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When Alfred Adler departed from the teachings of the Freudian school to develop what he termed individual psychology, he made a particular contribution through the study of the inferiority complex. In developing and stressing the importance of this inferiority complex he was contributing to psychology nothing intrinsically new, but rather setting up a new perspective for the analysis of human behavior. In making use of these psychological theories for the study of social phenomena or pluralistic behavior, the present paper is nothing more ambitious than an attempt to gain a slightly different slant upon some old and well-known reactions and institutions.
In a lecture recently Dr. Giddings stated that “the ultimate function of society is to make the individual man more of a man, more adequate in every way.” This is just what the individual possessed of an inferiority complex is striving to do, to make himself more of a man, to secure the maximation of his ego-consciousness. The man feeling himself incomplete or inferior in any fashion seeks compensation in ways which may be socially valuable or socially harmful. In this, the wise direction of compensatory effort, may well lie a hint for the sociologist who anticipates the telic control of the social process.
Janet speaks of the “sentiment d'incompletude,” Adler refers to the “männlichen Protest,” while Nietzsche's “will to power” and “will to seem” anticipated in a sense the new psychology. It is Adler who has particularly pursued this line of investigation, and of all the contributions of psychoanalysis to a fuller understanding of society there is probably none which the sociologist will find more fruitful than the Adlerian attack.
Adler considers the basis of the feeling of inferiority, “minder-wertigkeit,” to lie in the biologically familiar phenomenon of organic inferiority with the accompanying compensation of other organs or of higher nerve centers. Lombroso has held genius to be an over-compensation for an infer