Courage and Alfred Adler

Courage. The meaning of
the term conjures the color red, a lion without a heart, a soldier in
a muddy trench, the special olympics. We associate courage with a loud act—a movement taken
when the heart could stop, when the body is in danger, when the tides
are turned in the wrong direction. But courage is not miraculous.
In the words of Cormac Mccarthy, courage is a form of constancy.

As an aspect of mental health, a person can be both En-couraged, and Dis-couraged. Most of the writing I am finding so far about the topic in the realm of psychology, has come from the Adlerian school of therapy. Alfred Adler, a contemporary of Freud's, turned away from the often cynical naturalism of psychoanalysis, and is to thank in part for positive psychology--focused upon the nobleness of human beings. In "the Psychology of Courage", the authors Yang, Milliren and Blangen (all Adlerians) examine courage as the response to a "persistent threat to well-being". It is a kind of psychological muscle, that deals with fear particularly when, the authors say," it grows larger than our fear. In that case, fear becomes anxiety"(p.5). In Adler's world, fear (the kind that becomes anxiety) is the cause of our Inferiority Complex, our feeling that we "are incapable of meeting the world's demands"(p. 6). This inferiority is inextricably tied to our ability to relate socially--the more inferior we feel, the more we are turned toward isolation. Courage then for Adler, is a movement towards social contribution and participation.

-Life Style is what Adler used to refer to the composite parts of each individual used to interact with the world, or "the totality of the behavioral strategies and safeguards that take us to our successes and failures"(8).

-Characterizations of Courageous individual: "the absence of self-serving interest, safeguards, exploitation and superiority, [as well as the presence of] aesthetics, agape, altruism, courage, hope, empathy, meaning, endurance, movement, stillness, coherence, encouragement, reconcilliation, wholeness, regeneration, and social connectedness"(8).