Have You an Inferiority Complex?
School Boy Suicides and Business Failures Have Lost Their Fight Against This Sense, Says Dr. Adler, Dut [sic] Deaf Beethoven and Dumpy Napoleon Were Winners
By EDNA BRAND MANN
WHAT is an inferiority complex? What causes it? How does it show itself? And how can we cure it?
People have been asking these questions for years, and we have had all sorts of answers—some sublime, many ridiculous.
At last we can get an answer backed by the authority of the one man who knows, because he discovered the inferiority complex some twenty years ago and has been figuring it out ever since.
Dr. Alfred Adler of Vienna, docent of the Institute of Pedagogy, inspirer of twenty-two child guidance clinics, founder of his own school of individual psychology, popularly known as the father of the inferiority complex, is here in America to tell us about it.
"To begin with," he says, "every one of us has inferiority feelings. As babies we are all so weak, so dependent upon others, that we naturally feel inferior and insecure. There is nothing to be done about that, nothing to be ashamed of.
"But, unless our environment is right, the inferiority feelings will not take their normal place in our development. They will instead turn into an inferiority complex.
"An inferiority complex is likely to show itself in one or all of three general ways—in our work, our social life and our sex life."
The man who is afraid he will not succeed in his job may develop imaginary ailments which save him from the test. He may, as Dr. Adler's cases did, for instance, develop what is known as a compulsion-neurosis—a compulsion to put his shoes on and take them off again and again until most of the day was gone.
The underlying reason for this strange behavior was his unconscious desire to establish an alibi, an excuse for not going to the job he felt unable to master.
"How does this type of behavior show itself in everyday life?"
"Where shall I begin? Laziness may be a cloak for an inner feeling of inferiority. There is less social stigma attached to laziness than to stupidity. So children and adults act lazy lest they prove incompetent.
"The snob is often practicing 'social camouflage' for an inner insecurity. He fears secretly that he will not be a social success or that he will be discovered to be less than his ideal of himself.
"The more he limits his circle the greater his chance to win the recognition and praise he craves.
"The bully, too, seeks a cheap way of putting himself across. He is compensating for his brand of inferiority complex which involves lack of normal courage in fair fight.
"The person who is always busy criticising others—his wife, his friends, his children, politics, business—is more than likely trying to balance off his own inner lacks.
"Many a professional reformer is simply compensating for his own inner feeling of deficiency. The more he degrades others the higher he raises his own esteem.
"Most interesting, perhaps, are the compensations along sex lines. The great lover is no great lover at all. He is a cowardly, inferior lover. One flirtation after another is a defense against having just one love, with the responsibility and vital adjustments it involves.
"The Don Juans among men and the light-o'-loves among women are afraid of marriage.
"The bachelor scholar working from early morning till early morning, the man who is 'married to his business' (a popular expression which Adler proves is quite accurate), the girl or man whose courtships end often and always in broken engagements, the lover who, having lost his chosen one goes through life unwed and mourning—all betoken compensations, alibis, a sign that an inferiority complex has taken the place of normal courage."
"What causes an inferiority complex?" I asked eagerly, reckoning how at last I knew the little secret of most of my friends, acquaintances and self.
"We find it in three classes of individuals. It results from bad training, as, for example, in the case of the petted child and the hated child or organ inferiority (bad physique), as in the case of poor vision, cross-eyes, deafness, ugliness, short stature and the like."
Anything adding to the child's normal inferiority feelings, it seems, may weight them into an inferiority complex.
To illustrate the first type, the petted child, Dr. Adler told of a bright and attractive young man who became engaged to be married time and again but could never see it through because in essence he was afraid. In addition, he was poorly adjusted to his work and his social life.
Dr. Adler's study of the case revealed that as a child he had been petted and coddled to excess. It was the fault of the parents that now, when the time came, he could not be quite a man. He had been shielded from the struggles which teach courage and self-reliance. Never having tried out his own wings he knew no self-confidence. Quite the contrary, he felt overwhelmed in every new situation and came as a patient to Dr. Adler because his whole life was dominated by a sense of insecurity and inferiority.
"These spoiled children," Dr. Adler continued, "grow up looking only for spoiling. When they came to a situation where they are not spoiled they feel persecuted and hated and develop the characteristics of a man in an enemy country.
"It is interesting to watch how the coddled child reacts. His goal is to keep all attention on himself. He is untidy to keep his mother near him picking up his things.
