Abstract
THE subject-matter of this essay has a very important bearing upon the world problems of the present day. The popular conception of the inferiority complex has become a scandal in modern psychology. It is a term easy to use, and it has suffered a fate somewhat similar to that of the word 'idea' in John Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1690). In that work he used the term 'idea' in a special sense, as illustrated in his definition ("Essay", Bk. I, Chap, i,§ 8): "whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks". The general line of his argument was "the new way of ideas", of which Stillingfleet spoke– disapprovingly—on the first appearance of the "Essay". But Locke himself used the word in several different ways, and very soon it got into the general vocabulary of English literature in a large number of senses. That is an aftermath of Locke's important work.
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BROWN, W. The Inferiority Complex and the Paranoid Tendency: With a Brief Reference to Nazi Psychology*. Nature 156, 259–262 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/156259a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/156259a0