Striving For Superiority

Striving for superiority [Streben nach Überlegenheit] was a concept introduced by Alfred Adler (1870–1937), an early psychoanalyst who broke with Freud in 1911 over the relative importance of sexual and aggression motives. Over time Adler's views gradually evolved and broadened. Aggressive drives were elaborated into a will to power by Adler, who sees them often being an overcompensation for feelings of weakness or inferiority. For example, later-born children may strive to surpass their more powerful older siblings. Such strivings are usually neurotic if they reflect poor adjustment to one's social surroundings.

Later, Adler broadened his basic motivational concept still further, into the striving for superiority. Adler saw this striving not as a variable of personality but rather as an innate, universal, and unending human drive found in every individual person, a psychological parallel to physical growth. It originated at the beginning of life and increased over the course of evolution to improve adaptation to the external world. As Adler put it, “The urge from below to above never ceases” (1973, p. 103).

The striving for superiority is abstract but becomes concretized in a variety of activities: for example, self-preservation, having and raising children, adjusting to other people and society, and victorious self-assertion. With the concept of striving for superiority, Adler thus combined interpersonal power with power as capacity or ability (e.g., “power of concentration”).

Adler realized that people follow different paths to superiority; often there is no way to know which path is correct. Some paths to perfection are misguided and will fail because they do not fit reality. In this category Adler included many forms of neurotic behavior, such as the need to dominate over others, the need to avoid failure, and excessive dependency. In the long run, Adler believed, natural selection would render these conceptions extinct, as well as people and groups who hold them.

In later years, Adler suggested that the striving for superiority is directed by social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl], which involves a person's cooperation and identification with the group. Social interest does not stand in antagonism to the striving for superiority, but rather expands it still further, as people strive to help society as a whole become perfect, an ideal community.

Perhaps Adler's description of striving for superiority as the great upward drive seemed out of date even when he wrote it in the early 1930s—following the carnage of World War I and during the Great Depression, just as Hitler and the Nazis were coming to power. It recalls the optimistic Darwinist beliefs of the pre-World War I years, as for example in Shaw's 1903 play, Man and Superman. Perhaps this is why psychologists rarely use the term striving for superiority nowadays.