International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis | Inferiority, Feeling of

The term "feeling(s) of inferiority" refers to a group of representations and affects that reflect an individual's self-devaluation in relation to others. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Sigmund Freud mentioned a dream marked by both feelings of inferiority and infantile omnipotence. The thematic content of this dream is explicitly anal, which is significant, since Freud later often returned to anal issues as forces that can have a positive or negative impact on self-esteem.

Freud addressed feelings of inferiority, notably, in his analyses of the cases of the Rat Man (1909d), Schreber (1911c), and the Wolf Man (1918b). He also took up this theme in his formulations on narcissism (1914c). But above all, he examined feelings of inferiority with especially keen insight within the framework of the oedipal complex. In his paper on a child's fantasy of being beaten (1919e), he wrote that this fantasy, as well as other, analogous perverse fixations, were "precipitates of the Oedipus complex, scars, so to say, . . . just as the notorious 'sense of inferiority' corresponds to a narcissistic scar of the same sort" (p. 193). Within the oedipal framework, the threat of castration that weighs upon the little boy distorts his self-esteem, and the absence of a penis leads the little girl to devalue herself. In both cases, feelings of inferiority are intimately linked to the guilt inherent in the oedipal drama. The loss of love of the object and the sense of rejection accentuate this feeling.

Freud revised these views when he formulated his structural theory of ego psychology. "There is always a feeling of triumph when something in the ego coincides with the ego ideal. And the sense of guilt (as well as the sense of inferiority) can also be understood as an expression of tension between the ego and the ego ideal," Freud wrote in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c, p. 131).

One can thus better understand why Freud so firmly opposed Alfred Adler when Adler wanted to make feelings of inferiority the keystone of his theoretical conceptions in The Neurotic Constitution: Outlines of a Comparative Individualistic Psychology and Psychotherapy (1912/1926). In Freud's view, feelings of inferiority were a superficial manifestation—important in clinical work, to be sure, but understandable only within the framework of a more general metapsychology.

ROGER PERRON

See also: Adler, Alfred; Compulsion; Fanon, Frantz; Feeling of inferiority (individual psychology); Masculine protest (individual psychology); Social feeling (individual psychology).