The Courage To Be Disliked: A single book can change your life

While we might all be familiar to Freud and Jung when we think about Psychology, Alfred Adler is an Austrian physician and psychiatrist that brought up a different concept to the whole subject; a theory that is called Individual Psychology and relates to the fact that all our problems are connected to our interpersonal relationships. In this friendly reading book, the author Fumitake Koga joins forces with Ichiro Kishimi, professor, psychologist and one of the most prominent names regarding to this line of thought in Japan. Together, they managed to write about the subject using two fictional characters' conversation to develop Adler's thoughts and theories. Fumitake chose this model of writing inspired by Plato's work about Socrates, as most of what we know about Socrates nowadays come from the account of other philosophers who had the chance of learning from him directly. Excellent book, a different perspective about how to deal with our problems and fragility.

Reading this book, I finally understand that there is no point in a life that try to fulfill other people expectation. Live your own life. Not anybody else's. It is an unusual perspective of life. It is hard to imagine in the beginning, but after awhile, everything just makes sense. Additionally, the dialogue format between The Philosopher and The Young Man makes it easy to follow. I feel like as if I talk directly to the Philosopher by myself.

It seemed okay when I read the sample, but this book doesn't feel very empowering. It is too simplistic and it blames the victim with a one size fits all understanding of trauma and anger. Everytime the youth asks the philosopher to explain more, the philosopher conveniently changes the subject and never gets round to fully understanding the subject himself. I've heard better arguments on the bus