Individual psychology and the child / Leonhard Seif [and others].

Date:
1933
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Individual psychology and the child / Leonhard Seif [and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    One pole represents a minus, and the movement is to go from the minus to a plus; from a lack to a satisfaction; from something we miss to something we get; from a feeling of insecurity (always following the inborn law of balance, of compensation) to a point where there is no longer any feeling of insecurity. The movement is from the point of a lack of value towards the point where value is gained. The lack of value may be weakness: and the value, strength. The lack of value may be the lack of knowledge, and the plus, know- ledge: it may be clumsiness, and the desired‘ goal, skill. It is always a striving from the point of a feeling of inferiority towards the goal of superiority; of power, of totality, of completeness, of perfection where the individual is free from the burning and unbearable feeling of inferiority. The individual goal, the move- ment-line once given, all the child’s creative powers, intellect, emotions, will, character, urges, dreams, movements, gestures, logic, morals and so forth are moulded towards the goal. All the different forms of _ expression are the individual answers to the individual demands of life, are his style of life. We know it is the normal psychological situation for a little child: that he is weak, helpless and entirely dependent upon environment. At the same time, when a child becomes occupied with his orientation to his environment we must not forget that the child can mistake his situation and himself: can under-estimate it, Can over-estimate it and the chances that environment offers him. In short, he can arrive at something we call an opinion. Here I ought to interpolate that, if the attainment of the social reality is given us as a task, we must not forget that we can never solve that task perfectly; can never understand completely the facts of life. What we can do is to form an opinion about them. We can approach more or less to the fact of social life, to