compensation

n. 1. In Adlerian psychology, the development of one area of competence to make up for perceived lack of competence in another area, which can be healthy in the case of real limitation or misdirected in the case of an inferiority complex. 2. In Piagetian psychology, the intellectual ability to understand that for any operation there exists an operation that reverses that operation; thus if the height of an object is increased, its depth or width can be decreased to make size remain constant.3. In psychoanalytic psychology, the adoption of one behavior when another is unsuccessful.