Psychology of Self-Concept and Success

Striving for Superiority vs. Success

• Striving for superiority is focused on personal benefit, lacks concern for others, and is psychologically unhealthy.
• Striving for success is focused on benefiting humanity, maintains one's identity, and is psychologically healthy.

Style of Life

• Refers to the flavor of a person's life, including personal goals, self-concept, feelings for others, and attitude towards the world.
• Shaped by heredity, environment, and a person's creative power.
• Adler's three major problems of life: neighborly love, sexual love, and occupation, which can be solved through cooperation and personal encouragement.

Creative Power

• Makes each person a free individual, with control, responsibility, and determination in striving for their goal.
• Contributes to the development of social interest.
• Implication of movement shapes one's style of life.

Maladjustment

• Underdeveloped social interest is the underlying factor in all types of maladjustments.
• Maladjusted people set extravagant goals as an overcompensation for exaggerated feelings of inferiority.
• Private meaning: people who find everyday living as hard work, requiring great effort.

External Factors of Maladjustment

• Exaggerated physical deficiencies: congenital or result of injury or disease, accompanied by accentuated feelings of inferiority.
• Pampered style of life: characterized by extreme discouragement, indecisiveness, oversensitivity, impatience, and exaggerated emotions.
• Neglected style of life: children who feel unloved and unwanted, often abused or mistreated.

Safeguarding Techniques

• Patterns of behavior created to protect the exaggerated sense of self-esteem against public disgrace.
• Enables people to hide their inflated self-image to maintain their current style of life.

Freud's Defense Mechanisms vs. Adler's

• Freud's defense mechanisms are mostly unconscious, while Adler's are largely conscious to protect one's fragile self-esteem.

Safeguarding Techniques (continued)

• Excuses: "yes, but" and "if only" to protect one's weak but artificially inflated sense of worth.
• Aggression: depreciation, accusation, and self-accusation to safeguard the exaggerated sense of superiority.
• Withdrawal: moving backwards, standing still, hesitating, and constructing obstacles to avoid difficulties.

Masculine Protest

• The importance of being manly.

Family Constellation (Birth Order)

• Firstborn: likely to have intensified feelings of power and superiority, high anxiety, and overprotective tendencies.
• Second child: shaped by their perception of the older child's attitude towards them.
• Youngest child: most pampered, running a high risk of being problem children.
• Only child: in a unique position of competing with parents, leading to an exaggerated sense of superiority and inflated self-concept.

Early Recollections

• Recalled memories yield clues in understanding a person's style of life.
• Consistent with the style of life and subjective accounts of experiences.

Dreams

• Cannot foretell the future, but provide clues for solving future problems.
• Most dreams are self-deceptions and cannot be easily understood by the dreamer.
• Disguised to deceive the dreamer, making self-interpretation difficult.

Adlerian Psychotherapy

• Chief goal is to encourage, lessen feelings of inferiority, and encourage social interest.
• Uses humor and warmth to increase the patient's courage, self-esteem, and social interest.

Carl Jung

• Founder of analytical psychology, focusing on the unconscious mind and individual's desire to be whole.

Archetypes

• Ancient or archaic images derived from the collective unconscious.
• Collective unconscious is related to instinctive traits.
• Distinguished by an instinct.

Progression and Regression

• Progression is the forward flow of psychic energy to the outside world.
• Regression is the adaptation to the inner world, relying on a backward flow of psychic energy.

Attitude and Moral Standpoint

• A predisposition to act or react in a characteristic direction.
• Moral standpoint: a person's overall behavior and attitude.

Personality

• Overall behavior and attitude.
• Introversion and extraversion:
  • Introversion: subjective, biases, fantasies, dreams, and individualized perceptions.
  • Extraversion: objective, surrounding environment.

Functions

• Both introversion and extraversion can combine with any one or more functions, forming eight functions or types.
• Rational functions: thinking and feeling.
  • Thinking: logical intellectual activity that produces a chain of ideas.
  • Feeling: the process of evaluating an idea or an event, valuing, sensing function.

This quiz explores the differences between individuals who strive for superiority and those who strive for success, and how it relates to their psychology, self-concept, and attitude towards others.