Timmy Renz F.

Savillaga
Bs-Psych 1A

Alfred Adler Inferiority Theory Outline

A. Striving for Success of Superiority

1. The Final Goal
- Final goal is a work of fiction with no real-world counterpart.
- Goal is neither genetically nor environmentally determined.
- Each person has the power to create personalized goal.

2. The Striving Force as Compensation

- People strive for superiority or success as a means of compensation for feeling
of inferiority or weakness.
- The desire to achieve supremacy is natural, but it’s type and direction are
determined by feeling of inferiority and the desire to achieve superiority.
- The goal is then set to compensate for the deficit feeling, but the deficit
feeling would not arise unless a child had a basic tendency toward completion in the
first place.

3.Striving for Personal Superiority

- Some people strive for superiority with little or no concern for others at all.
- The goals are personal ones.
- Their striving is largely motivated by excessive feeling of inferiority o personal
inferiority.

4. Striving for Success

- Psychologically healthy people who are motivated by social interest and the
success of all humankind.
- Social progress is more important to them than personal credit.
B. Subjection Perceptions
1. Fictionalism
- Adler’s is a teleological.
- Fiction are ideas that have no real existence yet the influence people as if
they really existed.
2. Physical Inferiority
 - Some people compensate for these feeling of inferiority by moving towards
psychological health and a useful style of life.
C. Unity and Self-Consistency of Personality
1. Organ Dialect
- The organ that isn’t working properly express the person goal.
- A disruption in one portion of the body cannot be considered in isolation it
has an impact on the whole person.
2. Conscious and Unconscious
- The unconscious mind represses whatever the conscious mind wishes to
keep hidden from awareness.
- The conscious life becomes unconscious as soon as we fail to understand it
and as soon as we understand an unconscious tendency it has already become
conscious.
D. Social Interest
1. Origins of Social Interest
- Every person who has survived infancy was kept alive by a mothering or
infancy.
- Adler believed that the effects of the early social environment are
extremely important.
2. Importance of Social Interest
- Measure of psychological health and maturity.
- Adler believed that the worth of all such acts can only be judged against
the criterion of social interest.
E. Style of Life
- Adler refer to the flavor of a person’s life. It includes a person’s goal, self-
concept, feelings for others, and attitude toward the world.
- Adler believed that a style of life is established on childhood.
F. Creative Power
- Their creative power places them in control of their own lives, is
responsible for their final goal, determines their method of striving for the goal, and
contributes to the development of social interest.
- Creative power is a dynamic concept implying movement, and this
movement is the most salient characteristics of life.
G. Abnormal Development
1. General Description
- People set extravagant goals as an overcompensation for exaggerated
feelings of inferiority.
- The world is not focus with that of other individuals and they possess what
Adler called “private meaning”.
 2. External Factors in Maladjusted
- Adler recognized three contributing factors, any one of which is sufficient
to contribute to abnormality.
I. Exaggerated Physical Deficiencies
- Must be accompanied by accentuated feelings of inferiority.
- People develop exaggerated feelings of inferiority because they
overcompensate for their inadequacy.
II. Pampered Style of Life
- Extreme discouragement, indecisiveness, oversensitivity,
impatience and exaggerated emotion, especially anxiety.
- Pampered Children have not received too much love, rather
, they feel unloved.
III. Neglected Style of Life
- Children who feel unloved and unwanted are likely to borrow
heavily from these feelings in creating a neglected style of life.
- Neglected children have many of the characteristics of
pampered one’s but generally the are more suspicious and
more likely to be dangerous to others.
H. Safeguarding Tendencies
- Excuses, aggression, and withdrawal are three common safeguarding.
I. Excuses
- People first state what they claim they would like to do
something that sounds good to others then they follow with
an excuse.
- These excuses protect a weak but artificially inflated sense of
self-worth and deceive people into believing that they are
more superior than they really are.
II. Aggression
- People use aggression to safeguarding their exaggerated
superiority complex.
- Self-accusation is marked by self-torture and guilt.
- People devalue themselves in order to inflict sufferings
on others with protecting their own magnified feelings of
self-esteem.
- Deprecation is the tendency to undervalue other people
achievement and to overvalue one’s own.
- Accusation an aggressive is the tendency to blame others for
one’s failures and to seek revenge, thereby safeguarding
one’s own tenuous self-esteem.
 III. Withdrawal
- People who stand still do not move in any direction, thus,
they avoid all responsibility by ensuring themselves against
any treat or failure.
- The obstacle, they protect their self-esteem and their
prestige. If the fail to hurdle the barrier, they can always
resort to an excuse.
I. Masculine Protest
1. Origins of the Masculine Protest
- Both men and women place an inferior value on being a woman.
- Each of these modes of adjustment result from cultural psychic
difference between the two genders.
2. Adler, Freud and the Masculine Protest
- Freud believed that anatomy is destiny and that he regarded
woman as the dark continent for psychology.
- According to Adler, these attitude towards women would be
existence of a person with a strong masculine.

References
Feist, J. & Feist G. (2009). Theories of Personality 7 th edition. McGraw-Hill Primis.