in any position can develop any lifestyle. However, on the whole, certain psychological characteristics turned out to be characteristic of the particular position of the child in the family.
Firstborn (oldest child)
According to Adler, the position of the first child can be considered enviable as long as he is the only child in the family. Parents are usually very worried about the birth of their first child and therefore give themselves entirely to him, striving for everything to be "as it should be." The firstborn receives boundless love and care from the parents. He usually enjoys his safe and serene existence. But this continues until the next child deprives him of a privileged position by his appearance. This event dramatically changes the position of the child and his view of the world.
Adler often described the position of the firstborn at the birth of the second child as the position of "a monarch deprived of a throne," and noted that the experience can be very traumatic. When an older child watches his younger brother or sister win the competition for parental attention and affection, he will naturally be inclined to reclaim his dominance in the family. However, this battle for the return of the former central position in the family system is doomed to failure from the very beginning - the former cannot be returned, no matter how hard the firstborn tries. Over time, the child realizes that the parents are too busy, too twitchy or too indifferent to tolerate his infantile demands. In addition, the parents have much more power than the child, and they respond to difficult behavior (demanding attention to themselves) with punishment. As a result of this family struggle, the first-born "accustom himself to isolation" and learns the strategy of survival alone, not needing someone else's affection or approval. Adler also believed that the oldest child in the family is likely to be conservative, power-hungry, and a leader. Therefore, he often becomes the custodian of family attitudes and moral standards.
Only child
Adler believed that the position of an only child was unique because he had no other siblings to compete with. This circumstance, along with a particular sensitivity to maternal care, often leads the only child to intense rivalry with the father. He has been under the control of his mother for too long and too much and expects the same protection and care from others. The main feature of this lifestyle is dependence and self-centeredness.
Such a child continues to be the focus of family life throughout childhood. Later, however, he kind of suddenly wakes up and discovers that he is no longer in the spotlight. The only child never shared his central position with anyone, did not fight for this position with brothers or sisters. As a result, he often has difficulties in relationships with peers.
Second (middle) child
The second child is set from the very beginning by his older brother or older sister: the situation stimulates him to break the records of the older sibling. Due to this, the rate of its development is often higher than that of the older child. For example, the second child may start talking or walking earlier than the first. "He behaves like he is in a race, and if anyone gets ahead a couple of steps, he will rush to get ahead of him. He is racing at full speed all the time."
As a result, the second child grows up to be competitive and ambitious. His lifestyle is determined by the constant desire to prove that he is better than his older brother or sister. So, the average child is characterized by an achievement orientation. To achieve superiority, he uses both direct and devious methods. Adler also believed that the average child could set exorbitant goals for himself, which in fact increased the likelihood of possible failure. It is interesting to note that Adler himself was the middle child in the family.
Last child (youngest)
The position of the last child is unique in many ways. Firstly, he never experiences the shock of being "deprived of the throne" and, being a "kid" or "darling" of the family, he can be surrounded by care and attention from not only parents, but, as is the case in large families, older brothers and sisters ... Secondly, if parents are limited in means, he practically has nothing of his own, and he has to use the things of other family members. Third, the position of older children allows them to set the tone; they have more privileges than him, and therefore he experiences a strong sense of inferiority, along with a lack of a sense of independence.
Despite this, the younger child has one advantage: he is highly motivated to outperform older children. As a result, he often becomes the fastest swimmer, the best musician, the most ambitious student. Adler sometimes spoke of the "struggling youngest child" as a possible future revolutionary.
Each of the above examples is a stereotypical description of a "typical" oldest, single, middle, and youngest child. As noted earlier, not every child's lifestyle completely coincides with the general descriptions given by Adler. He argued only that the position of each child in the family presupposes the presence of certain problems (for example, the need to yield to the central position in the family after being the object of general attention, to compete with those who have more experience and knowledge, and the like). Adler's interest in relationships in the context of birth order was thus nothing more than an attempt to explore the types of problems children face and the decisions they can make to cope with those problems.
Although not all of Adler's theoretical propositions, mainly related to the typology of the personality of children, the sequence of their birth, were confirmed in further experimental studies, the very idea of the role of a sense of community and individual lifestyle in the formation of a child's personality, especially the idea of compensation as the main mechanism of mental development and behavior correction, has become an invaluable contribution to psychology.
Conclusion
adler psychology compensation inferiority
Having got acquainted with the individual psychology of Alfred Adler, we can characterize it as follows:
Adlerian psychology is phenomenological psychology, that is, subjective, personal, explaining that each person has his own subjective understanding of things, his attitude to the world. Schematically, you can imagine a picture when many people look at something from different angles. What everyone sees is his subjective, personal reality. Recognition of the right of everyone to have such a reality, in a sense equalizing each and every one - since these realities are not so easy to compare - is a great achievement in the development of psychology. And indeed of humanity in general. This is called humanism.
