Superiority

An Adlerian approach would take this dream as a reflection of my efforts to defend my sense of superiority and self-worth… The dream transformed my real problems into fantasy problems and thereby allowed me to use one of my customary strategies for defending against threats to my sense of superiority.

This passage presents Adler’s core clinical doctrine: superiority is a defensive fiction the psyche actively maintains through dream-work and the ‘style of life,’ mobilized against felt vulnerability.

Bulkeley, Kelly, An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming, 2017thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The more the ego struggles to preserve its independence, freedom from obligation, and superiority, the more it becomes enslaved to the objective data… the unconscious takes care of the relation to the object, and it does so in a way that is calculated to bring the illusion of power and the fantasy of superiority to utter ruin.

Jung’s typological analysis shows that the introverted ego’s insistence on superiority is structurally self-defeating, inevitably generating unconscious counter-forces that collapse the very fantasy it sought to protect.

Sharp, Daryl, Personality Types: Jung’s Model of Typology, 1987thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In spite of positively convulsive efforts to ensure the superiority of the ego, the object comes to exert an overwhelming influence, which is all the more invincible because it seizes on the individual unawares and forcibly obtrudes itself on his consciousness.

Jung demonstrates that the ego’s pursuit of superiority over the object is a structural failure: the more violently it is asserted, the more powerfully the repressed object returns through unconscious channels.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychological Types, 1921thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The hypothesis of the superiority of the self and monotheism over anima/animus and polytheism finds companions among historians of religion. Consequently, Jung’s hypothesis may be one more expression of the theological temperament.

Hillman argues that Jung’s privileging of the self and monotheism over polytheistic multiplicity is not a psychological discovery but a confessional theological bias masquerading as metapsychology.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The hypothesis of the superiority of the self and monotheism over anima/animus and polytheism finds companions among historians of religion. Consequently, Jung’s hypothesis may be one more expression of the theological temperament.

Identical to the Brief Account passage: Hillman’s core challenge to hierarchical assumptions embedded in Jungian psychology, contesting the notion that monotheism and the self represent developmental summits.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

whatever appears to me as inferior and weak is viewed from the twin of superiority and strength. Nothing is as such I can see no mote without at the same time realizing my own beam.

Hillman’s syzygy model reveals that superiority is never an isolated perception but always constituted within a dyadic antithetical structure, inseparable from the inferiority it claims to transcend.

Hillman, James, Healing Fiction, 1983supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Top Yin is located at the very top of Major Superiority, where superiority [the passage] is at its most difficult. To try to ford difficulties here where the passage is at its deepest inevitably would end in submerging one’s head, and this means misfortune.

Wang Bi’s commentary on the Daguo hexagram frames superiority as a condition that, when pushed to its structural extreme, becomes self-destructive—a cosmological warning against overreach embedded in the I Ching tradition.

Wang Bi, Richard John Lynn, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

A time of Major Superiority is indeed great! {This means that it is a time for the noble man to take action.} … though the noble man may stand alone, he does so without fear, and, if he has to withdraw from the world, he remains free from resentment.

The I Ching’s Major Superiority (Daguo) is here reframed positively as a condition demanding exceptional courage and solitary strength, available only to those of noble character.

Wang Bi, Richard John Lynn, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Third Yang If this one does not exert his superiority and ward them off but instead follows along, they are likely to kill him, which means misfortune.

Wang Bi’s Minor Superiority commentary treats superiority as a protective capacity that, when abdicated, renders the yang principle vulnerable to domination by petty forces—a cosmological ethics of assertive self-assertion.

Wang Bi, Richard John Lynn, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

to base the strength of religious monotheism upon analogy with the psychologically more complete state of the self begs the same question which is nowhere established: the superiority of monotheism to polytheism.

Miller extends Hillman’s critique by showing that the claimed superiority of monotheism rests on circular reasoning that smuggles a theological conclusion into a psychological premise.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

will you tell me whether you mean by the better and superior the wiser, or if not, whom? CALLICLES: Most assuredly, I do mean the wiser. SOCRATES: Then according to you, one

Plato’s Gorgias stages a philosophical contest over the definition of superiority, pressing Callicles to distinguish physical strength from wisdom as the true criterion of superiority in human affairs.

Plato, Gorgias, -380supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

a sustained argument of exceptional rhetorical sophistication for the eschatological superiority of the Christian message of salvation to the system of atonement described in the Mosaic law.

Thielman identifies ‘superiority’ as the organizing rhetorical claim of the Letter to the Hebrews, wherein Christ’s sacrificial mediation is argued to surpass and supersede the entire Mosaic sacrificial system.

Frank S. Thielman, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

if the good and just man be thus superior in pleasure to the evil and unjust, his superiority will be infinitely greater in propriety of life and in beauty and virtue?

Plato’s Republic uses the calculus of pleasure to demonstrate the just man’s superiority over the unjust, deploying a quasi-mathematical argument to ground ethical hierarchy in experiential difference.

Plato, Republic, -380supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the fate after death of the men of silver who are promoted to the rank of the Blessed of the Infernal Regions indicates their superiority over the race of bronze, whose fate in the afterlife is to be among the anonymous dead in Hades.

Vernant reads Hesiod’s mythological ranking of the races as encoding a hierarchical cosmology in which post-mortem fate reveals each race’s superiority or inferiority within a non-linear, cyclical temporal order.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The dissymmetry of these oppositions appears to be rather marked: the superiority of the ideas of object to the ideas of relation… and the correlative superiority of the substantive.

Derrida notes a structural linguistic hierarchy in which the substantive idea claims superiority over relational and grammatical categories, exposing a logocentrism built into the architecture of language itself.

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →