Authors' Note

Book: The Courage To Be Disliked

Type: Authors' Note

Difficulty: Beginner

Reading time: 2 min

Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler are the three giants of modern depth psychology — though Adler remains the least recognized of the three. This book is the authors’ attempt to remedy that gap: a distillation of Adler’s philosophical and psychological ideas, staged as a Socratic dialogue between a young man and a philosopher.

Who is Alfred Adler?

Adler was an Austrian psychiatrist and an original member of Freud’s Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He broke with Freud, rejecting the primacy of the unconscious and sexuality, and built his own system — “individual psychology” — grounded in purposive behavior, social interest, and the will toward meaning. His influence quietly ran through cognitive therapy, humanistic psychology, and positive psychology for a century before he began receiving direct credit.

Adlerian psychology enjoys wide acceptance in Europe and the United States, yet remains comparatively unfamiliar elsewhere. It offers what the authors call “simple and straightforward answers” to the oldest philosophical question: how can a person be happy? That the answers are simple does not make them easy — as the five conversations of this book will show.