"He fusses about his eating and sleeping. He is overanxious, and when he goes to school or later to work or later to marry this excessive anxiety carries over and we have the typical neurotic.
"The hated child is as badly off. Overharshness, repression, neglect can engender such deep inferiority feelings that the individual is driven to compensate at the other extreme with a violent, egoistic assumption of authority.
"This is the behavior pattern of many bandits, thugs, hold-up men who are seeking a pseudo-superiority, a role of bold heroism to compensate for their inner inferiority."
"What is your opinion about our recent suicide wave?" I asked at this point.
"Suicide," he explained, "is the response of such a child unprepared for the difficulties of life. It is no different from the disease we call neurosis, except that always in the suicide there is the element of spite against a contra-player—relatives, partner in life, teacher, etc.
"The reason the suicides usually occur early in college or late in high school is that at this time the child comes under the fire of enemy guns and must make his adjustment courageously for himself.
"But for this the petted child, for instance, has never been prepared.
"The most important years in development," Dr. Adler emphasized his words with long, hard pulls on his cigar, "are the first four or five, and the strongest force is the mother. If she is to guide her child past the pitfall of an inferiority complex she must be neither too soft nor too hard. She must first be loving and trustworthy and win the child to rely on her. She must then lead him to rely on himself, to make other friends, to learn courage and independence, and develop social feeling and interest."
The third producer of inferiority complexes is the one which Adler noticed first and which first made the world notice Adler.
Organ inferiority he called it. His book, "Organ Inferiority and Its Psychic Compensation," published in 1907, is devoted to this one aspect of the problem.
Any physical weakness or peculiarity means an extra burden of inferiority feelings and an extra urge to compensate, to strive for some sort of superiority.
"But the interesting point," Dr. Adler explained, "is that the compensation may be real or fictitious, useful or useless. Take the organ inferiority of stature. A short man may walk with an important swagger, talk in a loud, booming voice, wear a [¿huge?] tie, use big words, adopt a big, flowing handwriting, become a braggart or a bully.
"He is compensating for his unimportant looking size in what I call useless ways.
"Or he may become a Napoleon. The greatest men in history were often little men," Dr. Adler went on in his matter-of-fact tone. "There were Caesar, Napoleon, Prince Eugene, the great German warrior against the Turks."
"Who else?" I asked, trying not to smile—Adler, too, is a little man.
"I can't say because I can't speak about things I don't know very surely, but one of my pupils in Amsterdam, Van Raalte, is compiling a book on the subject and has collected many examples of great men in history who were little.
"But it is the same with other organic inferiorities. Do you know how many painters have poor vision? In the schools for painting nearly everybody has imperfect eyes. Whistler had poor eyes. So did El Greco, Menzel, Lenbach and many others. Whistler was said to be color blind (to green and red) so he became a master in nuances.
"This is useful compensation.
"Imaginative poets are often compensating for poor vision. They look in because they can't look out. Milton was an albino and later became blind.
"Musicians, the chances are, have little hearing defects. Beethoven was deaf.
"Dvorak, Mozart, Smetana, Robert, Franz had lacks in hearing.
"Even bad digestions have their compensations, useless and useful. Often the greatest chefs were children with poor stomachs.
"They sought superiority in the line of their weakness; a greater interest in food and a supernormal sense of taste resulted.
"But the food crank is making a useless compensation. 'I am not the usual man. I do not eat bacon,'" Dr. Adler quotes one of this type.
"He rules his home, the restaurant, his hostesses and visitors by capitalizing his poor stomach. It is the weapon by which he secures a sense of superiority."
"Can you cure an inferiority complex when a man is, say, as old as thirty?" I asked.
"At seventy!"
Which is no small comfort, either, considering the number of us who harbor a secret fear that we are stupid or shamefully inferior in one way or another.
What first suggested this universal sore spot to Adler? How did he come to discover the inferiority complex? How did the idea grow up with him and how did he grow with it?
Let him tell it.
"When I was four years old; that is, some fifty years ago, I heard the doctor say to my parents: 'Your son is lost,' and lying in my bed I knew what he meant, for my brother had died shortly before from the same sickness. I knew then and I never forget just what happens inside you when you feel afraid, weak, insecure."
Too weak to focus on anything but his own weakness, he looked into it, at it, through it, around it and emerged with a concept of inferiority feelings which he was to hold and develop for the rest of his life.