Adlerian psychology is individual psychology.
The title contains an implicit reference to the Latin individuus, meaning "inseparability," a term designed to emphasize holism, wholeness.
A person, according to Adler, is an indivisible entity and must be understood totally ("total person"), when thoughts, feelings, actions, dreams, memory and even psychology lead in one direction. Man is a system in which the whole is greater than any separate part of it. In this whole, Adler saw the unity of a person, in whose behavior there is a natural theme
We say that in our ordinary, settled life "everything repeats itself", "goes around in a circle." This means that all elements of this circle are interconnected, harmonized with each other, support and reproduce themselves - we choose feelings that provide our decisions, decisions lead to actions, and actions create those events that feed our feelings. This is individual, or, as we say, personal logic.
Adlerian psychology is theological psychology.
Theology means "expediency, movement towards a goal." Individual Psychology sees individuality in constant striving. We ask about a person when we do not understand him: “What does he want?”, Thereby meaning “What is his goal”? Here it is appropriate to recall the saying of the ancient Chilo "Look at the ending, think about the consequences."
Adlerian psychology is the psychology of community and social interest.
Adler departed from Freud's assumptions that human behavior is motivated by sexual instinct. Adler's hypothesis is that human behavior is motivated by social (social) needs and that human existence is an innate social existence. Among all the theories of personality, only Adlerian honestly argues that in order to be happy and successful in life it is necessary to be “good” in a socially significant sense.
Productivity for many psychological areas, high practical value - these are the essential features of A. Adler's individual psychology, which organically entered modern psychological science. A. Adler was much ahead of his time. Many of his positions and ideas retain their value today.
The main thing in assessing the concept is, in my opinion, in the fact that it contributed to the greatest extent to the development of all other psychotherapeutic concepts and problems (from the problem of childhood to family and social issues). It is difficult to assess the full potential of a direction that has not become a theory, but continues to live. Therefore, in conclusion, I want to quote the statement of A. Adler himself:
An honest psychologist cannot turn a blind eye to the social conditions that prevent a child from becoming part of the community and feel at home in the world, instead forcing him to grow up as if he is living in an enemy camp. The psychologist, therefore, must work against nationalism ... Against aggressive wars, revanchism and prestige; against unemployment, which plunges people into hopelessness; and against all other obstacles that encroach on social interest in the family, school and society at large.
List of used literature
1. Adler A. Practice and theory of individual psychology. / Per. with him. M .: Fund For economic literacy, 1995.
A. N. Zhdan History of Psychology. M .: Publishing house of Moscow University, 1990.
Stolyarenko L.D. Fundamentals of Psychology. 16th ed. Study guide / L.D. Stolyarenko. - Rostov n / a: Phoenix, 2006 .-- 672 p.
General psychology: textbook. allowance / L. A. Vainshtein, [and others]. - Minsk: Tesey, 2005 .-- 368 p.
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He became the founder of a new, socio-psychological approach to the study of the human psyche, called individual psychology. It was in the development of these new ideas of his concept that he parted with Freud. His theory, reflected in the works "On the nervous character" (1912), "Theory and practice of individual psychology" (1920), "Human Science" (1927), "The meaning of life" (1933), is a completely new direction, very little connected with classical psychoanalysis and is an integral system of personality development.
Adler's theory of personality denies the position of Freud and the domination of unconscious drives in the personality and behavior of a person, drives that oppose and separate a person from society. Adler believed that not innate drives or archetypes, but a sense of community with other people, stimulating social contacts and orientation towards other people, is the main force that determines human behavior and life. However, there is something in common that unites the concepts of these three psychologists: they all assume that a person has some internal, inherent in him alone nature, which affects the formation of personality. At the same time, Freud attached decisive importance to sexual factors, Jung - to primary types of thinking, and Adler emphasized the role of public interests.
At the same time, Adler was the only one who considered the most important tendency in the development of a person's personality to be the desire to preserve his individuality in integrity, to be aware of and develop it. Freud, in principle, rejected the idea of the uniqueness of each human person, rather exploring the general that is inherent in the unconscious. Jung, although he came to the idea of the integrity and "self" of the person, but much later, in the 1950-1960s. The thought of the integrity and uniqueness of the individual is Adler's invaluable contribution.
