All you can do with regard to your own life is choose the best path that you believe in. On the other hand, what kind of judgement do people pass on that choice? That is the task of other people, and is not a matter you can do anything about.
Billed as a Japanese phenomenon, The Courage to Be Disliked is written as a dialogue between a youth and a philosopher. If you were expecting Japanese philosophy, this books isn’t it. Rather, it revolves around Alfred Adler’s psychology, blended with wisdom from ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates and Plato.
Now that we’ve got that bit cleared out, let’s come to this book.
It’s eye-opening, controversial in parts, and quite a bit for this Jungian enthusiast to wrap her head around!
Adler was one of the three giants of 19th-century psychology alongside Freud and Jung, but his psychology is very different from anything the other two behemoths put forward.
While Freud’s and Jung’s psychology is based on etilogy, which is the perspective that actions are caused by past events, Adler’s psychology is based on teleology, the perspective that actions are motivated by future goals.
In Adlerian psychology, it all boils down to courage, to focusing only on what you can affect (similar to stoic philosophy), and living your own life in the present, one moment at a time.
“Your unhappiness cannot be blamed on your past or your environment. And it isn’t that you lack competence. You just lack courage. One might say you are lacking in the courage to be happy.”
Some of the ideas were familiar to me, others were things I suspected to be true, and some turned everything I thought I knew about psychology completely on its head!
One of the most controversial statements in this book is this: Trauma does not exist.
Instead, Adler says we have the power to choose a different story, a different goal, and live our lives according to that.
“No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.”
On one hand, this does make a lot of sense. But as someone who hasn’t suffered “major” trauma {though trauma isn’t a competition to see who has suffered the most}, my acceptance of this view may be very different from that of, say, a childhood sexual trauma survivor.
If you can read this book despite that claim, with the understanding that Adler’s psychology is probably different from anything you’ve ever heard so far, the theories in this book can, perhaps, help you to see that we all have the ability to determine our own future, free of the shackles of past experiences, doubts, and the expectations of others.
We can live only in the here and now. Our lives exist only in moments. Adults who do not know this attempt to impose ‘linear’ lives onto young people. Their thinking is that staying on the conventional tracks—good university, big company, stable household—is a happy life. But life is not made up of lines or anything like that.
It’s not easy to apply, and it could take some time to really wrap your head around some of the concepts, but it is a very thought provoking book, and it’s sparked my curiosity about Adlerian psychology.
If you have the courage, do read this book. It just might open you up to some interesting perspective shifts!
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