This mechanism teaches us how to estimate folk-psychology. A people behaves like an individual. So that our findings with reference to the psychology of individuals may be applied to whole races, and vice versa.
And here we note that the individual’s delusional greatness invariably has one and the same root: it is an over-compensation for an oppressive diminution of the ego-consciousness. The daily life about us offers innumerable proofs of this assertion. Persons particularly prone to delusional greatness are those who suffer from certain defects and who in youth had been subjected to painful, derisive, scornful, or depreciative criticism. Amongst these we find especially the halt, the lame, the partly blind, the stutterer, the humpbacked, the red-haired, the sick, etc.—in short, persons with some stigma. By the mechanism of over-compensation such individuals may manifest inordinately ambitious natures. Is it accidental that so many celebrated generals—Cæsar, Napoleon, Prince Eugene, Radetzky—were of small stature? Was it not precisely this smallness of stature which furnished the driving power that made them “great”? Instead of looking for the essence of genius in peculiar bodily proportions (which Popper finds to be in a long trunk and short legs!) it would prove a more gratifying task to ferret out those primary factors that have brought about an unusual expenditure of psychic energy in one particular direction.
A very brilliant and suggestive hypothesis (advanced by Dr. Alfred Adler) attempts to account for all superior human gifts as an over-compensation for some original “inferiority.” Even if this principle may not prove true in every case, it can be demonstrated to have played a part in the development of many a case of superior merit in some field of mental endeavour. We are all familiar with largely authentic anecdotes about distinguished scholars, who have just managed to squeeze through in their final professional examinations. In their case, too, by over-compensation a conviction of their inferiority brought about a heightened interest in their work and this interest then became permanently fixed.
Unawares we have wandered from the delusional greatness to true greatness. But who will presume to decide what is true greatness and what delusion? How many discoverers and inventors were ridiculed and their imposing greatness stigmatized as delusion, and how many intellectual ciphers rejoiced in the applause and the worship of their contemporaries! It is this fact which encourages a megalomaniac to permit the criticism of his contemporaries to “fly by him as the idle wind which he respects not.” If it is not true that all greatness is ignored, the opposite is true: every ignored person is one of the great ones. At least he is so to himself. Delusional greatness unites both criticism and recognition in a single tremendous ego-complex.
The roots of this delusion, as of all purely psychic maladies, are infantile. There was a time in the lives of all of us when we were the victims of a genuinely pathological delusion of greatness. In the days of our childhood we were consumed by a longing to be “big.” At first it was only the desire to be a “big man,” to be grown up. A little later and our desires fluttered across the sea of our thoughts like sea-gulls or flew like falcons into the unknown vast. We were kings, ministers of state, princes, ambassadors, generals, trapeze artists, conductors, firemen, or even butlers.
And yet we are all surprised when a butler plants himself squarely before the door and assumes the easy port of a person of some standing and identifies himself with the master of the house and graciously dispenses his domestic favours. Are we then, much better, more sensible, or freer from prejudice? We too stand before the doors of our desires and act as if we believed that they are realities which we are obliged to guard.
RUNNING AWAY FROM THE HOME
Once more the physician felt the young woman’s pulse. “But it’s impossible: you must not go out to-day; you are running the risk of a relapse. You stay in your beautiful home that you have furnished so cosily, so comfortably, and with such good taste. I have no objection, however, to your inviting a few friends, having a little music, chatting, gossiping, but—stay home!”