Social Feeling (Individual Psychology)

SOCIAL FEELING (INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY)

After long emphasizing feelings of inferiority and their consequences, Alfred Adler came to grant more and more importance to the social feeling found in the notions of bonds or attachments that had been studied by such authors as René Spitz, John Bowlby, and Hubert Montagner.

At birth, the infant is extremely vulnerable because of its physiological immaturity. The mother-child relationship is thus vital for the newborn. In Adler's view, preestablished schemes are triggered in the interactions between mother and child: "The mother, taken as the nearest kin at the threshold of development of social feeling, is the source of the first impulses enjoining the child to enter into life as an element of the whole," he wrote. He thus considered the act of suckling the mother's breast as an act of cooperation. The socialization of the infant is a potentiality that represents an evolutionary acquisition of the species: "The evolutionary acquisition of maternal love is generally so strong in animals and human beings that it can easily outweigh the instinct for food and the sexual instinct."

Social feeling is not simply adaptation to the group, which itself can be a form of compensation for feelings of insecurity, as can be seen in cults or in totalitarian systems. This notion extends to both the political and economic dimensions of the object-relations that ensure the subject's autonomy. In the child, compensation for feelings of inferiority is modulated by the harmonious development of social feeling, in which the mother plays an essential role. According to Adler in Problems of Neurosis: A Book of Case Histories (1929/1964), it is she who "effects the first major and specifically human changes in the infant's behavior. Under her influence, the infant, for the first time, inhibits its desires and organic instincts and introduces delays and indirect methods into the pursuit of what it desires . . . it is also the mother who interests the infant in other people and enlarges its social circle."

This potentiality is not expressed automatically. The mother may reject the child from birth, as happens in puerperal psychosis. A fusional relationship, by contrast, will prevent any possibility of autonomy. René Magritte's painting The Spirit of Geometry illustrates this type of relationship, in which the mother can see herself as the son she would have liked to be. Fernando Botero's painting Melancholy represents one of its consequences. Compensation for feelings of inferiority mobilizes aggressive impulses, expressed in the form of antisocial behaviors that may develop in the direction of delinquency or criminality. It is the development of social feeling that directs these aggressive impulses toward socialized behaviors or sublimation. In the neurotic, the aggressive behaviors are only masked. They are expressed in a systematic tendency toward devaluation.

In The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1920/1951), Adler likened melancholia to paranoia. This is not surprising if we think in terms of compensation for feelings of inferiority and the degree of social feeling—that is, the relationship to the other in the two cases. The melancholic expresses a narcissistic breakdown resulting from a loss of love, for which he or she blames the other. The paranoiac hallucinates this feminine other, which enables him to idealize himself at the price of homosexual feelings of persecution, since he becomes both God and the wife of God. The annihilation of the other in the schizophrenic culminates in an all-pervasive self in a delusional world.

FranÇois Compan

See also: Attachment; Inferiority, feeling of (individual psychology); Masculine protest (individual psychology).

Bibliography

Adler, Alfred. (1951). The practice and theory of individual psychology (P. Radin, Trans.). New York: Humanities Press. (Original work published 1920)

——. (1964). Problems of neurosis: A book of case histories (P. Mairet, Trans.). New York: Harper and Row. (Original work published 1929)