Adler Flashcards
Alfred Adler and Karen Horney share one thing in common: compensation theory. What does this theory entail?
Revolves around an unfortunate incident that occurred to you in childhood, and you spend the rest of your life trying to compensate for it. That compensation then defines your personality.
What did Adler call his field of psychology?
Individual psychology
What is Adler’s core tendency?
Striving for superiority
True or false: Adler was an ego psychologist.
True. He believed that the ego had energy for its own, not for the id.
What did Adler say about striving for superiority?
He believed that striving to go upwards was a good thing, but in some people the term is misunderstood. While most people want to self-improve, others want to use superiority as a way to make themselves feel more powerful than others.
Where does this “strive” come from?
Some sort of event that occurred in childhood that triggered the strive for superiority
What is “masculine protest”?
A distortion of striving for superiority; people who exhibit this are compensating for an inner feeling of inferiority
What is Adler’s core structure?
Feelings of inferiority
What are the different types of feelings of inferiority?
Organ inferiority
Social inferiority
Psychological inferiority
Universal inferiority
What is organ inferiority?
Physically insecure
What is social inferiority?
Socially insecure
What is psychological inferiority?
Intellectually/emotionally insecure
What is universal inferiority?
An inferiority we all share; at one point, we depended on someone for nurturance, the memory of being helpless
Adler believed that we all recognized our feelings of inferiority at ___ years old, and (for the rest of our lives) we try to compensate for them.
Five
True or false: Any behaviors we adopt to compensate for our inferiority make up our personality.
True