The experience of control

The experience of control—the sense that one actively chooses, successfully wills, or achieves mastery over himself and the circumstances in which he finds himself—is obviously one of the most fundamental features of human experience. People vary considerably in the extent to which they have this experience, and each of us finds in his own life that it differs from one time or situation to another. A pronounced need to maintain control at all times would seem an undesirable state of affairs, for it would serve to restrict the range of experience within rather pedestrian bounds. Alfred Adler was probably the first major personality theorist to focus special attention on the experience of control and to assign a central place in his system to the striving for mastery or control, but such a variable could hardly have gone unnoticed in earlier times.