Overview
A 2013 Japanese bestseller (translated into English in 2018) structured as a dialogue between a young man and a philosopher who expounds the ideas of Alfred Adler — the Viennese psychiatrist often overshadowed by Freud and Jung but whose ideas have had an underappreciated afterlife.
Kishimi is a Japanese philosopher and Adler specialist; Koga is a writer and editor. The book is a reconstruction of Kishimi's explanations of Adlerian psychology in dialogue form, borrowing the classical philosophical dialogue structure. It sold more than five million copies in Japan and Korea before its 2018 English translation.
Key Ideas
Teleology over aetiology
Adler rejected the Freudian focus on past trauma; we are shaped by the goals we currently pursue, not the wounds we carry.
Separation of tasks
What others think of you is their task, not yours; trying to control it is both impossible and the source of most neurosis.
The courage to be disliked
Genuine freedom requires accepting that some people will dislike you for the life you choose — and that is the price of authenticity.
Horizontal relationships
Healthy relationships are horizontal (equal) rather than vertical (hierarchical); praise and criticism are both subtly controlling.
Community feeling
Adler's end state is gemeinschaftsgefuhl — a sense of belonging to a larger community — achieved not through fitting in but through contribution.
Who should read this
Readers who have been repeatedly told their problems stem from childhood and suspect this explanation is incomplete. Also useful for people who have sacrificed too much of their own lives to meeting others' expectations and want a framework for pulling back without becoming selfish.
Who might skip it
Skip if you prefer Freud or Jung — the book is essentially a polemic against both. Skip also if the dialogue form annoys you; the philosopher and the youth characters are thin, and some readers find the format tedious.
The verdict
A better book than its self-help-aisle appearance suggests. Adlerian ideas — responsibility over victimhood, task separation, lifestyle choice — have aged well and are unusually compatible with ancient virtue traditions (Stoic, Confucian). The dialogue format is an acquired taste but the underlying philosophy is genuinely coherent.
The courage to be happy also includes the courage to be disliked.
— Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, The Courage to Be Disliked
If you liked this
The Courage to Be Happy, the authors' follow-up. Understanding Human Nature by Adler himself for the primary source.