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Alfred Adler saw striving for superiority as fundamental to human nature. He saw it as an overarching master motive (Ansbacher and Ansbacher 1964) and a “governing dynamic force as one of striving from inferiority to superiority” (Ansbacher and Ansbacher 1956, p. 101). It has been said that the related concept of the “inferiority complex” is potentially Adler’s most significant contribution to psychology and the contribution that he is most famous for (Bottome 1947). Adler himself acknowledged it as “one of the most important discoveries of Individual Psychology” (Adler 1932, p. 49), although he expressed doubts that the concept was widely understood by psychologists. He defined the inferiority complex as something that “appears before a problem...
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References
Adler, A. (1928). Understanding human nature. London: Allen & Unwin.
Adler, A. (1929). The science of living. New York: Garden City Publishing Company.
Adler, A. (1932). What life should mean to you. London: Allen and Unwin.
Ansbacher, H. L., & Ansbacher, R. R. (Eds.). (1956). The individual psychology of Alfred Adler. New York: Harper and Row.
Ansbacher, H. L., & Ansbacher, R. R. (Eds.). (1964). Superiority and social interest: A collection of later writings. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Bottome, P. (1947). Alfred Adler: Apostle of freedom. London: Faber and Faber.
Dixon, P. N., & Strano, D. A. (2006). The measurement of inferiority: A review and directions for scale development. In S. Slavik & J. Carlson (Eds.), Readings in the theory of individual psychology (pp. 365–373). New York: Routledge.
Heidbreder, E. F. (1927). The normal inferiority complex. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 22, 243–258.
Milliren, A., Clemmer, F., Wingett, W., & Testerment, T. (2006). The movement from “felt minus” to “perceived plus”: Understanding Adler’s concept of inferiority. In S. Slavik & J. Carlson (Eds.), Readings in the theory of individual psychology (pp. 351–363). New York: Routledge.
Watts, R. (2011). On the origin of the striving for superiority and of social interest (1933). In J. Carlson & M. P. Maniacci (Eds.), Alfred Adler revisited, (pp. 41–47). New York:Taylor & Francis.
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Alba, B. (2017). Striving for Superiority. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1428-1
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