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PHILOSOPHER: That is not because the world is complicated. It’s because you are making the world complicated.
PHILOSOPHER: None of us live in an objective world, but instead in a subjective world that we ourselves have given meaning to. The world you see is different from the one I see, and it’s impossible to share your world with anyone else.
PHILOSOPHER: You may know this, but well water stays at pretty much the same temperature all year round, at about 18 degrees. That is an objective number—it stays the same to everyone who measures it. But when you drink the water in the summer it seems cool and when you drink the same water in the winter it seems warm. Even though it’s the same water, at the same 18 degrees according to the thermometer, the way it seems depends on whether it’s summer or winter.
At present, the world seems complicated and mysterious to you, but if you change, the world will appear more simple. The issue is not about how the world is, but about how you are.
PHILOSOPHER: It is a completely new school of psychology that was established by the Austrian psychiatrist, Alfred Adler, at the beginning of the twentieth century. In this country, it is generally referred to as Adlerian psychology.
PHILOSOPHER: If we focus only on past causes and try to explain things solely through cause and effect, we end up with ‘determinism’. Because what this says is that our present and our future have already been decided by past occurrences, and are unalterable. Am I wrong?
In Adlerian psychology, this is called ‘teleology’.
PHILOSOPHER: No. This is the difference between ‘aetiology’ (the study of causation) and teleology (the study of the purpose of a given phenomenon, rather than its cause). Everything you have been telling me is based in aetiology. As long as we stay in aetiology, we will not take a single step forward.
PHILOSOPHER: Yet those who take an aetiological stance, including most counsellors and psychiatrists, would argue that what you were suffering from stemmed from such-and-such cause in the past, and would then end up just consoling you by saying, ‘So you see, it’s not your fault.’
argument concerning so-called traumas is typical of aetiology.
PHILOSOPHER: In Adlerian psychology, trauma is definitively denied.
‘No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by
our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.’
Adler is making here when he refers to the self being determined not by our experiences themselves, but by the meaning we give them.
Your life is not something that someone gives you, but something you choose yourself, and you are the one who decides how you live.
it’s still because it is his goal to think that way.
Every one of us is living in line with some goal. That is what teleology tells us.
PEOPLE FABRICATE ANGER
Why are you rushing for answers? You should arrive at answers on your own, and not rely upon what you get from someone else.
ARE YOU OKAY JUST AS YOU ARE?
This is because you have not learned to love yourself. And to try to love yourself, you are wishing to be reborn as a different person. You’re hoping to become like Y, and throw away who you are now. Correct?
‘The important thing is not what one is born with, but what use one makes of that equipment.’
It’s a proposition generally known as a Socratic paradox.
Without question, there is no shortage of behaviour that is evil. But no one, not even the most hardened criminal, becomes involved in crime purely out of a desire to engage in evil acts.
PEOPLE ALWAYS CHOOSE NOT TO CHANGE
PHILOSOPHER: Yes. Lifestyle is the tendencies of thought and action in life.
Adlerian psychology’s view is that it happens around the age of ten.
Yes, you can. People can change at any time, regardless of the environments they are in.
When we try to change our lifestyles, we put our great courage to the test. There is the anxiety generated by changing, and the disappointment attendant to not changing. I am sure you have selected the latter.
Yes. Adlerian psychology is a psychology of courage. Your unhappiness cannot be blamed on your past or your environment. And it isn’t that you lack competence. You just lack courage. One might say
you are lacking in the courage to be happy.
saying ‘if only I could be like Y’ is an excuse to yourself for not changing.
According to him, his job keeps him too busy, and he can never find enough time to write novels, and that’s why he can’t complete work and enter it for writing awards. But is that the real reason? No! It’s actually that he wants to leave the possibility of ‘I can do it if I try’ open, by not committing to anything.
‘No matter what has occurred in your life up to this point, it should have no bearing at all on how you live from now on.’ That you, living in the here and now, are the one who determines your own life.
Don’t worry about it. You should read Plato’s dialogues. The conduct and language of the disciples of Socrates are surprisingly loose. That’s the way a dialogue is supposed to be.
People cannot simply forget the past, and neither can they become free from it.
But as long as she has a fear of blushing, she can go on thinking, I can’t be with him because I have this fear of blushing.
When a client shows up requesting a cure from fear of blushing, the counsellor must not cure the symptoms.
Don’t be evasive. Being ‘the way I am’ with all these shortcomings is, for you, a precious virtue. In other words, something that’s to your benefit.
To feel lonely, we need other people. That is to say, it is only in social contexts that a person becomes an ‘individual’.
In theory, yes. As Adler goes so far as to assert, ‘All problems are interpersonal relationship problems.’
PHILOSOPHER: You were so afraid of interpersonal relationships that you came to dislike yourself. You’ve avoided interpersonal relationships by disliking yourself.
YOUTH: Well, for instance, if I see something in a newspaper about a person around my age, someone who’s really successful, I’m always overcome with these feelings of inferiority. If someone else who’s lived the same amount of time I have is so successful, then what on earth am I doing with myself? Or, when I see a friend who seems happy, before I even feel like celebrating with them, I’m filled with envy and frustration.
PHILOSOPHER: I see. Incidentally, Adler is thought to be the first to use the term ‘feeling of inferiority’ in the kind of context in which it is spoken of today.
YOUTH: In other words, the feelings of inferiority we’re suffering from are subjective interpretations rather than objective facts?
PHILOSOPHER: That’s right. We cannot alter objective facts. But subjective interpretations can be altered as much as one likes. And we are inhabitants of a subjective world. We talked about this at the very beginning, right?
From the viewpoint of Freudian aetiology (the attributing of causes), the parents’ divorce was a great trauma, which connects in a clear causal relationship with one’s views on marriage. Adler, however, with his stance of teleology (the attributing of purpose), rejects such arguments as ‘apparent cause and effect’.
However, people who aren’t equipped with that courage end up stepping into an inferiority complex.
PHILOSOPHER: Such people try to make themselves ‘special’ by way of their experience of misfortune, and with the single fact of their misfortune try to place themselves above others. Take the fact that I am short, for instance.
Adler says, ‘In fact, if we were to ask ourselves who is the strongest person in our culture, the logical answer would be the baby. The baby rules and cannot be dominated.’ The baby rules over the adults with his weakness. And it is because of this weakness that no one can control him.