No less important is the idea of the creative self, proclaimed by him.In contrast to the Freudian Ego, which serves the purposes of innate drives and therefore completely determines the path of development of the personality in a given direction, Adler's self is a subjective and individualized system that can change the direction of personality development, interpreting the life human experience and giving it a different meaning. Moreover, it is the Self that undertakes the search for such an experience that can make it easier for this person to implement his own, unique lifestyle.
Adler's theory of personality is a well-structured system and rests on several basic premises that explain the many options and paths of personality development. These basic tenets are: 1) fictitious finalism, 2) striving for superiority, 3) feelings of inferiority, and 4) public interest, 5) lifestyle, 6) creative self.
The idea of fictitious finalism was borrowed by Adler from the famous German philosopher G. Feiginger, who wrote that all people are guided in life by means of constructions or fictions that organize and systematize reality, determining our behavior. From Feiginger, Adler also got the idea that the motives of human actions are determined to a greater extent by hopes for the future, and not by the experience of the past. This ultimate goal may be a fiction, an ideal that cannot be realized, but, nevertheless, it turns out to be a very real stimulus that determines the aspirations of a person. Adler also emphasized that a healthy person, in principle, can free himself from the influence of fictitious hopes and see life and the future as they really are. For neurotics, however, this turns out to be impracticable, and the gap between reality and fiction further increases their tension.
Adler believed that his family, the people who surround him in the first years of life, play a great role in the formation of the structure of a person's personality. The importance of the social environment was especially emphasized by Adler (one of the first in psychoanalysis), since he proceeded from the idea that a child is not born with ready-made personality structures, but only with their prototypes that are formed in the process of life. The most important structure, he considered the lifestyle.
Developing the idea of a lifestyle that determines human behavior, Adler proceeded from the fact that this is the determinant that determines and systematizes human experience. The lifestyle is closely related to the sense of community, one of the three innate unconscious feelings that make up the structure of the self. The sense of community or public interest is a kind of core that holds the entire structure of the lifestyle, determines its content and direction. The sense of community, although it is innate, can remain undeveloped. This underdevelopment of a sense of community is the basis of an asocial lifestyle, the cause of neuroses and conflicts that arise in a person. The development of a sense of community is associated with close adults who surround the child from childhood, primarily with the mother. Rejected children growing up with cold, walled-off mothers do not develop a sense of community. It also does not develop in spoiled children, since the feeling of community with the mother is not transferred to other people who remain strangers to the child. The level of development of a sense of community also determines the system of ideas about oneself and about the world, which is created by each person. The inadequacy of this system creates obstacles to personal growth, provokes the development of neuroses.
In shaping his life style, a person is actually himself the creator of his personality, which he creates from the raw material of heredity and experience. The creative I, about which Adler writes, is a kind of enzyme that affects the facts of the surrounding reality and transforms these facts into a person's personality, "a subjective, dynamic, single, individual and unique style personality." The creative I, from the point of view of Adler, gives meaning to a person's life, it creates both the very purpose of life and the means for achieving it. Thus, for Adler, the processes of forming a life goal, a lifestyle are, in fact, acts of creativity that give the human personality uniqueness, consciousness and the ability to control his own destiny. In contrast to Freud, he emphasized that people are not pawns in the hands of external forces, but conscious wholes, independently and creatively creating their lives.
If a sense of community determines the direction of life, its style, then two other innate and unconscious feelings - inferiority and striving for superiority - are sources of personality energy necessary for its development. Both of these feelings are positive, they are incentives for personal growth and self-improvement. If the feeling of inferiority affects a person, causing him to desire to overcome his disadvantage, then the desire for superiority causes the desire to be better than everyone, not only to overcome the disadvantage, but also to become the most skillful and knowledgeable. These feelings, from the point of view of Adler, stimulate not only individual development, but also the development of society as a whole through self-improvement and discoveries made by individuals. There is also a special mechanism that helps the development of these feelings, compensation.
Adler's personality theory highlights four main types of compensation: incomplete compensation, full compensation, overcompensation and imaginary compensation, or withdrawal into illness. The combination of certain types of compensation with a life style and the level of development of a sense of community gave him the opportunity to create one of the first typologies of personality development.
In Adler's theory of personality, there is a provision that a developed sense of community, defining a social lifestyle, makes it possible for a person to create a sufficiently adequate scheme of the environment. At the same time, people with incomplete compensation feel less inferior, since they can be compensated with the help of others, with the help of peers from whom they do not feel fenced off. This is especially important in case of physical defects, which often do not provide the possibility of their full compensation and thus can serve as a reason for the isolation of a child from peers, stop his personal growth and improvement.
