... The specific conditions it reacts to will provide the instruments with which it establishes its superiority in feeling, and the moulds of character in terms of which this superiority is pursued and maintained. The process begins in earliest infancy. Indeed, the first cry of the new-born is a sign of felt insecurity; an insecurity extended and intensified by its manifold relations to the adult world on which it depends. The child early begins to feel inferior, often because of some sensed or perceived inferiority of organ in itself. The whole of its life soon becomes a persistent effort to overcome this feeling of inferiority, and to replace it by a feeling of superiority and security. Such a feeling need not, and hardly ever does, register a real superiority and security. It is not a recognition of reality and an adjustment thereto; it is an aversion from reality, an evasion of it, a compensation for it. The feeling of superiority is attained by means of autogenous fictions and in the pursuit of a "fictitious goal." Sometimes it is created by bullying, aggression, self-assertion; sometimes by submission, weakness, all the frailties and perversions, many sorts of disease. Sexuality and sex-relations are often its instruments, and merely instruments. The feeling of superiority, centred in the fictitious goal, is striven for universally. Everybody is doing it, but doing it without knowing, hiddenly. Everybody has a "secret life-plan" that dominates and directs every phase of his conduct and evinces itself in his carriage, his postures, his fantasies, his dreams, his dogmatisms, his intolerances, his envies, his pleasure in the misfortunes of others, and so on. These are all substitutes for the struggle with reality, short-cuts to security; as a rule their intensity exceeds the requirements of self-preservation in the struggle. All the relationships they designate are reducible to the basic one of superior-inferior and this is especially symbolized in terms of the relationships of the sexes. The superior is always masculine, the inferior always feminine; Alder designates the demand for superiority as "the masculine protest." It stands out in neurotics. The urge to superiority is not, however, the all of the Adlerian system of human nature. Over against the will-to-power is set "the eternal, real, physiologically-rooted community feeling." This Adler signalizes as the source of tenderness, love of neighbour, friendship, and love. ...
