"Personality functions as a delicate balancing .
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act, with sexual and aggressive desires weighed against the demands of society, and the person attempting to satisfy both" (Lefton/Brannon 410). By way of contrast, Adler saw sex as an attempt to obtain power over another person and felt people are motivated or energized by natural feelings of inferiority , which leads them to strive for success. Feelings of inferiority come from a sense of incompletion or imperfections in one's life, which cause them to have a strong drive to overcome the imperfection. Adler called this striving "compensation". .
All of these strong drives leads us to the motivation factor. Adler believed that man is motivated more by his expectations for the future than by experiences of the past. This concept was called fictional finalism. Future expectations may be purely fictional, yet they exercise a profound influence on a person's behavior. "The normal person can, when necessity requires it, free himself from the influence of these fictions and face reality, something that the neurotic person is incapable of doing" (Nordby/Hall 9). However, Freud believed if people could only look at their past, they could gain insight into their current behavior. He was fixated on the past, especially a person's childhood, and that motivation came from the internal feelings one had built because of the experiences they had once had. Freud's level of mental life that consist of those experiences that we are aware of at any given time is what he called consciousness. He also theorized that conscience is not implanted by God, but develops through identification with a parent. .
Since both Adler and Freud disagreed on whether personality came from nature or nurture, meaning the genes we were given or the environment we grew up in, the overall basis on mental development was expressed quite different between the two of them.
