The relationship between literature and psychology, as two complementary and mutually enriching fields of inquiry, provides an effective and productive framework for examining the hidden, concealed layers of the human psyche as it confronts existential crises and the pressures of survival. Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's acclaimed and celebrated novel *Jay-e Khali-ye Soluch* (Soluch's Empty Place) offers a deep, multilayered narrative of the gradual, progressive disintegration of a rural family following the sudden and unexplained disappearance of its head, Soluch. This event leaves the novel's principal, central characters, Mergan (the wife) and Abbas and Abrau (the sons), defenseless and vulnerable in the face of extreme poverty, harsh environmental determinism, and the social pressures of the village of Zaminj. Drawing on the key, foundational concept of "fictional finalism" in Alfred Adler's individual psychology, the present study analyzes and examines the contradictory and at times self-destructive behaviors of these characters. Although such behaviors appear irrational and aberrant at first glance, they follow a distinct and intelligible inner logic when viewed within the framework of each character's illusory, compensatory goals. The findings show that the father's absence awakened latent, dormant feelings of inferiority in the survivors and transformed them into an acute, pervasive inferiority complex, to which each responded by constructing a fictional goal of compensation. Mergan, denying the loss and hoping for Soluch's return, seeks to preserve the family's structure, which explains her silence in the face of her young daughter's forced marriage. Abbas pursues delusional domination and a superiority complex that ends in catastrophe and ruin. Abrau, in the mode of "masculine protest," strives to assert his physical authority, first over his mother and then in the face of mechanization's arrival in the village. The study concludes that the absence of "social interest" in these self-centered, individualistic goals was the principal and primary cause of the characters' destructive clash with one another and of the family's final collapse.