Social Feeling as a Potential

What we call social feeling in Individual Psychology is the true and inevitable compensation for all our natural weaknesses. Even from the biological standpoint, the human being is clearly a social creature, needing a much longer period of dependence upon others before its maturity than any animal; the human mother is also more dependent before, during, and after giving birth. The high degree of cooperation and social culture which man needs for his very existence demands spontaneous social effort, and the dominant purpose of education is to evoke it. Social feeling is not inborn, but an innate potential which must be consciously developed.

Alfred Adler

(From The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, Volume 9: "Case Histories".)