Compensation (psychology)


In psychology, compensation is a strategy whereby one covers up, consciously or unconsciously, weaknesses, frustrations, desires, or feelings of inadequacy or incompetence in one life area through the gratification or excellence in another area. Compensation can cover up either real or imagined deficiencies and personal or physical inferiority. Positive compensations may help one to overcome one's difficulties. On the other hand, negative compensations do not, which results in a reinforced feeling of inferiority.
There are two kinds of negative compensation:
A well-known example of failing overcompensation is observed in people going through a midlife-crisis. Approaching midlife, many people lack the energy to maintain their psychological defenses, including their compensatory acts.

Origin

, founder of the school of individual psychology, introduced the term compensation in relation to inferiority feelings.
In his book Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Physical Compensation he describes this relationship: If one feels inferior he / she tries to compensate for it somewhere else.
Adler's motivation to investigate this was from personal experience. He was a very sickly child. He was unable to walk till he was four because of rickets. Then he was a victim of pneumonia as well as a series of accidents.
Adler also "transferred" this idea of compensation to psychic training.

Cultural implications

people, by compensation theory, mute the feelings of low self-esteem by:
Narcissistic children try to compensate for their jealousy and anger by:
Christopher Lasch, an American historian and social critic wrote in his book The Culture of Narcissism that North American society in the 1970s was narcissistic. The narcissistic society:
Therefore, it is "fascinated" with fame.
Consumption has been put forward as a means of compensation. Examples: