Power and violence attract pathological types, who rise to the top in authoritarian circumstances and are able to act out their mental illnesses recklessly.
[…]The philosophical doctrine of pragmatism […] asserts that we cannot find absolute truth; we should not even look for it, since this is always a waste of time. Truth is merely a name for reflections that get us ahead practically; their value for the conduct of our life determines whether we call something true.
[…]A person can overcome his fear of life only if he has a stable relationship to his human environment.
[…]Man is not evil by nature. No matter what transgressions a person may have committed, led astray by his erroneous view of life, this need not oppress him, for he can change. He is free to be happy and to give pleasure to others.
[…]The theory of individual psychology is based on the assumption that the personality is a goal-directed unit. […] life and the psyche can be understood only on the basis of this goal-directedness (teleological).
[…]Out of general cultural influences, a realization of organic weaknesses or adequacies, and the influence of the environment and education, each human being fashions for himself with a certain arbitrariness a law that governs his life and serves as the framework for his subsequent destiny.
[…]A deeper understanding of a human being presupposes an intuitive knowledge of his goal and an ability to relate his life movements to it.
[…]Culture and civilization encompass the history of man’s efforts to control his imperfections.
[…]We owe to man’s existential angst (that is, his inferiority feeling) his continual striving for transcendence, which has given rise to all great achievements in the development of mankind.
[…]Education is the most important factor in the origin of marked feelings of inferiority. […] All handicaps of an organic, social, or familial nature can be largely compensated for by pedagogical skill and psychological sensitivity.
[…]All active character traits–ambition, vanity, envy, avarice, hatred, etc.–contain a direct expression of the striving for superiority. If a person fails in his pursuit of his overt will to power, there is a deviation into an indirect manifestation, and then the same superiority ideals can be striven for by passive means […] including submissiveness, lack of independence, laziness, masochism, obedience–are revealed as tricky methods of attaining dominance by demonstrating weakness of tractability.
[…]The theory of social interest is the keystone of individual psychology. All other findings must be related to this central concept if they are to be understood in any deeper sense.
[…]According to Erwin Wexberg, genuine fellow feeling is manifested in the following:
- Objectivity – Only a person with fellow feeling is capable of remaining objective and of letting the matter take precedence over the person.
- Logical thinking – This results only from courage to investigate the facts consistently, irrespective of egotistical prejudices and wishful thinking that constrict one’s vision.
- Readiness to contribute – A person with fellow feeling is willing to do his share for the common welfare and through his contribution to guarantee the existence and the further development of the community.
- Readiness for devotion to nature and art – Social interest cannot stop at the extrahuman world, and it manifests itself in interrelationships with life and the universe as well as with creations of art, in which human feeling presents itself in sublime form.
- Responsibility for actions, ideas, feelings, etc. – A person knows he is responsible for the form of his life, and he assumes responsibility for everything that falls within the range of his knowledge and ability
The striving for power primarily appears as a compensation for oppressive feelings of inferiority and anxiety; its real goal is not necessarily predominance over others but, rather, security and freedom from fear.
[…]Perception is anything but an exact mirror of the conditions in the world. Rather, any perception is greatly colored by the total personality making it.
[…]Dreams contain emotional life in its totality–namely, our anxieties and apprehensions, our hopes and our desires, our character and our instincts, our reason and our emotionality. […] A dream is a symbol of our attitude toward all the problems of our life; in it the dreamer’s childhood, his present situation, and his orientation toward the future are seamlessly combined.
[…]Investigations of talent must always be anchored in a psychology of personality.
[…]Our rationality often serves to veil and cloak our irrational driving forces.
[…]In viewing the personality structure, we notice as the main structural defect that its wholeness, its particular goal in life, and the life style peculiar to it are not founded on objective reality but on the individual’s subjective view of the facts of life. The conceptual idea, the comprehension of a fact, is never the fact itself. For this very reason all persons living in the same factual world assume different forms. Every person forms himself in accordance with his personal conception of things, and some conceptions are psychically healthier than others.
