Striving for superiority and the superiority complex (Adler)
Adler's master motive: everyone strives from a felt minus to a felt plus, toward a private goal of completeness. It is healthy when aimed at contribution. The superiority complex is when the goal is personal dominance and the striving covers an inferiority that was never faced.
What drives it
The complex converts the pain of feeling small into a display of being big. Adler's tip for reading people: work out the goal. Behaviour makes sense once you know what the person is trying to rise above.
How it shows
Work
Has to be the cleverest in the room; corrects small errors in front of seniors; name-drops and ranks. Quieter versions: superiority through suffering, moral purity, or being the busiest person in the building. The healthy form is a drive to master the problem that leaves others better off.
Relationships
Competes with the partner and can't let them shine; disparages their taste or intelligence and calls it honesty; needs the last word.
Self
The quick ranking you run when you walk into a room, and the relief when you come out on top.
What tells it apart
Grandiose narcissism: Grandiose narcissism is a stable trait that looks the same everywhere; Adler's complex is a compensation, and the inferiority usually shows in one domain (money, education, body, family) or with one person who deflates them.
Status motive: The status motive can be pursued warmly and lets others rise too; the superiority complex needs others below and shows contempt for them.
Self-enhancement: Self-enhancement is the ordinary mild flattering of oneself that almost everyone does; the complex is effortful, defended and sharpens when a specific sore spot is touched.
A test
Find the domain where they feel small and watch whether the superiority display intensifies when it comes up.
Questions to carry
- Which topic makes the display of being big grow louder, and what might the person feel small about there?
- Where do I need to come out on top, and what am I trying to rise above?
How strong the research is
clinical. Clinical theory with little direct testing; its compensatory form, grandiosity masking hidden inferiority, has mixed support, since research on narcissism and implicit self-esteem has often failed to find the predicted hidden low self.
Where it comes from
Alfred Adler, 1912 (The Neurotic Constitution, as 'masculine protest'); developed through the 1920s and 1930s; The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology, 1927 in English
On the family tree: Alfred Adler
Sources
- Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution (Über den nervösen Charakter) (1912)
- Alfred Adler, Understanding Human Nature (Menschenkenntnis) (1927)