In 1902, a group of men, mostly doctors, began meeting every Wednesday in an apartment in Vienna. The “Wednesday Society” was founded by Sigmund Freud, but its first president was Alfred Adler.

The two men were very different. Freud was a patrician type, highly educated and lived in a fashionable district of Vienna. Adler identified with the people, and a plain-looking son of a grain merchant.

These pioneering psychologists also had big differences in how they saw human nature. While Freud believed that human beings are driven by the unconscious mind, Adler saw us as social beings.

We create a style of life in response to our environment, and to our perceived shortcomings. We naturally strive for personal power and a strong sense of identity.

Growing into an environment in which everyone else seems bigger and more powerful, every child seeks to gain what he or she needs by the easiest route.

Adler’s idea of “birth order,” is that where you come in a family is important. Those born last, being smaller and less powerful than their siblings, will try to “outstrip every other member of the family and become its most capable member”.

Adler said that, “a thousand talents and capabilities arise from our feelings of inadequacy”. Our attempts to banish a sense of inferiority shape our whole lives. We try to compensate for it in often extreme ways.

This is Adler’s famous “inferiority complex”.

An inferiority complex may make you more timid or withdrawing, or it could produce the need to overachieve. This unhealthy “pathological power-drive” is expressed at the expense of others and society generally.

Adler identified Napoleon, a small man making a big impact on the world, as the classic case of an inferiority complex in action.