approach to the problem of greatness in laying down the principles under the guidance of which we can analyze the psychic processes behind achievement. In all of us lie latent talents which will become productive only upon the incidence of a strong urge. The study of motives, then, is fundamental to the explanation of greatness.

THE INFERIORITY COMPLEX

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Alfred Adler, a prominent psychoanalyst, has advanced a theory of motivation which he has found valuable in the treatment of neurotic disorders. According to Adler every neurosis (mental breakdown) is caused by an inferior organ. The possession of an inferior organ makes a person feel inferior to other people. The boy who stammers, for example, is embarrassed by his handicap in social contacts. The sense of his peculiarity weighs upon him until a feeling of inferiority develops. This inferiority complex, Adler originally maintained, is always due to an inferior

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After a prolonged investigation of the school children of Vienna, Adler has more recently come to the conclusion that organic weakness is only one of the sources which contribute to a sense of inferiority. Any factor in the child's experience which encourages maladjustment tends to create a feeling of inadequacy. Discouragement tends to appear in three types of children: (1) the child who is handicapped by an organic defect, such as deafness, a clubfoot, a disturbed digestion; (2) the child who has been so spoiled by unwise parental affection that he has learned to depend upon others for his security; (3) the child who is unwanted

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and who is treated, therefore, with a coldness that leads him to interpret the world as hostile.

THE LONGING FOR SECURITY

The important point for our purpose is that this sense of inferiority involves significant psychological consequences. A basic tendency in human nature is the longing for security. We like to feel sure of ourselves and to believe we have the capacities necessary to secure an adequate adjustment to the demands of the environment. The security of the individual is frequently jeopardized by unkind circumstances which intrude upon his self-complacency. It is very discomforting to a man to have to admit that he is "beneath" others. To acknowledge another his superior is to betray his self-respect. When he fails to attain his ideal in the world of reality, the longing for security demands that something be done to relieve the unpleasant consciousness of inferiority. There is an added incentive to blot out failure through the attainment of success. The man who knows he is uneducated may train his mind by intensive study until he surpasses others in intellectual power or he may take pride in developing an unusually powerful physique. Every individual craves power and he will exert himself to win it as long as he believes he can succeed. For the ambitious person defeat acts as a spur to the cultivation of strength. Hall writes: "No dread was greater from the very dawn of adolescence than that of inferiority and mediocrity, which most of the greatest efforts I ever made in life were to escape." 1 The realization 1 G. Stanley Hall: Life and Confessions of a Psychologist, p. 377.

of inferiority makes a man angry with himself and with those who are only too ready to taunt him for his shortcomings. "Some learn to penalize those who injure them or affront them by the long-circuit way of surpassing them in good deeds or superior attainments and achievements by way of revenge. Man owes much of his aggressiveness to wrath and must give it ever more deliberate and fuller scope and more momentum, but on a constantly higher plane. He cannot be too angry if he is angry aright.” 2

COMPENSATION FOR INFERIORITY

The process by which a man transcends his handicaps is known as compensation. Adler's scheme may be pictured thus:

Inferior organ-leading to

Feeling of inferiority-leading to

Longing for security-leading to
Compensation.

The craving for superiority, accentuated by defect, is satisfied through compensation for inferiority. That is the essence of Adler's psychology.

Let me illustrate how inferiority was compensated through athletic accomplishment in the life of Gene Neely. He was a listless young man until a shotgun wound deprived him of one arm. This "crippling accident did a strange and great thing for Gene Neely. It gave Gene Neely a cause. It seemed . . . to charge him with a burning mission to prove to the world that a man with one arm can do anything that a man with . Ibid., pp. 465, 466.

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two arms can do. But for that misfortune, it is quite probable that he would merely have been a good-natured fat man on cordial terms with the world, an easygoing individual with no particular drive nor dash to nim. . . . But as it was Neely became a sort of flamng crusader in the cause of the maimed. There was edge and bite and fire and fury to him. There was a constant challenge in his steel-gray eyes, a seething anrest in his powerful limbs. He measured every man -his power, his skill-and as he measured him, he prepared to fight him. 'He thinks he's good because e's got two arms,' he used to confide, . . . 'but I can ick him the best day he ever saw. . . ." He was erhaps the most remarkable athlete in intercollegiate nnals. "He made the All-America team in football, layed a crack center field, both at Dartmouth and ter with one of the fastest semipro nines in the South, ould flail a golf course in the 80's, play a masterful ame of tennis, was a demon wrestler, a strong swimmer, good dash man in track, an expert at billiards, a hampion trap shooter, and a fair basketball forard." Organic defect stimulated him to achieve his curity through a brilliant athletic career.

Parents sometimes compensate for their own disapintments by vicarious pride in the success of their ildren. You can see the part that parental influence d to play in the life of G. Stanley Hall, one of nerica's outstanding psychologists. He says in his tobiography: "If ever parents lived for their chilen, mine did. We were not only their offspring but we developed they looked to us to realize their own uthful ambitions, the thwarting of which they always The Boston Post, September 28, 1927.

felt so keenly that it actually clouded their lives. They alone of all their brothers and sisters ardently aspired to a larger horizon and to be and to do something worth while in the world, and were always oppressed by a sense of failure. We children were incessantly exhorted to 'make good' in their place, to succeed as they had fallen by the way. As we matured this became more and more of a spur to us, and education seemed to both them and us to open the only way. The pathos of their disappointment grew upon us with advancing years.

The older we grew the dearer we became to them until they seemed to find a kind of vicarious completion of their own lives in us." 4

THE CHALLENGE OF ADJUSTMENT

All of us run up against difficulties which test our resources for adjustment. The demands of the environment often tax our powers to the utmost. Adaptation under trying conditions can sometimes be effected only through recourse to compensation. Various situations give us an opportunity to match our powers with hostile circumstances. There are three paramount questions in life, says Adler, the proper meeting of which demands courage-social relations, occupation, and marriage. Asked what he meant by courage, Adler whimsically pointed to the third great question, marriage. Life is an adventure that demands strength of character. The crises weed out the weak. Only the strong can weather the storms of "outrageous fortune." The real test of life comes when we have suffered the humiliation of failure. It takes "backbone" to "come G. S. Hall: op. cit., pp. 79, 80.

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