That’s the book about psychology. Provocative title, of course. Takes some time of reading to get to that point though. Audio-book version is narrated by two people in the form of dialogue, very interesting approach. Open person is philosopher and the other - young guy who’s trying to understand the new concept. He disagrees a lot and even yells at times (which might get even irritating), so we could here our unlocked questions while listening or reading to book while that sound guy speaks, which puts us in his role. Of course - one of the main goals is to find happiness. Are You truly happy? Perhaps You don’t need to read such books.
Opposite of Freud
There is a lot of controversy in the book to the Freud theory of determinism. Adler (book is based on his ideas) denies “trauma” thinking whatsoever and assumes we are free to choose how to proceed instead of clinging to our traumas. Instead of thinking of the past as something as determines our present and future - we should think of our present and the tools we have.
Life problems
All life problems we have - are interpersonal problems in the core. If we had no people around us - we’d not know the feeling of loneliness and had no problems at all (would not be able to reproduce yourself either, obviously). So - no matter how much we could possibly want to shut ourselves from others, there still would be interpersonal problems
We create problems
Book starts with the example of a person who would lock himself, because he was afraid to go out due to traumas. However - in Adler’s theory person created the problem, because that was the most efficient way of getting attention from parents and that was the worth being unhappy. In short - we choose to be unhappy for one reason or another.
Separation of tasks
Big attention is payed to separation of tasks. Separation of tasks meaning two things - protecting our tasks from being invaded by others, like parents wanting to decide whether we should marry that person or not and stopping ourselves from invading on other people’s tasks, like not pushing our children do their homework as it’s their responsibility Well - as I’ve mentioned before - these theories often come as “black n’ white” only versions.
Inferiority and superiority
If we don’t accept ourselves who we are - we get fixated and focused only on ourselves. In this case - we are not able to pay enough attention to people around ourselves and form healthy relationships. We should treat people as equal to use and build horizontal relationship with them, not vertical. We should not compete with others but treat them as comrades.
Courage to be happy
We simply need courage to be happy, which we might be lacking this getting stuck where we are. Courage - means taking action and breaking the patterns of our behavior. No-one is lacking ability we just luck courage. According to Adler - everyone have a possibility to be happy, not everyone have enough courage to do so.
Up there are described only the main ideas, without describing in details why or how those ideas could be achieved. Author of the book does it quite well together with the virtual opponent.