In the case of overcompensation, such people try to turn their knowledge and skills to the benefit of people, their desire for superiority does not turn into aggression against people. Examples of such overcompensation of superiority in a social life style for Adler were Demosthenes, who overcame his stuttering, F. Roosevelt, who overcame his physical weakness, and many other remarkable people.
At the same time, with an undeveloped sense of community in a child, various neurotic complexes begin to form in early childhood, which lead to deviations in the development of their personality. Thus, incomplete compensation leads to the emergence of an inferiority complex, which leads to the development of an inadequate scheme of apperception, changes the lifestyle, introducing anxiety, feelings of self-doubt, envy, conformity and tension in the child's life. The inability to overcome their defects, especially physical ones, often leads to imaginary compensation, in which the child, just like later an adult, begins to speculate on his shortcoming, trying to extract privileges from the attention and sympathy that surrounds him. However, this type of compensation is imperfect, since it stops personal growth, forming also an inadequate, envious, egoistic personality.
In the case of overcompensation in people with an undeveloped sense of community, the desire for self-improvement is transformed into a neurotic complex of power, domination and domination. Such people use their knowledge to gain power over people, to enslave them, thinking not about the benefits of society, but about their own benefits. At the same time, an inadequate scheme of the environment is formed, which changes the lifestyle of a person. Such people become more and more tyrants and aggressors, suspecting others of the desire to take away their power. Therefore, they become suspicious, cruel, vindictive, not sparing even their loved ones. For Adler, examples of such a lifestyle were Nero, Napoleon, Hitler and other authoritarian rulers and tyrants, not necessarily on a national scale, but also within the framework of their families and relatives. At the same time, from the point of view of Adler, the most authoritarian and cruel children become spoiled children, while rejected children are more inherent in the complex of guilt and inferiority.
One of the main qualities of a person, which helps her to withstand the hardships of life, overcome difficulties and achieve perfection, is the ability to cooperate, cooperate with others. Only in cooperation can a person overcome his feelings of inferiority, make a valuable contribution to the development of all mankind. Adler wrote that if a person knows how to cooperate with others, he will never become neurotic, while a lack of cooperation is the root of all neurotic and ill-adapted lifestyles.
Although not all the provisions in Adler's theory of personality were confirmed in further experimental studies, the very idea of the role of a sense of community and individual lifestyle in the formation of personality, especially the idea of compensation as the main mechanism of mental development and behavior correction, has become an invaluable contribution to psychological science.
It is necessary to note the contribution of Adler to psychotherapy, since he was one of the first to investigate the role of play in overcoming neuroses and complexes. He believed that it was play that enabled children to overcome their inferiority complex, which they experience in the world of the adults around them. Moreover, the spontaneous play of children is already a good psychotherapeutic tool. In the same case, when it is required to overcome more serious complexes and solve special problems, the development of play should be carried out and directed by adults.
Adler's theory of personality was a kind of antithesis to Freud's concept of man. She has had a tremendous influence on humanistic psychology, psychotherapy and personality psychology.
An inferiority complex is an irrational experience of one's own inferiority, when one feels like a defective product, which, if not regretted, will simply be written off and thrown away. An inferiority complex is one of the main causes of all neuroses. This topic has already been highlighted on the site from different angles more than once: pride - all these are manifestations of fluctuating self-esteem, which rushes between pride and inferiority.
Surrogates for a "fulfilling life"
Alfred Adler argued that an inferiority complex is formed in early childhood, when a child begins to realize that his possibilities are not unlimited, and not all desires are realizable.
Perhaps the two most obvious constraints on our capabilities are the physical body (at the material level) with all its needs, and moralizing education (at the psychological level). Children's fantasy-filled games are one way to compensate for these limitations. Using toys, the child, overcoming limitations, plays out various roles that cannot be realized in real life - thus he indirectly embodies his desires.
Over the years, the grown-up child continues to act out his limitations in his actual position. You can sublimate your energy and express it in creativity. You can act out your complexes by terrorizing others - not the most productive option. You can pretend to be special, or a great person, as they do. You can realize yourself, like children, being carried away by the world of imagination, plunging into computer games, reading novels, watching TV series, where, forgetting, they live someone else's life.
One of the most popular and publicly approved options for compensating for an inferiority complex is the so-called "success". It doesn't matter what, the main thing is that the person himself no longer doubts his worth
That is, there are many options to calm doubts at your own expense. It is not necessary to practice tyranny, megalomania, picking stars from the sky.
Inconsistency of an inferiority complex
At the heart of an inferiority complex is fear. On the surface, this is the fear of being inferior, and therefore unloved, rejected, humiliated, abandoned and lonely. At a deep level, these experiences boil down to.
