Ask Lemmy

There's something to that, at least with trauma (and it doesn't really explore Trauma). Still, as a philosophical exercise, I found it really compelling. If you end up reading it or listening to the audiobook, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

I also read it. Saying it writes it off might be a slight overstatement, but it doesn't accept trauma as valid justification for not doing something you are otherwise capable of. It generally treats it as a comforting lie to avoid recognizing something one doesn't want to confront about oneself.

That is its most controversial claim, and with our modern understanding of things like PTSD it would certainly need to at least yield a lot of ground. I also remember it advised parents to not really praise or scold children in a way that passed authoritative judgement. Even as someone who thinks parents should generally trust kids to make their own choices more, that seems hard in practice and not likely to benefit a child depending on feedback from parents.

But I would still recommend it with the caveat that you are free to disagree with any of its claims. It's overall very empowering and pushes the idea that someone's worth is not dependent on the evaluation of others. It tries to convince the reader that they are capable of changing things they don't like about themself rather than being deterministically fated to it like Freud might have you believe. With the amount of hopelessness people face now, it's probably more relevant today than during Adler's life.