A dethroned king, a pacesetter, and a youngest who is not moved

Adler cared less about what a person is born with than about what they do with what they have. He called his work individual psychology, and treated a person as one part of a social living system. The dynamics of a family, and its shape, were for him a small version of a society: social interest, dissatisfaction, and frustration show themselves inside the house as well. From the interplay of parent and child, and from the relative standing of siblings, he drew types of lifestyle and of character by birth order.

The first child has a time as an only child, when almost everything thought good for a newborn is done. When a second arrives, the change is sharp. Adler compared the first child left behind to a dethroned king, who tries to recover the old place, fails, and may isolate themselves and learn to live without depending on other people’s affection and recognition. First children, he held, often prefer a stable job such as a civil servant or a teacher.

The second is born with an older sibling already there as a pacesetter, and is pushed to go beyond that sibling’s strengths. Second children may walk and talk sooner. They live at full speed to prove they are better, and often become competitive and ambitious, and choose work that asks for a taste for adventure. The youngest is not dethroned, and may be spoilt; if the family is not well off, they may have little that is their own and inherit everything from the others. Surrounded by stronger, more privileged siblings, they can grow a thin independence and a strong inferiority. An only child, with no sibling to race, may also be spoilt, and dependent and self-centred. The theory holds that even children of the same parents form different characters through their place in the sequence and the competition for a parent’s love. Not every child, the writer later adds, fits the type.

Adler as a second son, and a guilt he carried

Adler himself was born a second son, with an older brother of greater ability who had their mother’s love. He was also jealous of a younger sibling; that sibling died soon after, and Adler spent his childhood with the guilt of it. The personal history is left as the page gives it.

Inferiority, in his analysis, has a deeper origin than a single house. A human being in a state of nature lacks the great force, or the sharp sight or smell, of many beasts that live alone; in the order of the stronger, the physical weakness brings unease, anxiety, and a sense of helplessness, and that, he held, is where inferiority begins. The writer agrees with that reading.

A sister’s clothes, and a sentence that would not stay in the middle

The writer is the second of one son and two daughters. She can speak a hard word, and can seem a little sharp; unlike her older sister, she is quick at reading a room and a situation, and is often told she has a sense for it. Watching the sister, with whom she spends the most time, can sometimes feel frustrating. She is possessive about her own things. Growing up, except on special days, she mostly wore clothes her sister had already worn. She hated that, and as an adult she will not wear her sister’s clothes, and will not lend her own.

As a second of three she has sometimes looked at first and youngest people with a prejudice when first meeting them, though, ironically, many of her friends are first or youngest children. She has a fair amount of inferiority. In her school years she wondered why; applying Adler’s account of character, she thought it might be so. Beside the more general origin he named, she finds inferiority in her sibling relations. From the beginning she had an older sister as a lifelong comparison and a person to race. Adults asked, “Why aren’t you like your sister?” and “Your sister does it this way; why don’t you?” When the youngest was born, the attention of the family and of the adults around them moved there. Growing up, she was told to yield, in a pressure that was not quite named as pressure, because she was the older one to the younger, and the younger one to the oldest, and an inferior feeling formed without her quite meaning it to.

She had wondered why she had this character, or why she did not form ties more easily, and had looked for ways to change, and had also wondered whether a born character was something one had to give up on. People around her even recommended a speech academy, to become more brisk and cheerful. Writing the page, and looking at her situation through Adler’s individual psychology, she came to see that the worry was not hers alone, and that the people around her, and the family close at hand, were part of it. She will not, she says, stay silent simply because she stands in the middle, or stop naming what she needs. She will do the work in front of her completely, and make a sphere of her own. Every person, she holds, is equally valuable.

Why a king, a pair of clothes, and a middle child are kept together

A type on a page is only a type. A house still has a sister’s dress, a sentence from an adult, and a person who will not, any longer, give way without speaking. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Essay on Adler’s theory of family structure and birth order, with the writer’s own experience as the second of one son and two daughters (Korean source page).
2. Adler’s individual psychology; the image of the first child as a dethroned king; occupational leanings of first and second children; the only child; Adler’s own place as a second son, and a younger sibling who died.
3. Oh Hong-myeong, “On inferiority: a psychological and ontological analysis, and a sketch toward an ethics of devaluation,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research no. 67 (2015): 67–105.
4. Kim Eun-ha, “A case study of hwabyeong applying Adler’s individual psychology,” Korean Journal of Psychology 20, no. 4 (2015): 469–495.

Last updated: 14 November 2026