Chapter III: Will-To-Power

Alfred Adler was a pupil of Freud. In the course of his psycho-analytic practice he stumbled across a discovery which led to a break with Freud and the enunciation of a new theory. In contradistinction to the sexual theory it may be called the power-theory.

What Adler noticed in every neurotic was a marked feeling of inferiority, a feeling, as he put it, of being _under_, and a consequent incessant striving to be _over_ or on top. To use a simple, concrete case: If a man felt inferior to the woman he loved, and this was a symptom of inferiority he had always had toward the women he loved, he would strive by every means to put the woman down and himself up. He might put her down by economic pressure, by intellectual attack; or he might put her down in the sexual way, for instance through cruelty (sadism).

In the latter case, Freud would say that the problem was sexual. But Adler would say, what the man is striving for is not sexual satisfaction, but power. If he could put the woman down through money-pressure, that would satisfy him, or if he could put her down sexually, that would be satisfactory. What he was seeking was mastery.

Take the well-known case of the Don Juan who has one love-affair after another, who wins a woman only to tire of her and pass on to the next. Such men will admit, as a rule, that the greatest pleasure is in conquest, and that when a woman has been conquered she is no longer interesting. They look upon love-affairs as a series of battles, and the aim is not love or sexuality, so much as triumph.

What becomes then of the Oedipus complex, the incestuous longing of the son for the mother? According to Adler this, too, is a problem of power. The father is the head of the house, the master, the king in the realm of the family, and possesses the mother. The son is under the father, but would depose this king and take his place. In short, he would be the head and possess the mother. But actually, what the child is seeking, is not really to possess the mother, but to have power in the manner of his father.

The cause, then, of mental disorders and spiritual maladies, Adler traces to an excessive feeling of inferiority which leads to a marked will-to-power. But whence arises this feeling of inferiority? Adler at this point is sure that the origin is to be sought not in something psychic but in something physical. His theory is that the feeling of inferiority is due to some _actual organic inferiority_.

In other words, he believes that a child who has a club foot, like Byron, or one subject to epileptic fits, like Dostoyevski, or one with an impediment which causes stammering, like Demosthenes, or one with a chronic tendency to constipation like Lincoln (the cases of great men could be multiplied endlessly), that such a child feels himself inferior to normal children; he feels that there is something the matter with him, that he has less chance of success, etc. This is the feeling of inferiority, the feeling of being under. And the deeper this feeling, the greater the reaction to it, the greater the striving to change the position about, so that instead of being under his fellows he is over them. Out of such defects, then, arise the great ambitions, or as Adler puts it, the “guiding fiction.” By this he means a phantasy of some great goal which the child dreams about and sets out to reach.

A classical case is that of Demosthenes. Because he stammered, because he was inferior in speech to other children, an ambition awoke not merely to be able to talk in the normal manner, but something far greater: namely, to be the greatest of orators, an ambition he actually achieved. But suppose he could not have achieved such a victory, suppose conditions had been such that it was impossible for him to be an orator? Then his incessant striving would prove futile, the feeling of inferiority would increase, and there would be a breakdown. The breakdown would be a neurosis, and he would be ready for a psycho-analyst.

Why did Napoleon set out to conquer Europe? His inordinate will-to-power could be traced back to a painful feeling of inferiority in his youth, which showed itself in the military school, where he was put to shame by his fellows. They, he must have felt, would become in time great generals and leaders in the army; hence, he must be even more than they, the general of generals.

As to the feeling of inferiority itself, Adler denotes it as the feeling of being _feminine_. Woman, he believes, has the psychology of being under, man that of being over, as shown in the sexual act itself. Besides, man is physically stronger than woman. Hence, if a man has an organic inferiority, he feels that he is not a man, and hence, that he is in some way feminine. All his striving therefore is to be masculine, and indeed, super-masculine. This striving Adler calls _the masculine protest_. One finds it in women also; a marked feeling of inferiority in a woman leading her to strive to be like a man, and a refusal to accept her own psychology.

Such, in brief, is the Adler theory. It owes many things to Nietzsche, who, in his “Thus Spake Zarathustra” teaches will-to-power as the guiding principle of life, who relegates woman to a lesser, man to a greater sphere, and who finds in the striving of the ego the dominant impulse of life.