In my second last posting in this thread I mentioned that the movement has a "vector quality". A vector has a direction and a force. It moves from- to. From the feeling of minus, the Minderwerdikeit, to the above. So what is this direction that Adler talks about. It is a fictional goal of superiority above the perceived limitations! This goal although still vague in the child, moves from the "minus to the plus" and it will persist in almost all of the rest of life. Here is a quote from the Collected Classical Works of Alfred Adler Part I-III page 41 Volume I, The Neurotic Character. (Please be advised that this material and any other quotes from it I use, are copyright.)



"The most important task of thinking is, in the first place, to anticipate actions or events, to understand the means and the goal, and to influence them as much as possible. This thinking in advance assures us, to a certain extent, of our influence over space and time. Accordingly, our psyche is, in the first place, an organ of defense and attack, born out of distress with limitations that are too narrow and obstruct the gratification of our impulses from the very beginning. However, this purely physiological form of impulse-gratification can last only until suitable means have been found to stabilize and secure oneself against even the greatest challenge. By the end of the suckling stage, when the child performs independent, self-assured actions that are not directed solely towards the gratification of his impulses, when he takes his place within the family and begins to adapt himself to his surroundings, the child already possesses abilities, psychic gestures, and will. In addition, his actions have become coherent, and one can see that the child is on the way to achieve a place in the world. Coherent conduct of that kind can only be understood if one presupposes that the child has found a specific, fixed point outside his own person that he is striving after with the energy of his psychic development. The child, therefore, must have created a guiding line, a guiding image, in the expectation that this is the best way to find his orientation and achieve the gratification of his needs, the avoidance of discomfort and the realization of pleasure. ………..



Soon, this attitude will be accompanied by a striving to obtain the favor, the help and the love of the parents, and by impulses towards independence, of defiance and resistance. The child has found a "meaning of life' which he strives after, the outlines of which he is forming, and from which rises the conduct that guides and evaluates his actions and his emotional impulses. The helplessness of a child, his awkwardness and insecurity, force him to try out different possibilities, to collect experiences, and to create a memory so that the bridge into the future may be constructed, where greatness, power, and many different gratifications dwell. The construction of this bridge is the most significant achievement of the child, because otherwise he would be facing the entire gamut of impressions that come rushing on without any sense of order, without counsel, without guidance and without reassurance. It is hardly possible to define the limits of this first stage of the wakening subjective world, the development of the *I* properly, or indeed even to put it into words."

This is the first of many steps toward the goal of superiority. Another example that Adler uses in the same volume is with reference to Goethe on page 33 of the same reference given above but in chapter I-II. This one is quite jarring!

"Among others, Goethe points out that, on the one hand, perception may be linked to a practical gratification of certain needs, but that on the other hand, beyond this, man leads a life of emotion and imagination. These words aptly express the compulsion to elevate the feeling of self-worth, which also appears in one of his letters to Lavater, when Goethe remarks': This desire to make the pyramid of my existence, the basis of which is fixed and prepared for me, reach upward into the sky as high as possible, outweighs everything else and it will never be out of one's thought for even little more than a moment."

In contrast to his seeming lowly state, as the brain matures, a conquest starts which will move inexorably away from the benefit of mankind to the world of egocenticity. There is, according to Adler, in each of us, a compensating tyrant that would wish to rise, but the plan is vaguely or competely hidden from us and certainly not shown easily to mankind around. It is a secret compensation for the feeling of being nothing.
The task then of the therapist is to discern this "goal", interpolate it back to its origin in the feeling of inferiority, and then encourage it away by demonstrating that to be a fellow man is all we need. That is no small art in itself, but before this can be undertaken the "Life Style", the plan from below to above must be uniquely comprehended and that is the highly tuned skill of the expert Adlerian therapist!

This section has made a huge jump from the cute little, loveable child, to the child who feeling as nothing seeks his own mechanism for compensation and now will start to seek to "rule his little world" with every tool he can find. He will look over his parents, his siblings and all the manifold influences in his world, to see by what means he can attain the centre stage.

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George Neeson M.D.