“A small circle of colleagues and supporters afford me the great pleasure of coming to my house in the evening (8:30 p.m. after dinner) to discuss interesting topics in psychology and neuropathology....Would you be so kind as to join us?”

Upon his acceptance, Adler became one of the founding members of “The Wednesday Psychological Society” (later the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society), the room where modern psychology more or less began.

Ten years later, Alfred Adler walked out.

Freud told the story afterward as a betrayal, and history has mostly gone along with him. While Freud is the name everyone knows, Adler built out his psychology based on his disagreements with Freud, and it’s having a moment. Yet, most people living according to Adler’s ideas couldn't tell you where they came from.

Freud's model was built on the inside of a person: the subconscious, the split self, the idea that whatever was wrong with you was buried somewhere underneath and had to be dug up. The internal world captivated Freud, almost to the exclusion of external elements.

Adler, however, believed people were shaped by the web around them, family, friendship, work, the whole social fabric a person never actually exists apart from. He believed that everyone shared the need to belong and that personal problems were, in fact, interpersonal. He thought Freud overemphasized sex to explain human behavior.

Instead of looking at a person in isolation to understand their behavior, Adler saw people through their family system, friendships, societal roles, and culture. To understand a human being involved, consider the internal and external worlds together.

Adlerian psychology (also known as “Individual Psychology”) is the psychology of growth, where people strive to overcome difficulties and actually change their lives. Though his name may not be as well known as Freud and Carl Jung, Adler’s original ideas are embedded in modern practice.

Two Japanese psychotherapists, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, took Adler's psychology and turned it into a dialogue between a philosopher and a frustrated young student (which takes some getting used to) published as The Courage to Be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness. It came out in Japan in 2013 and it reveals how to apply Adlerian Individual psychology to contemporary life.

The english edition published in 2018, and has since sold over 13 million copies worldwide, almost outselling my own book, Little Panic: Dispatches from an anxious life.

Like many books, it became famous on TikTok.

Buried in that dialogue is a single question the philosopher keeps returning the student to, one that isn't a direct quote from Adler so much as Kishimi and Koga's distillation of a concept Adler called the separation of tasks.

What that question opens up is either the most freeing idea to come out of pop psychology's raid on Adler, or the most convenient excuse anyone has built for not caring what people think of you.