Adler

Adler is discussed as a theorist of the inferiority complex, but the book’s central concern is Sartre’s revision of that theory. It preserves Adler’s two-level account of inferiority and compensation while relocating both within a unified, freely chosen project: the person does not merely suffer an antecedent complex, but organizes failure and attempted compensation in a way that can deepen the very inferiority it appears to escape.

Adler’s Account and Sartre’s Reversal

Sartre takes Adler’s account as a point of departure for interpreting conduct, including the strained struggle against fatigue. Such a struggle may express an inferiority complex, Sartre allows, but the complex cannot be treated as a prior formation that mechanically causes the present reaction. Its meaning is found by looking toward the future: the person’s possibilities and undertakings determine how the difficulty is lived. Fatigue’s physical circumstances may contribute to the fatigue itself, but they do not, by themselves, explain the way it is suffered.

On this account, an inferiority complex is a project of the person’s for-itself in a world shared with others. It is a way of choosing oneself and of assuming one’s being-for-others. Patterns of failure are not isolated symptoms; they form an organized totality, a projected plan that gives the acts their meaning. Giving in to a steep path, for example, can make it count as a path too difficult to traverse. Likewise, claims of being ugly or stupid anticipate how other people or society will obstruct one’s enterprises; their significance emerges through the undertakings against which that adversity is experienced.

Recognition, Compensation, and Bad Faith

Sartre explicitly grants Adler two connected observations: a person fundamentally recognizes inferiority, and a heavy, unbalanced development of acts, works, and statements may be designed to offset or conceal it. The disagreement concerns how those levels relate. Sartre refuses to call the underlying recognition unconscious. Instead, it belongs to fundamental, unreflective consciousness, while the person’s reflected-on consciousness supplies the acts and declarations that serve as its tributaries.

The attempted compensation may therefore function in bad faith. The will presents false psychic objects as motives—such as love of glory or love of beauty—so that it can deliberate about them and appear to determine itself by them. Yet this willing is not an independent force opposed to spontaneous consciousness. Their apparent divorce is itself projected within the deeper unity of a fundamental choice: choosing oneself as inferior. Works intended to hide inferiority can, at a more profound level, make it more measurable and conspicuous.

The Person Who Chooses Inferiority

Sartre’s account pushes beyond the complex as a psychological label. The recognition of inferiority is itself a choice, and the shifting, feeble affirmations meant to conceal it can also be chosen as part of that deeper intention. The person thereby selects not only a way of appearing before others but a pattern in which shame and failure are repeatedly encountered. Sartre describes the sufferer as having chosen to be his own tormenter, while distinguishing this choice from any claim that he enjoys the suffering when it becomes most intense.

Adler’s role is thus both foundational and limited. His two-level description supplies a pattern Sartre can acknowledge, but Sartre replaces explanation through the unconscious, repression, and censorship with bad faith and the unity of consciousness. The inferiority complex becomes less a hidden cause lodged in the past than a global, future-oriented way of choosing oneself before others—one whose efforts at concealment may help bring its painful meaning into view.