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July 24 - September 3, 2022
Understanding a human being is no easy matter.
It is even said that to truly understand Adlerian psychology and apply it to actually changing one’s way of living, one needs ‘half the number of years one has lived’. In other words, if you were to start studying it at the age of forty, it would take another twenty years, until you turned sixty. If you were to start studying at the age of twenty, it would take ten years, until you turned thirty. You are still young. Starting at such an early stage in life means that you might be able to change more
It is okay to lose your way or lose focus.
If all the adults could see that young people were walking ahead of them, I am sure the world would change dramatically.
People with neurotic lifestyles tend to sprinkle their speech with such words as ‘everyone’ and ‘always’ and ‘everything’.
PHILOSOPHER: In the teachings of Judaism, one finds the following anecdote: ‘If there are ten people, one will be someone who criticises you no matter what you do. This person will come to dislike you, and you will not learn to like him either. Then, there will be two others who accept everything about you and whom you accept too, and you will become close friends with them. The remaining seven people will be neither of these types.’ Now, do you focus on the one person who dislikes you? Do you pay more attention to the two who love you? Or would you focus on the crowd, the other seven? A
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Adler does not recognise ways of living in which certain aspects are unusually dominant.
Just like miyamoto musashi writes about in the book of five rings
There is no freedom in a feeling of contribution that is gained through the desire for recognition.
We are beings who choose freedom while aspiring to happiness.
a person who is obsessed with the desire for recognition does not have any community feeling yet, and has not managed to engage in self-acceptance, confidence in others or contribution to others.
And then, the philosopher arrives at the following conclusion: happiness is the feeling of contribution. There certainly seemed to be aspects of the truth there. But is that really all that happiness is? Not if it’s the happiness I’m searching for!
But the children who try to be especially bad—that is to say, the ones who engage in problem behaviour—are endeavouring to attract the attention of other people even as they continue to avoid any such healthy effort.
referred to as the ‘pursuit of easy superiority’.
that is a pursuit of easy superiority, and is an unhealthy attitude.
He wants to be a special being, and the form that attention takes doesn’t matter.
Being normal is not being incapable. One does not need to flaunt one’s superiority.
Do not treat it as a line. Think of life as a series of dots. If you look through a magnifying glass at a solid line drawn with chalk, you will discover that what you thought was a line is actually a series of small dots. Seemingly linear existence is actually a series of dots; in other words, life is a series of moments.
Yes. It is a series of moments called ‘now’. We can live only in the here and now. Our lives exist only in moments. Adults who do not know this attempt to impose ‘linear’ lives onto young people. Their thinking is that staying on the conventional tracks—good university, big company, stable household—is a happy life. But life is not made up of lines or anything like that.
Think of it this way: Life is a series of moments, which one lives as if one were dancing, right now, around and around each passing instant. And when one happens to survey one’s surroundings, one realises, I guess I’ve made it this far. Among those who have danced the dance of the violin, there are people who stay the course and become professional musicians. Among those who have danced the dance of the bar examination, there are people who become lawyers. There are people who have danced the dance of writing, and become authors. Of course, it also happens that people end up in entirely
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One would not call that a ‘journey’. You should be on a journey the moment you step outside your home, and all the moments on the way to your destination should be a journey. Of course, there might be circumstances that prevent you from making it to the pyramid, but that does not mean you didn’t go on a journey. This is ‘energeial life’.
one can dance the dance.
And the same thing would hold true for your father, too—he was likely dancing earnestly the dance of his everyday work. He lived earnestly here and now, without having a grand objective or the need to achieve that objective. And, if that was the case, it would seem that your father’s life was a happy one.
Only, instead of seeing his life as a line that he reached, start seeing how he lived it, see the moments of his life.
You think, I really want to do this, and I’ll do it when the time comes. This is a way of living that postpones life. As long as we postpone life, we can never go anywhere, and will only pass our days one after the next in dull monotony, because we think of here and now as just a preparatory period, as a time for patience. But a ‘here and now’ in which one is studying for an entrance examination in the distant future, for example, is the real thing.
If your life, or mine for that matter, were to come to an end here and now, it would not do to refer to either of them as unhappy. The life that ends at the age of twenty and the life that ends at ninety are both complete lives, and lives of happiness.
The greatest life-lie of all is to not live here and now. It is to look at the past and the future, cast a dim light on one’s entire life, and believe that one has been able to see something. Until now, you have turned away from the here and now, and only shone a light on invented pasts and futures. You have told a great lie to your life, to these irreplaceable moments.
So, cast away the life-lie, and fearlessly shine a bright spotlight on here and now. That is something you can do.
What is the meaning of life? What are people living for? When someone posed these questions to Adler, this was his answer: ‘Life in general has no meaning.’
of war, there is no way one can go on about the meaning of life. In other words, there is no meaning in using generalisations to talk about life.
‘Whatever meaning life has must be assigned to it by the individual.’
No matter what moments you are living, or if there are people who dislike you, as long as you do not lose sight of the guiding star of ‘I contribute to others’, you will not lose your way, and you can do whatever you like. Whether you’re disliked or not, you pay it no mind and live free.
Then, let’s dance in earnest the moments of the here and now, and live in earnest. Do not look at the past, and do not look at the future. One lives each complete moment like a dance. There is no need to compete with anyone, and one has no use for destinations. As long as you are dancing, you will get somewhere.
A ‘somewhere’ that no one else knows!
If I change, the world will change. No one else will change the world for me
No, that is not the case. You say you wish you had known this ten years ago. It is because Adler’s thought resonates with you now that you are thinking this. No one knows how you would have felt about it ten years ago. This discussion was something that you needed to hear now.
But if one does not know how to build good interpersonal relationships, one may end up trying to satisfy other people’s expectations. And, unable to communicate out of fear of hurting other people even when one has something to assert, one may end up abandoning what one really wants to do.
If Adler’s way of thinking is hard to accept, it is because it is a compilation of antitheses to normal social thinking, and because to understand it one must put it into practice in everyday life. Though his words are not difficult, there may be a sense of difficulty like that of imagining the blazing heat of summer in the dead of winter; but I hope that the reader will be able to grasp keys here to solving their interpersonal relationship problems.
IS ADLERIAN PSYCHOLOGY A RELIGION?
Latin root of the word ‘science’ is scientia, which simply means ‘knowledge’.
that person would no longer be a lover of wisdom (philosopher). In the words of Kant, the giant of modern philosophy, ‘We cannot learn philosophy. We can only learn to philosophise.’