No matter how artificial and clumsy it may be, on the whole it (we must give it its due) in its own way encourages constructive changes. Everyone knows the taste of satisfaction when the so-called "correct" way of life was offered to feed the conscience. We rejoice and rest with peace of mind after the work done. In this perspective, the inferiority complex works in conjunction with the survival instinct; nature thus protects us from life-threatening idleness. Therefore, both the feeling of guilt and the feeling of one's own insignificance cannot be unambiguously called some kind of harmful neuroses. They encourage us to develop.
But this is the whole problem. This is how they are drawn into a vicious circle, when an inferiority complex causes both the thirst for self-realization and the fear in the process of this “realization” of screwing up, experiencing their own worthlessness and helplessness, now in an exacerbated form. As a result, an inferiority complex stimulates to move simultaneously in two opposite directions. A person longs for change and at the same time is terribly afraid of these changes, because they require real actions, which clearly reveal all the weaknesses.
In confronting the thirst for change and the fear of them, as a rule, one after another wins in turn. But if fear wins, depression can be added to all other negative sensations as an experience of the hopeless meaninglessness of one's own life. And in this position, the inferiority complex blooms and bears fruit, lowering the consciousness into the abyss of personal hell.
Self-deception of an inferiority complex
An inferiority complex is a rotten splinter in a person's soul. And so that the grimace of pain from this splinter does not distort the facade of the personality, they dress up with superficial masks to show themselves and others. Our social personality is in many ways a "collective image", a kind of psychic showcase. According to Jung, this is the archetype "persona", the mask behind which a person hides his unwanted features. ...
An inferiority complex gives rise to doubts about your own truths, about who you are and what you can rely on while following your life - all this leads to general self-doubt. A notorious, insecure person is afraid that his inflated image will not withstand contact with reality, and he will face his own insignificance face to face.
We create self-deception in order to hide from reality, in order to maintain false masks that protect us from the realization of our own helplessness in the face of life. In the most advanced cases, this mechanism manifests itself in serious clinical abnormalities.
Under the influence of an inferiority complex, the only thing they really want in the depths of the soul is not to be rejected, but without any condemnation to be accepted with all their giblets. We ourselves want to accept ourselves in our true guise in order to get rid of self-flagellation and self-deprecation. But on the surface, we expect approval, praise, good grades, medals and diplomas, and at an advanced stage - admiration and prostration.
Dependence on someone else's opinion is the inability to rely on one's own opinion about oneself, doubt in one's knowledge of oneself - it is also self-doubt.
It is not for nothing that in Hollywood films one of the most "offensive" swear words - "loser" - a person who ignores opportunities, focusing on the reasons for passive inaction, hiding from fear c. There is an opinion that a loser is every bus passenger over 30 years old. But in reality, absolutely everyone can feel like a failure under the influence of a personal inferiority complex. For example, when unrealized dreams begin to glow among the habitual images of the mind.
Often we buy expensive, luxurious things solely for the sake of self-affirmation, simply because we are ashamed to travel on public transport in cheap clothes. In this case, a car is not a means of transportation, but only a luxury - just another toy and a tribute to the insatiable complex. Exterior decor is just a temporary way to maintain your status and drown out an unquenchable inferiority complex. When they savor their lack of fulfillment, they become a loser in any situation - with or without money, until they change their own pernicious beliefs.
Product psychology
An inferiority complex is the psychology of a product. The person himself puts himself on the showcase of life in order to frustrate the approval of potential "buyers". And if the "product" is not taken, it itself includes itself in the list of unusable. An inferiority complex is a fictitious smell of rot, due to which the product independently classifies itself as "spoiled" and therefore suitable for disposal. The “buyer” thinks quite differently in this market.
When a person's inferiority complex is absent, or weakly expressed, he is not afraid to lose, he is not afraid of mistakes and failures, because they cease to symbolize the low quality of himself, but only provide useful experience.
Such a person does not feel the need to rise at the expense of others, calmly accepts criticism and compliments. In assessing the situation, it is based not on emotions, but on logic and reason.
To restore and strengthen your own psychological health, you need to study and know yourself. There are many methods. One of the most effective is working with a psychologist, or systematic introspection. Mindfulness and meditation, journaling, any conscious work with thinking and feeling help. Interaction with people is powerful when we get to know ourselves deeper in relationships. In general, it all comes down to revealing the deep truth about yourself and life.
When a person knows himself, he is not afraid to test his own beliefs for strength. Even if we all follow the path of least resistance, the desire to simplify and simplify our lives is an excellent motivation for personal growth.
