I bought The Courage to Be Disliked because I was curious to learn more about what the book had to offer. There has been an explosion of self-help literature in the 21st Century, and it probably has something to do with our chronic feelings of loneliness, burnout, and fear of not fitting into society. Japanese ways of thinking have also become extremely popular due to the rise of Marie Kondo. So this book seemed to hit all the right buzzwords for today’s society. Yet, this book fell short. Very short.
This book, first written in Japanese by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga is a dialogue between a ‘Philosopher’ and a ‘Youth’. The two discuss Adlerian philosophy in comparison to Freudian notions of psychology and philosophy. The dialogue, I assume, is supposed to imitate the Adlerian discussions he had in cafés around Europe. However, it sounds like two Japanese robots had their dialogue recorded and then translated by Google Translate. Needless to say, the conversation in the book had the same flow as a low-fibre diet.
The Courage to Be Disliked is particularly frustrating if you have studied philosophy and/or psychology at length. Not because the authors say something that isn’t true, but more that they leave things extremely vague, unexplained, and sometimes wholly superficial. This is where I feel the book does a disservice to its audience. There is a part of me that hopes this is due to the horrible translation. However, I fear it is the way the book has been written. So rather than write the book off as terrible, I wanted to unpack some of the points made in the book and hopefully try to frame them in a more positive light.
Wrong: Deny trauma
One of the first things the book talks about is that everyone should deny trauma. It says that people use past trauma for selfish reasons. Like you had a bad relationship with your mother, so you can’t have relationships with women now that you are older. This, according to the authors, would be an example of using trauma as an excuse for your present troubles.
Denying trauma is just devastating and an extremely slippery slope.
“I don’t want to work, so I’ll create an awful boss, or I don’t want to acknowledge my incapable self, so I’ll create an awful boss.” p130
As someone who has experienced abusive work environments in the past as well as exploitative relationships, the sentiment as quoted above is awful.
“I brought out the memory of being hit because I don’t want my relationship with my father to get better.” p148
Denying people’s traumas is what rape culture and other horrible societ,al ideals are built on, and this almost made me throw the book across the room. So what should we do with trauma?
Denying trauma helps no one. Suppressing our past experiences can and often do lead to more mental and physical health issues later on in life. It isn’t that we shouldn’t believe that trauma exists, but rather, that we should not let our past traumas control our present or future entirely. Of course, we shouldn’t let those who have hurt us win by letting that trauma control our lives, but we also should not deny trauma. We should learn to live with it. This is what I hope the two authors meant when they talked about denying trauma, but their discussion of it is so bad that it doesn’t actually help anyone, in my opinion.
Dealing with trauma is like weightlifting. Without any previous experience, you are suddenly given 100kg weight to lift. At first, you cannot even lift the weight a centimetre off the ground. Your muscles shake, you start to sweat, and you will inevitably fail. However, with time and the right help and training, you begin to lift that weight every day until you can carry it around without even noticing it. Although, some days when you’re feeling off and not quite yourself that weight will feel heavy again and you might even need to put it down to rest a bit. But on other days, you will be running like the wind towards your bright, amazing future, and that weight will feel like a feather in your hair.
Wrong: Reject power structures
Now, I know what you might be thinking here. Surely getting rid of power structures and creating a more equal and less competitive society will be better for everyone involved, right? However, to ignore or reject power structures is to deny the society we live in today completely. It is naive and utopian at best. We should strive to create horizontal rather than vertical relationships, as the authors suggest. Although there are many ways to think about power dynamics.
The relationships we have with each other are on a smaller scale than other relationships involving power. These are close interpersonal relationships between small groups of people. Within these relationships, we can look at creating equality and level power dynamics. We can reject competitiveness and lift each other up. Although, when we start to look at society and the structures of power and the discourses of power these structures create, we soon have a different problem.
Michel Foucault, a French philosopher, literary critic, and historian is perhaps the most well-known for talking about discourses and power structures. People who fall outside the scope of ‘society norms’—read LGBTQIA+, women, POC, disabled people, non-Christians, etc.—do not have access to the same power, control, or agency over their lives. I wonder if this gross oversight on power structures is due to Japan’s relatively homogenous society with very few non-Japanese people living there. However, it still doesn’t excuse discussions about women, disabled people, gender rights, or sexuality.
Right-ish: know your task
The only saving grace of this book for me was the authors’ discussions on tasks, sort of. It is important to remember what is our task or what we are capable of controlling. Our boss getting angry with us is one thing. However, it is not our task to control our boss’ anger. Knowing what you can and cannot control is extremely important. It is also essential to know when you need to step up to do something and when you need to stay in your lane. Worrying about how other people perceive you is not your task, nor is it your task to make everyone around you contented.
The part that gets a bit questionable here is that tasks are also built on larger societal structures. One has to only think of how gendered our societies are to realise that knowing your task might reinforce gender stereotypes. Men could easily think, cooking is not my task; being emotional is not my task; cleaning the house is not my task. Similarly, women can also think, being strong is not my task; owning my sexuality is not my task; getting a career is not my task.
As you can see, the aforementioned topics require more discussions than what the book offers its readers. It is extremely worrying that many people will read this book without enough context to understand the full picture. The Courage to Be Disliked is a bit like a pipe dream. It asks us to do things to better ourselves but completely disregards the actual world we live in.
Utopian or delusional? Have you read any self-help books that you felt didn’t quite meet the mark? As always, share the reading love.
bound2books 
I bought The Courage to Be Disliked because I was curious to learn more about what the book had to offer.
Tel-U
I just completed “trauma doesn’t exist” segment …and it has made me anxious!
I want to continue reading but I am not able to read it…. I’ll try again tomorrow.
Thank you for your insights.
Saying “The Courage to Be Disliked is a bit like a pipe dream. It asks us to do things to better ourselves but completely disregards the actual world we live in,” is essentially assuming the part of the kid in the book. He argues with the philosopher that certain statements are nihilistic or inapplicable because he’s unwilling to see the truth behind them or look for ways to reconcile them with “the world we live in.” In essence, you missed the point.
Thanks for your opinion Tony! If you found the book helpful for you – awesome. Some people don’t think like you. I’ve studied and taught a lot of philosophy and this framework isn’t for everyone. Instead of telling strangers on the internet about what points they have supposedly missed, try being, i dunno… Accepting of differences in the world?
One of the worst books I’ve ever read. Completely devoid of any nuance, ignoring all neurological and psychological findings of the past hundred years, victim-blaming, and poorly written.
Yes, building your identity around traumatic past events and using that as an excuse for all your failures isn’t healthy. Duh! Yes, exaggerating and upplaying your suffering as a means to control other people is bad. Duh! That’s what we call narcissism!
That doesn’t mean trauma doesn’t exist, or that it can’t have completely debilitating effects on us (which modern brain imaging has proven, even). And it doesn’t mean we only suffer in order to avoid relationship problems. Sometimes we just suffer!
I can see how, upon first reading, this kind of framing may feel empowering and liberating. But try it for some time. You’ll end up suppressing your feelings, your trauma, and things will get even worse than before!
I liked the bits about not making other people’s problems your problems. But even those were presented in such an abstract way as to be completely useless. Actual situations are usually much more complex and complicated, which makes it hard to determine whose “task” an issue is. I’d even go so far as to say that precisely this difficulty is what makes setting and enforcing boundaries so hard.
It’s a bunch of trite, arrogant drivel.
Thank you Hope Lee for your insightful and fair review of, The Courage To Be Disliked which I have just finished and am now reading, The Courage To Be Happy.
I agreed with many of your observations. As you say, one wonders if translation has rendered the original insights from the “discussion” obscure. I questioned the context of traditional cultural traditions and their role in the discussions. There is a section in the book where the philosopher talks about a hypothetical mother in a family, doing the washing up because no one else has offered to help her, nor do the other family members consider it their responsibility to help her. The philosopher suggests that instead of being angry because she is always the one who has to clean up after everyone else, she should take a different, more positive approach to her (allotted by default) task and take pleasure in doing the task well for its own sake and because she is being useful to her family. I found it difficult to reconcile the authors’ acknowledgement of the important and useful role of the housewife in society that the philosopher says they believe to be as valuable as someone who has a more traditional role of wage-earner with the curiously inert attitude they hold to those who find themselves in the lower positions in society. As so many critics of this work have pointed out, there is very little opportunity to create horizontal relationships within the traditional institutions where work takes place and the majority of people are employed. The power resides with the employers and there is an abundance of legislation in countries all over the world which backs up that power and its consequent and ubiquitous vertical relationships. To be blunt, the usual way with bosses is, it’s their way or the highway. I was a little dismayed by the authors’ seemingly skipping merrily over the need to comply with one’s employers’ rules in order to earn money so as to keep a roof over one’s head and body and soul together. What opportunities do most working people have to challenge the vertical relationships of employment? In the Education system in the UK, there is a National Curriculum to follow, inspections by governmental institutions, regular assessments of pupil and systems to be completed with the results recorded and added to the school’s tables. Anyone not complying would soon find themselves out of work as they themselves are also appraised on their ability to follow established procedures.
Nevertheless, I persevered as it was my first introduction to Adlerian Psychology. What did seem valuable was the insight and description of respect. That we each should show respect to everyone, not by obeisance but in acceptance. Fully accepting one another as and for what we are. Fully accepting and therefore respecting ourselves for what we are. This concept resonated and seemed difficult but “doable”. Unfortunately, within the structure of the dialogues, when the youth finds a principle difficult, the philosopher resorts to saying, well of course, these are very difficult concepts, naturally you’re going to get things wrong because you haven’t really understood in the first place. What he doesn’t do is seem to respect the youth’s position in that he lives in the world and wants to change it for the better. The youth tries to understand the theories but the philosopher is rather like a stern Maths teacher saying, well of course if you don’t understand it you’re just not listening or not trying hard enough! His examples all seem to be limited to one kind of life experience, that of an educator. What about a social worker? A panel beater? Or is it assumed that only certain echelons of society will seek out the books’ message?
Discussions on Adlerian psychology seem to fall into those who have adapted Adlerian ideas to their own, already extant practice and those who critique the ideas as being unfalsifiable. Herein lies the root of the problem with this book. Whenever the student says he has an issue in understanding and/or putting into practise Adler’s ideas (as understood by Ichiro Kishimi) the philosopher excuses himself and blames the student for poor understanding or execution of these ideas. Is this closed circle thinking? The philosopher seems to say, I alone have a true understanding of Adler’s ideas and theories, I alone perceive their truth because I have studied them for many years. Well ok, but how can that be proved? It’s acknowledged that Adler’s ideas are quite vague so how can it be proved that the philosopher has really understood them let alone promulgate advice on their true application? As the youth says, it seems to require a leap of faith which is possibly why the second book was written.
I wonder at the marketing of these books with their appealing titles. They seem to offer a chance for happiness if only the books are read and understood correctly. Read the books? Still unhappy? That’s all on you. Who is reading them? People seeking happiness, relief from their condition. People who need help coping in a world that seems quite hard to negotiate. The youth challenges the philosopher on this point whose response is to insist that people can be happy from this moment on, but he acknowledges that to truly understand the concepts in order to achieve this happiness will take a great deal of work and many years. So, either they can be happy instantly or, they can be happy after a great deal of hard work. Which is it to be? In other words, you have to do the work, there is no easy fix. I haven’t even touched on the apparent relegation of life trauma and its role in shaping the multifarious human beings and the world in which we all must live.
However, many of us bought the books so someone is happy!
I wanted to chime in on the translation bit, because I’ve read the book in Japanese and checked the start of the book in English. Sadly, the translation is faithful, and it’s not particularly well written in Japanese either. He really does say that “trauma does not exist” (トラウマは、存在しない), that “people fabricate anger” (人は怒りを捏造する) and all that.
I do wonder if the author’s extremely idealized views comes from a lack of contact with systemic inequality. Some of the examples brought up are stereotypical problems in Japan, like the hikikomori (though the word isn’t used in the English translation) and the embarassed girl (the word for that is 赤面症, I don’t know how it was translated). But his examples don’t really make any more sense in that context. On the contrary, rejecting vertical relationships is doubly jarring in Japan, where you literally conjugate verbs differently when you talk to your superiors (that’s called keigo). The bit about the housewife sounds equally sexist and out of place.
At about the middle of the book he starts sounding like a socialist (which Adler was). Maybe that justifies some positions like seeing contribution to society as one’s true goal. But it’s hard to connect the advice to the principles, he just seems to attribute positive attitudes with Adlerian psychology and harmful attitudes with Freud gratuitously. Some of the healthier points of view, like focusing on the here and now, sound recognizably Buddhist, but that doesn’t seem derived from the principles of Adlerian psychology.
Well. I just wanted to mention that I was left with a similar impression having read the author’s original words, unfortunately.
(sorry if this comment is duplicated, I think an error occurred the first time I typed this)
Thanks for your comment – and also your insights on the original Japanese. I had also wondered if the types of systemic inequality that we often see throughout the West was possibly lost. So I think you are on to something there.
I have read only about a quarter of this book, and I am left hoping that Adler himself did a better job of fleshing out the bases for his complete rejection of etiology in favor of teleology. Obviously, the question of whether human free will is absolutely unconstrained is a very difficult one, a question that has dogged both Eastern and Western philosophy for centuries. The position pushed here is certainly counterintuitive, so a lot of argument is likely to be necessary to convince people that, for example, “traumas don’t exist.” The claim is repeated here numerous times, but, as a famous Monty Python character would say, “That’s not argument!”
Karen Horney has been accused of being an Adlerian in Freudian clothing. I don’t think that’s quite right myself. I think she tries to fuse those two important perspectives in her work. I recommend it to readers here, especially “Our Inner Conflicts.”
One other note: I tried my hand at writing a dialogue book of this type back in 2003. It also has a sort of guru character. I think, though, that the other characters in my book are more nuanced than the young person here, and that they each manage to provide some information that my (fallible) teacher can learn from himself.