When I began The Courage to be Disliked, I bristled at its opening premise — it rejects Freudian psychology in favor of the author’s pet philosopher king, Alfred Adler. “Oh what do we have here, a real innovator! What courage it must take to reject Freud, the most hated psychologist of the 20th and 21st century!” The post writes itself.
I plowed on, encouraged by the format of the book, a Socratic dialogue between a lost youth and an older philosopher. Fumitake Koga writes in a deceptively simplistic conversational style, which may have developed from his own conversations with the book’s other author, an older philosopher and translator of Adler into Japanese, named Ichiro Kishimi. The book is very popular in Japan.
The dialogue immediately addresses objections the reader has against its bold early claim that trauma is mostly unimportant, or that we should trust everyone around us, or that life does not follow a single timeline. I made it far enough to rework my initial objection about the sincerity of the book’s uniqueness. I am convinced that Koga has written a quiet cultural intervention as someone who just really really likes Alfred Adler.
Of the three major philosophers in this triad — Freud, Jung, and Adler — it is obvious that all are part of the same loser’s club in the world of cognitive behavior therapy. They are frequently dismissed or shouted down on the completely valid and well-thought out grounds of being philosophy. Or in the dreaded words of commenters and undergraduates the world over — “non-scientific.” Thirsting for more conversation and comprehension of what I had just read, I found very little work with. What recent community there is around Adler writ large seems to directly stem from this book in just the last couple of years. So reading it is the wild west, boys.
But Courage to be Disliked itself makes the audacious claim that all trauma can easily be forgotten and that people only hold on to their past to let it define themselves. This is Adler’s greatest counter-argument to Freud, and is shocking to hear in a modern context, where “trauma” and “past-actions” have become buzzwords, despite widespread skepticism of the idea’s progenitor.
The worldview of Adler is one that is “teleological,” where we must look at the purpose of our thoughts and actions, as oppose to “etiological”, where we observe why they’re there. A person in a Freudian paradigm might interpret their lack of self-esteem as a result of having a harsh father, and refuse to try new things. A person with an Adlerian view would say their goal is to never leave home, and use self-esteem to justify this.
This has lots of implications, and is a lot to take in. I’m not even sure it entirely contradicts Freud. Is it mainstream? Maybe lots of self-help books say similar things. But it is funny, and weirdly dopamine triggering to read a book that tells you to just be happy, or to just change. Give it a try!
How many actions do we describe as the consequence of some event, but are actually the justification for something else? The other day my friend made a sarcastic comment to me when I told him I (willingly) didn’t know who Hawk Tuah was. Rather than fretting over what I did to make him say this, I now wonder, is he trying to abandon me, and using this as an early justification? But if he’s using a Freudian paradigm, as most people do, even his haters, then it’s obvious I should be thinking about the etiological reasons, the why he is acting snippy.
Or does one person’s Adlerian viewpoint contradict someone else’s Freudian if they share a space?
In our deeply unserious world, perhaps there is a little bit of truth to both. In regards to our own actions we are free to interpret our own actions, but use less caution in others’. We can assume our friend is storing up evidence to ditch us, but for the sake of communication, it’s probably best to take their anger at face value. I could have skipped this substack post, on the justification that I wanted to draw instead, but here I am, with no excuse.
The points are simple and move from one to another which may not always follow your objections as thoroughly as Plato’s actual dialogues of Socrates did, searching into the deepest crevices of curiosity and inquiry. The result is a book that doesn’t enthrall on that level, but is a relaxing read between a fake young man and a professor. We might as well play along, and pretend we are the young man, however unsympathetic we find him. Which, I did find him relatable. There is something compassionate about a self-help book that for once doesn’t just tell you to hustle all the time and make money, and takes seriously a young person who has no direction.
Its ideas don’t always seem to cohere or seemed joined together, though on further reading they might. Another takeaway is that life is not meant to live like a straight line, where we work towards specific careers, or goals, and are cast aside if we fail. I’ve struggled with this, and have seen more goal-driven people as the accumulation of years of identity building and relationships within them. This may be true, but really we should live each day as a scattered dot, or a “rhizome,” in Deleuzean, which are not connected in a straight line but have many entrances, and exits, to many other rhizomes. It seems disjointed but is probably more realistic when you really think about it. It liberates you from a plate-balancing act, to enjoy the moment and to be satisfied that it could be snuffed out by a whimsical gust of wind.
This book didn’t entirely change my view against an etiological framework, but has given me more tools to work with. Before this I was reading books about Lacan. But I am not so deeply entrenched in etiology that I rejected this book outright. They are all tools in the daily life, and odds are you will just choose whichever one is most convenient to you. It is deeply unserious to believe that all acts of interpretation, whether you friend is mad because he wants to leave you, or he is mad because he wants to prevent that, is all on a whim. Yet I cannot think of any other way to put it.
Yes, I should address that the title is slightly misleading. It suggests that following our own paths is what will make us appear random, more node-like and less line-like to the people we know, but not that we should disconnect from people. We should obviously attend to our friends and family and co-workers and community, but not to the extent that it obviates us. Or should we? The book’s rather stoic style seems to push against great ambitions, which the youth objects to as well, using Plato and the other great philosophers as an example. Why is the courage to be normal, and non-exceptional, something that is proposed?
I don’t know, but I will keep this book near my bed, and continue to compare it to Freud. Perhaps it underestimates Freud, like everyone else does. Perhaps it is not as subversive as it thinks, and Adlerian psychology, much like Freud, has been absorbed into more palatable ideas, like positive or individualist psychology. Or Adler is simply more compatible with Eastern thought than Western. I would advise the skeptical reader to appreciate the book as a broader conversation about philosophy and as another ally in the fight against dry, CBT dismissiveness.
I also read this coming out of a few months of psychoanalysis. It was by a retired practitioner who seemed uninterested in Freud, at least on a practical level. He pulled it out of his dusty closet, surprised that anyone would notice it. Any time I brought up a problem I had, or a conflict that occurred that was deeply distressing me, there was nothing more than someone listening, or summarizing what had occurred, sometimes badly. There was no validation, or even fake encouragement, or advice — or solution. “I’m sorry, jealousy is a real relationship killer.” Yes, but I’ve went through all that work to identify it and now I’m being judged! “Is there anything you’d like to address before you go?” Christ.
The limits of psychoanalysis is that it seems to require not just one but two people who are deeply invested in esoteric extracurricular. And that it can take years to get anywhere! If you do not remember precisely moments of your childhood that corellate to your current actions, well I guess you’re fucked. You can just make your past up, or “interpret” it, if we’re to follow theme. It is plausible that given the nature of memory and storytelling, most people do — by necessity. But even then, the psychoanalyst must be creative and rigorous, and invested enough, to know when you’re lying, and not to simply tell you what you want to hear.
Perhaps there are examples of it working better on youtube. For me, psychoanalysis cost a lot and left us both bored and disappointed. This book was cheap and mostly satisfying and interesting.