I'm attempting to find the original text where the phrase "Napoleon complex" was first used.

-- Sarah Simons (ssaddendum@aol.com), August 19, 2002

Answers

I don't know. The phrase appears nowhere in all the works on the "Classics in the History of Psychology" website. Because of the term "complex" it may have a psychoanalytics origin. Any good academic library should have the Concordance of Freud's works. You might check there.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), August 19, 2002.

An online version of the Freud abstracts is available at http://nyfreudian.org/abstracts/ when it's up and running, you can search the entire set of abstracts- -at the moment the search function isn't working, but the abstracts are all available.

All my efforts to find the Napoleon complex on the web yielded material on the Oedipus complex, and I suspect Freud didn't coin the phrase, which may have come out of developmental psychology. Be sure to consult dictionaries of psychology and psychoanalysis--your library should have some.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), August 20, 2002.

It occurs to me that "Napoleon Complex" is really just a colloquiual term for a (specific form of) the Inferiority Complex, the idea of which was, of course, pioneered by Alfred Adler. You might find the term used in his writings, or more likely in those of his latter-day popularizers.

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), August 20, 2002.

Chris is right, I think, although Adler merely used Napoleon as an example of inferiority complex, whereas the phrase Napoleon Complex emerges later to describe inferiority specific to those of short stature. I found one German site that mentions Napoleon specifically in terms of Adler's works:

http://www.a3heer.myweb.nl/Terrorisme-VS.htm

At http://hammer.prohosting.com/~penz/encycl/a1encyc.htm you find Napoleon compared to Mussolini, Stalin, & Hitler as "small foreigners"

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), August 26, 2002.

it actually refers to chiefs of police.

-- djv (vanstretch@yahoo.com), October 04, 2002.

I know many peolple with the napoleon complex but none are really small in stature, some just come from a small country like the nederlands.

-- Kate See (looksy_1@hotmail.com), October 07, 2002.

napoleon compex refers to the condition of being small in stature but aggressivly ambitious and seeking absolute control.

-- jaclyn (jacalina87@hotmail.com), October 14, 2004.