--- Title: The Feeling of Inferiority and its Compensation Description: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 3 (1927), April issue, pp. 254-256. Paper read before the Section of Neurology and Psychiatry of the New York Academy of Medicine, January 11, 1927. Author: Alfred Adler URL: https://adler.school/archivo/adler/original/1927-04%20The%20Feeling%20of%20Inferiority%20and%20its%20Compensation --- *Section of Neurology and Psychiatry, January 11, 1927* # THE FEELING OF INFERIORITY AND ITS COMPENSATION ALFRED ADLER Vienna "The Feeling of Inferiority" is the most important view and the legitimate child of the Adlerian Individual Psychology. It means a lasting fundamental feeling which originated in early childhood when the child had a weak body and experienced difficult situations. The more painful were those experiences the greater was the feeling of inferiority. This fundamental feeling acts as a stimulus to overcome the present situation and its difficulties. In this striving to overcome, in its every plane, there is lying an ideal goal of the future. In this goal is foreseen and anticipated as a stimulating and consoling presentiment a feeling of balance, security, totality, and, especially in the frequent cases where there is a more urgent and greater feeling of inferiority, an aim of superiority. Along this action line leading from "down" to "above" you can find connected with and impressed by it every expression, symptom, feeling, understanding and thinking. When the feeling of inferiority is increased and the goal is much more elevated and urging, the whole style of life is a varied one, striking, expressive, impatient, egotistic, sensitive, cautious, hesitating or escaping. Each new situation brings new difficulties because the preparation for the usual new situations in life is too tense, precipitate, or wrong. New situations for which there is demanded a well-developed social feeling are especially felt as a danger to the goal of superiority. In life you can find three fundamental questions: the social question (friendship, comradeship, truth, social behavior, etc.), the question of occupation, and the question of love and marriage. Everybody gives his individual answer to these questions by his behavior, and this answer is also an expression of his action line or his style of life. Therefore we may draw conclusions from the answers to the style of life and we can insist that all false answers are the results of a greater feeling of inferiority (neurosis, problem children, crimes, etc.). In all those cases we judge a movement as to whether it is on the useful side connected with the social feeling, or on the useless side. Thus sometimes a greater feeling of inferiority can stimulate the individual to the accomplishment of great things in science, art, etc., if courage is not lost. The neurosis begins before a difficult problem and causes a loss of courage, so that the individual begins to hesitate or stop. In spite of wanting to solve his problem and satisfy his desire to be a conqueror, he fears a defeat even more and escapes to the useless side, fixing and securing his escape by being always preoccupied with the means (headache, anxiety, sleeplessness, fits, depression, compulsion neurosis, etc.). In this phase he is not really the conqueror, but he is satisfied with the presupposition and the presentiment that he could be the conqueror if he did not have such a fatal hindrance. He hides from himself and others his real feeling of inferiority, decreases the circle of the action line of his life, and is continually striving to be the center of his family with extenuating circumstances for his lack of achievement. With this strong network is it difficult to mistake a style of life? We can reckon with the reasons: wrong situations in childhood, the goal of superiority, whether the movement is on the useful or useless side, the degree of courage he possesses, and every expression. We are not surprised, therefore, to be informed that a noted psychologist has called Individual Psychology the copernicle deed in pedagogy. --- *Fuente:* *Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine* 3 (1927), págs. 254-256, en la sección «Section of Neurology and Psychiatry, January 11, 1927». Transcripción hecha sobre las imágenes de página de PubMed Central (bullnyacadmed00915), con ayuda de un OCR propio, y cotejada íntegramente con las imágenes. «Copernicle», así en el impreso.