Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation: A Contribution to Clinical Medicine

Alfred Adler

01/1917 · Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company

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At the beginning of the twentieth century Alfred Adler (1870- 1937) investigated the influence of physical inferiority on the development of normal and pathologic mental trends, joining in 1902 the group gathered around Freud. As early as 1907, however, his studies on organ inferiority resulted in conclusions that were irreconcilable with Freud's theories. Circa 1912 he separated from Freud and founded his own school of Individual Psychology. What Adler called "organ inferiority" is a condition that might occur as a familial tendency or as a situation in one individual. When the tendency was familial in nature one might find that a whole series of members suffered from a disorder that tended to attack one organ, and when organ inferiority is an individual tendency a disease would be liable to localize in the inferior organ since it is a common experience to find that inferior organs fail first in their functions when the organism is infected or under a particular stress. To Adler the inferiority represented a defect in the material available for the construction of a normal well balanced personality pattern, and it became a point of crystallization for the mental superstructure of compensation and hypercompensation; moreover, this organ inferiority tends to increase the feeling of inferiority experienced by every child resulting in an intensification of the striving towards an often unattainable goal. In the course of this striving the personality may become distorted and exhibit the traits of a "neurosis" or of a character disorder. This whole concept later became known popularly as the "inferiority complex" and was extended to include psychical deficiencies the personality reaction to which was often one of overcorrection of the original disorder. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved).