The Courage to Be Disliked

You could argue that the three main legacy branches of modern psychology are Freudian, Jungian and Adlerian. Everyone has heard of Freud; most everyone has heard of Jung; some have heard of Alfred Adler. Don't believe me? Type in ‘Freud' (just the one name, no first name) into a Google search field. Now try it with ‘Jung'. Finally, try ‘Adler.' Assuming the search results have not significantly changed since this writing ‘Freud' and ‘Jung' will return the desired figure as the first result, as well as a biographical strip down the side of the page: Wikipedia snippet, birth and death dates, etc. ‘Adler' will get you a page filled with various Adlers — as names, as places — with poor Alfred down near the bottom of the page with one, pathetic entry. Kishimi quotes Adler early on, saying, “There might come a time when one will not remember my name; one might even have forgotten that our school ever existed.” Kishimi then writes that, “[...Adler] went on to say that it didn't matter. The implication being that if his school were forgotten, it would be because his ideas had outgrown the bounds of a single area of scholarship, and become commonplace, and a feeling shared by everyone.”

We are somewhere in between these two events, between the forgetting and an all-pervasive adoption of his ideas. It would be unfair to say that his name is forgotten; fading into the background, sure. With the advent of the internet, nothing is truly gone. An endlessly republished encyclopedia means that the curious and persistent can just about remember it all. You could also not say that his ideas have reached dominance; but if you stand back far enough and get quiet long enough, you can see another perspective beginning to shift into focus in a big way. Before Adler — linked in this book to the ideas of ancient Greece — you have Eastern philosophy: the Taoists, the Buddhist; a little later Zen shows up — in short, an understanding of power and ease which is hardly new and has found greater expression than just in the writings of the ancient Greeks. It is this forgotten wisdom with which The Courage to be Disliked concerns itself, even if it isn't fully aware of what it's doing.

In the form of a Socratic dialogue between teacher and student, the material is clear, methodically presented and comprehensible even to someone coming to these ideas for the first time.

Focus on something and it will grow. It seems to be universal. The best way to get a difficult teenager to be more difficult it to focus on their difficulties. Meet political strife with more political strife and where there was a kitchen fire suddenly the whole neighborhood is alight. This is an extreme oversimplification of Adler's ideas, but the difference between etiology (Freud) and teleology (Adler) in many ways comes down to such a focus. Adler puts the power of our lives right where it belongs, in our hands and on our shoulders. We alone bear responsibility. The notion that we somehow created situations apparently beyond our control is harsh medicine, at the very least, and baffling to many first encountering it. Someone reacting to Adler's ideas might justifiably say, “But we can't blame the victim for the crime.” Adler might respond, “What's past is prologue.” He would probably have said it in German, though.

It might be time that we re-remember the name Alfred Adler. If this book is just one in a line of such books I would call that good news.