Bullying and Delinquency viewed from Adolerian Psychology
1998 Volume 36 Issue 2 Pages 19-35
Details
1998 Volume 36 Issue 2 Pages 19-35
Recent psychological studies report that bullying is caused by frustration and stress among children. Basically, bullying is the dominance to weaker child. A. Adler, who assumed the striving for superiority and the wish for power as basic drive of human being, proposed that bullying is related to the superiority derived from the compensation of inferiority. This hypothesis is significant to understand the mechanism of bullying.
The main contribution of Adlerian psychology to understand bullying may be summarized as follows.
(1) Bullying is one of the expressions of excessive superiority to compensate the feelings of inferiority.
(2) The striving for power, which is another basic drive of human being, derives bullying to others.
(3) When the child feels dominated by others, he/she intensifies the impulse to dominate and bully others.
(4) Competitism in the contemporary society strengthens the striving for superiority and stimulates bullying among children.
In this paper, the relation between the orthodox frustration-aggression theory and bullying is also disscussed.
