The Courage to Be Disliked

The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi is a nonfiction work that presents the ideas of Alfred Adler, the Austrian psychotherapist who broke from Freud and Jung, through a Socratic dialogue. A frustrated young man visits a philosopher, and across five conversations the two debate whether people can change and whether happiness is a matter of choice rather than circumstance. The philosopher insists that trauma does not determine us; we act from present goals rather than past causes, a position Adler called teleology. The book’s central claim is that all problems are interpersonal relationship problems, and that suffering enters when we crave others’ approval. Its best-known framework, separation of tasks, asks whose responsibility a given outcome truly is, freeing a person from trying to control others’ judgments. Related concepts include the courage to be disliked, community feeling, and the rejection of praise as a form of manipulation, since praise implies hierarchy and dependence on another’s evaluation. The dialogue also distinguishes the desire for recognition from genuine contribution to others. Kishimi structures the exchange as the young man repeatedly challenging the philosopher’s assertions, from denying that anyone can simply choose happiness to questioning whether self-acceptance and contribution to others are realistic life tasks. The philosopher argues these points through everyday examples: a person who stays home out of anxiety, a parent and child negotiating responsibility, a student fearing failure. The book’s title names its central demand: that a person act according to personal principles even at the risk of being disliked, rather than pursuing validation. First published in Japan in 2013 and translated into English by Adrian Yen in 2018, it has become a widely read introduction to Adlerian psychology.