Thread by @eriktorenberg

Favorite takeaways & quotes from "The Courage to Be Disliked", a book that dives into Adlerian school of psychology, contrasted w/ Freudian.

amazon.com/Courage-Be-Dis…

"It’s as if you see the world through dark glasses, so everything is dark

But if that's the case, instead of lamenting about the darkness, you could remove the glasses

Maybe you’ll want them back on, but can you even take em off in the first place?

Do you have the courage?"

Freudian -- etiology (the study of causation)

Adler -- teleology (the study of the purpose of a given phenomenon, rather than its cause)

"We humans are not so fragile as to be at the mercy of etiological (cause-and-effect) traumas. Adler says choose our lives & our lifestyles"

Freud’s idea is that a person’s psychic wounds (traumas) cause their present unhappiness.

When you treat a person’s life as a vast narrative, there is an easily understandable causality & sense of dramatic development that creates strong impressions and is extremely attractive.

But Adler, in denial of the trauma argument, states the following: “No matter what has occurred in your life up to this point, it should have no bearing at all on how you live from now on.” That you, living in the here and now, are the one who determines your own life."

He isn't saying that the experience of a calamity or abuse during childhood or other such incidents have no influence on forming a personality; their influences are strong.

But he's saying we can determine our own lives according to the meaning we give to those past experiences

"If I stay in my room all the time, without ever going out, I can get all of my parents’ special attention focused on me.

On the other hand, if I take even one step out of the house, I’ll just become part of a faceless mass whom no one pays attention to. No longer special."

To quote Adler: “The important thing is not what one is born with but what use one makes of that equipment.”

You want to be Y or someone else because you are utterly focused on what you were born with.

Instead, you’ve got to focus on what you can make of your equipment.

A person wants to be a novelist, but never seems to complete his work.

He wants to leave the possibility of “I can do it if I try” open, by not committing to anything.

If he tried and failed, he'd shut the door to that. Many things are like this: invented stories to never try

All problems stem from interpersonal relationships; (all joys stem from interpersonal relationship.)

If you can just be by yourself, you’ll even have a justification ready whenever other people snub you.

That if you didn't have your shortcomings, you too could be loved.

Anger is a form of communication, and communication is possible without using anger.

We can convey our thoughts and intentions and be accepted without any need for anger.

If you learn to understand this experientially, the anger emotion will stop appearing all on its own.

Adler was very critical of education by reward and punishment.

It leads to mistaken lifestyles in which people think, If no one is going to praise me, I won’t take appropriate action and If no one is going to punish me, I’ll engage in inappropriate actions, too.

“Freedom is being disliked by other people.”

The courage to be happy also includes the courage to be disliked.

(Don't be a jerk but:) “You have enemies? Good. It means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” - Churchill

"My father was a moody person. But to blame him for why our relationship went bad is Freudian etiology.

The Adlerian teleology reverses the cause-and-effect interpretation.

e.g. I brought out the memory of his badness b/c I don’t want my relationship w/ my father to get better"

"That’s right. For me, it was more convenient to not repair my relationship with my father. I could use having a father like that as an excuse for why my own life wasn’t going well. That for me was a virtue. And there was also the aspect of taking revenge on a feudal father."

Should strive for, in order:

1. self acceptance

2. confidence in others

3. contribution to others

“People are my comrades, the world is a beautiful place.”

Out of ten people, two will love you, one will dislike you, and seven won't pay attention to you.

Focus on the two that love you, not the ones that dislike you or the seven who don't care.

When one adopts the POV of Freud, one sees life as a great big story based on cause and effect.

So it's all about where and when I was born, what my childhood was like, the school I attended and the company where I got a job.

That decides who I am now and who I will become.

For Adler, You're not bound by the past. Life isn't a linear narrative.

Life isn't like climbing a mountain. You are not "en route".

It's more like a series of dots/moments. "Here and now"

Live like you're dancing: you're enjoying the moment but also going somewhere.

As long as you don’t lose sight of guiding star of ‘I contribute to others’ you will not lose your way, and you can do whatever you like.

Whether you’re disliked or not, you pay it no mind and live free, but don’t care what people say about you

"The greatest life lie is to not live here and now. It is to look at the past and future, cast a dim light on one's entire life, and believe that one has been able to see something."

**

Would love to hear any well-reasoned critiques