Handicaps and Overcompensation

In psychological systems that give primacy to the concept of an integrated personality, the idea of overcompensation plays a dominant role. “Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger” is the way W. Stern formulates this idea, pointing out that strength is born from weakness, and abilities from deficiencies (W. Stern 1923, p. 145). The school of the Austrian psychiatrist Adler, which is widely popular and very influential in Europe and America and calls itself individual psychology, that is, personality psychology, developed this idea into an entire system, into a complete theory of the psyche. Overcompensation is not some rare or exceptional phenomenon in the life of an organism. An infinite multitude of examples of it can be cited. This is more an extremely common and very widespread feature of organic processes related to the basic laws of living matter. Granted, to this day we do not have any kind of exhaustive and all-inclusive biological theory of overcompensation, but in a number of specific fields of organic life these phenomena have been studied so thoroughly, and their practical use is so substantial, that we can quite rightly talk about overcompensation as a scientifically established, fundamental fact of an organism’s life. We vaccinate healthy children with smallpox toxin. The children experience a mild illness and upon recovering become protected against smallpox for many years. Their organism has acquired immunity, that is, it has not only overcome the mild illness that we caused with the inoculation but has come out of the illness healthier than before. The organism has succeeded in developing an antitoxin in much larger quantities than was required by the dose of the toxin that was injected in it. If we now compare our children with others who have not been vaccinated, we will see that they are exceedingly healthy with respect to this horrible disease: they are not merely not ill now, similar to other healthy children, but they also cannot get sick, they will remain healthy even when the toxin gets into their bloodstream.