Perceived inferiority in one domain drives compensating striving, sometimes to socially productive and sometimes to destructive ends.
Demosthenes was said to have overcome a stammer to become Athens's greatest orator. Adler's point cuts both ways: the same mechanism produces both the achievement and the resentment that seeks domination.
In practice
- A manager who was passed over twice becomes the department's most rigorous defender of promotion criteria, and its most exacting reviewer of everyone else's.
- A person who felt slow at school builds a career on preparation, arriving at every meeting with the material read twice.
- Standing
- Adler here is Alfred Adler the psychologist, distinct from Mike Alder of Alder's razor.
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Theories of the mind, from the lab to the bookshop