Alfred Adler: Inferiority Complex

Alfred Adler

• Adopted a socialist orientation, focusing on humanistic and egalitarian principles.
• Represented the "common man" or "underdog."
• Posited that all behavior has social meaning, a purpose, and is goal-directed.
• Believed behavior represents unity, having a pattern designed to overcome inferiority feelings and strive for superiority.
• Contended behavior stems from subjective perceptions.
• Identified the fundamental human motive as the search for success, superiority, freedom from helplessness, escape from fear, and personal completeness.
• Freud emphasized sexual/aggressive pleasure-seeking, while Adler focused on compensating for perceived inferiority and helplessness.

Inferiority Complex

• Characterized by a feeling of lack of worth, hindering self-improvement.
• Repressed feelings may manifest as a superiority complex, marked by arrogance and exaggerated achievements.

Moving from Felt-Minus to Felt-Plus

• Organ inferiority: Everyone is vulnerable to "disease" in their weakest organ.
• People compensate by developing other strengths. For example, a child with poor vision develops exceptional listening skills.
• Aggressive drive: Hostile reaction to perceived helplessness.
• Expressed outright through fighting or transformed into competition.
• Masculine protest: "Masculinity" implies competence; people strive for it.
• People create "fictional goals" and strive to achieve them, more realistic than perfectionism.
• Rejected traditional gender roles focusing on psychology over biology.

Social Interest: Life Tasks

• Three tasks: Societal, work, and love.
• Style of Life: Each person sculpts their own personality, established by age 4 or 5.
• Attitudes toward society, work, and love.
• Creative life force leads to fulfillment.
• Law of Movement: Direction taken by an individual that originates from their ability to exercise free choice.

Mistaken Styles of Life

• Ruling type: Dominates others, selfishly confronting problems; may be high achievers but are generally vain and competitive.
• Getting type: Dependent, adopts passive attitude; more likely to be depressed.
• Avoiding type: Isolates themselves, seeming "cold;" hides a fragile superiority belief.
• Appropriate style of life: Socially useful type, benefiting others.
• Research shows consistent Style of Life from childhood to adulthood.

Early Recollections

• Commonly used to assess people's lifestyles.
• Indicates self-perception, personal strivings, and views of others.
• Fact is not important.
• Present determines the past.
• First memory persists due to repeated contemplation, holding subjective importance with emotional content being paramount.

Family Influence

• Mother is the greatest influence, guiding social interest development.
• Father is the second greatest, providing encouragement to pursue interests.
• Birth order, family size, and sibling gender contribute to individual differences.
• Parents should encourage rather than punish, be firm without dominating, show respect, emphasize cooperation, avoid pampering or neglect, and not struggle for power or show excessive sympathy.

Birth Order Hypotheses

• First-born: Struggles with "dethronement," likely to act antagonistically.
• Second-born: Stimulated to achieve highly through competition, often successful but may isolate.
• Later-born: Often pampered, likely to be "getting type," expecting over-indulgence.
• Only children: Exaggerated self-importance, seeks center of attention.

Birth Order Research

• First-borns: High achievers, self-centered, Type A (if female), anxious (if male).

Adlerian Therapy Stages

• Empathy + relationship: Establish a working relationship.
• Information gathering: Client history, early memories, current functioning.
• Clarification: Client core beliefs about self, others, and life
• Encouragement: Encourage progress towards a new style of life
• Interpretation and recognition: Helping client to reconsider their fictional finalism
• Knowing: Client can monitor their behavior with less input from therapist
• Emotional breakthrough: Old patterns are discarded via imagery/roleplay
• Doing differently: Client behaves differently in life
• Reinforcement: Client begins to pay more attention to others’ needs rather than their own
• Social Interest: Sense of community is established
• Goal redirection: New goal to strive for
• Support and launching: Client strives towards new goal in spirit of social interest

Fictional Finalism

• Relates to the psychology of "As If," guiding goal nature and achievement.
• Guided Self-Ideal: Subjective and personally meaningful for navigating life's obstacles.

Erik Erikson

• Development covers the lifespan, emphasizing the ego and the impact of culture.
• Developmental stages are universal but influenced by culture.

Psychosocial Stages

• Epigenetic Principle: Development unfolds over time, influenced by both physical yearnings (id) and cultural forces.
• Outcome depends on positive-to-negative ratio; positive outcomes yield "virtues."
• Crises emerge when environment demands shift in perspective; adaptive responses lead to "virtues."
• Ritualizations (healthy social traditions/habits) help resolve conflict, while ritualisms (unhealthy habits) do not.

Stage 1: Trust vs. Mistrust (hope)

• Basic trust: dependable others will provide for needs.

Stage 2: Autonomy vs. Shame (willpower)

• Child becomes autonomous through toilet training, ambulation, and interpersonal relationships.

Stage 3: Initiative vs. Guilt (purpose)

• Child develops conscience, more initiative with support.

Stage 4: Industry vs. Inferiority (competence)

• Child learns by producing things; quality leads to industry.

Stage 5: Identity vs. Confusion (fidelity)

• Adolescents answer "Who am I?" through exploration.

Stage 6: Intimacy versus Isolation (love)

• Intimacy: Fusion of identities, distinct from sexual intimacy.

Stage 7: Generativity vs. Stagnation (care)

• Generativity: Interest in guiding the next generation.

Stage 8: Integrity versus Despair (wisdom)

• Integrity: Meaningful life reflection.

Research

• Cross-cultural differences exist in psychosocial stages.
• Male and female identities differ in focus but reach similar development levels.

Erikson

• Contribution: Role of culture, lifelong development, dynamic identity.
• Limitations: Some descriptions are ambiguous.

Erikson vs Freud

• De-emphasized the importance of unconsciousness
• Focused on psychosocial stages
• Decreased role of sexual stages
• “Fixation” does not cause “stagnation,” generally speaking
• But identity must be established for intimacy to occur

Karen Horney

• Challenged psychosexual stages, penis envy, and the Electra complex.
• Personality is driven by interpersonal, not sexual, conflicts.
• Gender differences result from socialization.
• Normal Personality Development: Children develop “basic confidence” in themselves and others.
• When parents convey predictable warmth, interest, respect.

Abnormal Development

• Child feels small, helpless, deserted, endangered.
• Caused by belittling/abusive parents.
• Results in basic anxiety, the root of neurosis.

Basic Anxiety

• Child's feeling of isolation in a hostile world.
• Basic Hostility: Reaction to parental neglect; child cannot act hostile due to fear of punishment.
• Three Interpersonal Orientations: Coping and control means.

Moving Toward (Self-Effacing)

• "Getting type," ingratiating, morbid dependency on a partner, need for love, assuming others are superior.

Moving Against (Expansive)

• "Ruling type," narcissistic, need to be right and for recognition, arrogant.

Moving Away (Detached)

• Resigned, desires freedom, rebel against others' constraints, needs privacy.

Neuroticism

• Healthy people can change stances; neurotic people cannot.
• Neurotic Needs: Exaggerated normal desires—love, power, independence.

Neurotic Needs

• Differ from healthy values in intensity, application, disregard for reality.
• Application to Problems: Jealousy stems from insecurity and unresolved anxiety.
• Tyranny of Shoulds: Generates guilt; part of turning from real self.
• Neurotic Search for Glory: Idealized self-striving, fear of success.

Major Adjustments to Basic Anxiety

• Eclipsing the Conflict: Raising the opposite to predominance—dependency to hostility.
• Detachment: Moving away from others to reduce conflict.
• The Idealized Self: Moving away from real self towards an ideal.
• Externalization (projection): Projects inner conflicts outward.

Secondary Adjustments to Basic Anxiety

• Blind spots : Being unaware of overt behavior that is incompatible with idealized self-image
• Compartmentalization: Incompatible behaviors are recognized, but solely within different arenas

Secondary Adjustments to Basic Anxiety -Minimizing Conflict

• Arbitrary Rightness: Declaring, arbitrarily and dogmatically, that I am right.
• Elusiveness: Do not commit to any opinion.

Therapy

• Therapist provides security, explores relationships and assumptions, and helps form new images.

Gordon Allport

• Psychology should focus on healthy people; emphasis on consciousness.
• Personality: Dynamic organization of psychophysiological systems determining unique adjustments.
• Emphasis on present, not past.
• Traits: Stable, pervasive individual differences, developing from learning, maturation.
• Different from habits or attitudes.

Personal Traits

• Cardinal: Single trait determines behavior.
• Central: Frequently evidenced in behavior.
• Secondary: Very specific

Methods of Inferring Traits

• Language (dictionary), behavior, personal documents.
• Questionnaires: Allport-Vernon-Lindzey Study of Values.

Letters from Jenny

• Idiographic research, revealing basic traits: quarrelsome, self-centered, independent, aggressive.

Stage Theory

• Bodily sense (infancy)
• Self-identity
• Ego enhancement
• Ego Extension
• Self-image
• Rational agent
• Propriate striving
• The knower (adulthood).

Qualities of a Normal, Mature Adult

• Extensions of the Sense of Self: Having many interests can "lose" oneself in contemplation, recreation, and loyalty.
• Warm Human Interaction: Sincere and friendly.
• Emotional Security: Accepting self with high self-esteem.
• Realistic Perception, Skills, and Assignments: Avoids optimism or pessimism.
• Self-Objectification: Insight and humor; sees self accurately.
• Unifying Philosophy of Life: Harmonizes individual and societal demands.

Unitas Multiplex

• Integrates diverse personality elements: interests, traits, biological predispositions.

Trait Development

• Traits eventually function on their own due to functional autonomy

Personality Consistency

• Proprium: Sense of self, uniting attitudes, perceptions, intentions.
• Pursuing future goals leads to consistent behavior.

Raymond Cattell

• Personality: Predicts what a person does in a given situation.
• Traits: Personality units with predictive value.

Factor Analysis

• Procedure for analyzing correlations among measures into a simpler pattern.

Data Types

• Q-data: Questionnaire.
• L-data: Behavioral observation.
• T-data: Lab tests.

Data Analysis

• R-technique: Hundreds of people take questionnaires and then F.A the data
• dR-technique: Same as R, but people take the test twice to assess change. See how changes relate to one another
• P-technique: One person over and over; used to study STATES (temporary personality traits), not TRAITS

Types of Traits

• Surface trait: Level of observable behavior.
• Source trait: Primary factor from factor analyses.
• Ability, temperament, and dynamic traits (motives, interests).

Intelligence

• Fluid (innate learning)
• Crystallized (effects of opportunity/education).

Dynamic Traits

• Ergs (constitutional instincts).

Metaergs

• Environmentally moulded.
• Sentiments (e.g., religion).
• Attitudes (e.g., value of Mother's Day).
• Subsidiation: Basic drives met by multi-step sequences.

Cattell's 16 PF

• Measures major source traits, rated dimensionally.

The Big 5

• Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, emotional stability.

Heritability

• Each has significant genetic component.