I Am Inferior, So What?

Feelings of inferiority are part of human nature. But be careful! Don’t let them become a complex.

Feelings of inferiority are part of normal experience. There are several aspects of human nature that determine your sense of inferiority to other living beings: your relative physical weakness compared to that of animals of similar size, and your long — and sometimes helpless — childhood.

Feelings of inferiority are part of the experience of individuals and almost all people, whether they recognize it or not, end up conforming to their limitations.

The correct method of readjusting these feelings of inferiority is called compensation, and the inability to readjust produces what is called an “inferiority complex.” The path of life is long and can be twisted, and at any point in it psychological maturity can be traumatized, turning inferiority into a complex.

It was Alfred Adler, a Viennese doctor and colleague of Freud, who studied the inferiority complex in depth at the beginning of the 20th century. Adler found in 1912 that his ideas were different from those of his colleague Freud and called his system “individual psychology”.

Adler believed in compensation. For example, he thought that in the psychic sphere the same thing could happen as in the case of the kidneys: when one of them falls ill, the other kidney increases its function to keep the body healthy.

Demosthenes stuttered as a child and this seemed to have motivated him to become a great speaker. Therefore, Adler considered that the key to understanding the mode of operation of the mind lay in the impulse of power or will to dominate present in all individuals and he affirmed that it was the driving force of man’s attempt to achieve the “objective of his life”, the idea of ​​superiority, of social significance and of raising the self-esteem of the individual.

The relationship between a person’s feelings of inferiority and his drive for power sometimes leads him to a life goal, perhaps related to his own inferiority. But when the individual feels that he is too weak to achieve what he sets out to do, then an inferiority complex takes hold.

Inferiority feelings are influenced by the child’s relationship with his parents, the relationships between his parents and the instability or stability that derive from this relationship, that is, the way in which the child is or has been treated: punitively and rigidly, belittling him when he is at an age when everything his parents say is an irrefutable truth within him.

According to Adler, each child develops a special strategy to deal with family situations that represent an obstacle for him. He adopts certain attitudes — or what Adler calls a lifestyle — on which his character will be based when he becomes an adult. In other words, for a child, feelings of inferiority are normal features of existence.

There are three types of possible reactions: the normal or compensation, the extranormal or supercompensation and the abnormal or unconscious inferiority complex.

Adler believed that in neurosis, the individual who feels incapable of achieving a higher goal, develops his symptoms to escape competition or to achieve dominance over others through a kind of emotional extortion. For the child who is clumsy in sports, the abnormal or neurotic reaction is to develop an illness in order to feel justified before himself and before his group.

When the child enters adolescence, he observes himself and compares himself in everything with his peers. This is a difficult stage in which he is neither a child nor an adult, he feels confused, his feelings and impressions about things and people are not clear and he tends to be influenced by what the group thinks.

In the normal reaction, most of the guests have already made adjustments and found compensation for their inferiority when they reach adulthood.

However, the resolution of an inferiority complex does not occur automatically, and its unconscious nature often means that the individual cannot see it for himself. The imbalance can only be resolved by the individual himself, if he is aware of it and then has the ability to reject and control his feelings and reactions.