Afterword

Book: The Courage To Be Disliked

Type: Afterword

Difficulty: Beginner

Reading time: 5 min

The making of the book

In the winter of 1999, co-author Fumitake Koga was a youth in his twenties when he picked up Ichiro Kishimi’s Introduction to Adlerian Psychology at a bookshop in Ikebukuro. He describes the encounter as transformative — a “Copernican revolution” that denied trauma, converted causation into purpose, and answered a nagging dissatisfaction he had felt with Freudian and Jungian discourse.

What struck Koga was not only Adler, but Adler filtered through Kishimi: a philosopher trained in ancient Greek thought who located Adler within the longer tradition of Western philosophy. In Kishimi’s reading, Adler echoes Hegel on the social constitution of individuality, Nietzsche on subjective interpretation, and the phenomenologists on lived experience.

The Plato parallel

When Koga finally met Kishimi in Kyoto in March 2010 — eleven years after that bookshop discovery — Kishimi said: “Socrates’ thought was conveyed by Plato. I would like to be a Plato for Adler.” Koga answered immediately: “Then I will be a Plato for you.” The dialogue structure of the book is not a literary device; it is the authors’ deliberate identification with the Socratic tradition.

Why the ideas feel simultaneously obvious and radical

Adler’s ideas have a paradoxical quality: at times they seem to state what everyone already knows, and at others they overturn assumptions that felt foundational. Koga attributes this to the fact that Adler is genuinely radical at the level of first principles — the shift from “what caused this?” to “what purpose does this serve?” changes everything downstream — while remaining entirely grounded in ordinary life.

The Afterword closes with the observation that this is not a book to be read once. Each reading, at a different point in life, tends to illuminate a different argument.