"I decided then to become a doctor. This decision when I was four years old expressed my tendency to overcome death. Simply that.
"It grew out of my inferiority feelings, my sense of insecurity. It was my compensation."
"A useful compensation," I ventured.
"A useful compensation. That I hope."
He spoke with such earnestness that I regretted my light tone.
"My friends tell me today," Adler contined, "'What you say now you said as a boy.' Early in life I said, 'A good doctor must also be an educator,' and my first published articles repeat that theme. I early saw the importance of courage for mental and physical health.
"I am most grateful to my boyhood experience on the streets of Vienna for knowledge which was later of great value. At that time I laid my foundation for the understanding of human nature and learned to value courage highly."
Later he became a general practitioner and a good one, adding always to his store of practical knowledge about every day people.
Psychiatry early fascinated him. He studied under the greatest professors at the University of Vienna and is today more famous than any of them. It is interesting to know that he was never psychoanalyzed and does not believe in Freudian psychoanalysis.
Not until 1900 did his course touch that of Sigmund Freud, who was at that time formulating and explaining his theories of the subconscious mind, which have since made him famous—or in some quarters infamous.
Adler was one of the first to recognize Freud's greatness and originality. When hisses and jeers were the response of the majority in the medical profession young Adler published his appreciation of Freud's new and living approach to mental problems.
Freud was so much pleased that he invited Adler to join his special discussion group on the problems of the neurosis.
"But," says Adler, "when I later saw that the discussion group was becoming a Freud club I resigned. I recognized Freud's greatness, but I disagreed entirely with his looking at everything from a sexual angle."
Very soon Adler founded his own school of individual psychology. Not the sex instinct, but the ego impulse, the will to power, is considered by him to be the basic determiner of our conduct.
How this works in normal and neurotic cases he sets forth in "Individual Psychology" (translated in English), "The Neurotic Constitution" and other original volumes, any one of which is enough to make his name famous. He is also founder and editor of "The International Journal of Individual Psychology," published for the last five years in English, French and German.
Yet there is nothing of the professor or learned doctor about the man. Sturdy, stocky, forthright, suave—so simple, warm and friendly that I felt like brushing from his lapel the cigar ashes which kept dropping as he smoked and talked.
It is easy to see how the most inhibited of his patients must thaw before him.
Adler gives the immediate impression of being great and not knowing it. Maybe that is why his American pupil, Dr. Walter Wolfe, says of him: "He is a regular fellow, a thoroughly genial genius," and this after a year of close daily contact with him in Vienna.
Dr. Wolfe also told me that Adler's children are nearly as interesting as their father ought to be. The youngest girl, a beauty with red hair, is an actress at seventeen, already established in one of the finest theaters in Vienna. The two older girls are doctors of psychiatry and sociology and the boy is an engineer.
The interview which Dr. Adler had granted me was for 9 a. m. in his rooms at a hotel in New York City. What is it we hear of the Viennese reputation for playing late and sleeping late?
Adler had been up since six, busy with work, and on the floor rows of sprawling camp chairs told of a lecture class the night before.
"Excuse the untidiness of my rooms," he apologized, "my chambermaid is not so industrious as I am."
At the end of his generously long interview he spoke hurriedly of what is closest to his heart, the child-guidance clinics which he and his disciples have founded in Vienna, Germany and Holland. They are unique in that these clinics are in direct connection with the schools, and in them the teachers and parents are trained to recognize and treat problem children before they have a chance to become problem adults.
"I train the teachers and parents so that I am superfluous after a short time," he concluded, satisfied to the hilt at the prospect of becoming superfluous.
And if that isn't the sign of a great man, what is?
Fuente: Oakland Tribune (Oakland, California), domingo 10 de julio de 1927, pág. 5 del suplemento dominical; entrevista sindicada de Edna Brand Mann. Transcripción hecha sobre la imagen de la página en la California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC, OT19270710.1.9), con ayuda del OCR de la plataforma, que mezcla la pieza con otras de la página (un poema de Edgar A. Guest, la columna «The Lantern» y el artículo «Nicaragua's Heroic Villain»), omitidas aquí. Se respetan las erratas del periódico («Dut» por «But» en el subtítulo; «contined»; «Dr. Albert Adler» en el pie de foto); se corrige en silencio la «c» rota de «basic». Los comentarios p. n del código marcan la página impresa.