“Courage is here understood as the willingness to act in line with  COMMUNITY FEELING (SOCIAL INTEREST) in any situation.  It is fundamental to successful ADAPTATION.  To encourage is to promote and activate the COMMUNITY FEELING, that is, the sense of BELONGING, value, worthwhileness, and welcome in the human community.  As the loss of courage, or discouragement, is understood by INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY to be the basis of MISTAKEN, and dysfunctional behaviour, so encouragement is a major part of ADLERIAN PSYCHOTHERAPY and counselling.

The discouraged person has the same GOAL as the person with courage: to triumph over the INFERIORITY FEELING and to be seen as successful and worthy of respect in the human world.  However, he or she lacks the courage to operate on the , USEFUL SIDE OF LIFE, in the fear of being exposed as deficient.  The MOVEMENT towards success is then deflected toward finding a place of personal SUPERIORITY over others, a MOVEMENT on the USELESS SIDE, marked by pretense, evasion, DISTANCE, and posturing in NEUROTIC, SOCIOPATHIC, or PSYCHOTIC processes and operations.

The aim of INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY treatment is always to increase an individual’s courage to meet the problems of life (p. 362).

Courage is but one side of SOCIAL INTEREST (p. 342).

We can understand by courage one side of COOPERATION (p. 437).

Only the activity of an individual who plays the game, COOPERATES, and shares in life can be designated as courage (p. 166).

In every step of the treatment, we must not deviate from the path of encouragement.  This is in accordance with the conviction INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY, by which so much untenable unity feels offended, that “everybody can do everything” with the exception of amazingly high achievement, about the structure of which we cannot say very much anyway (p. 342).

NEUROSIS and PSYCHOSIS are modes of expression for human beings who have lost courage (p. 343).

All mistaken answers [to the TASKS OF LIFE] are degrees of an infinite series of failures or abnormalities, or of the attempts of more or less discouraged people to solve their life-problems without the use of COOPERATION or SOCIAL INTEREST (p. 299).

The whole outlook [of the criminal] is conditioned by a socially USELESS GOAL, just as the selection of that GOAL is conditioned by alack of courage (p. 140).”

Reference

Griffiths, Jane and Powers, Robert L. (2007). The Lexicon of Adlerian Psychology, Port Townsend, WA: Adlerian Psychology Associates, Ltd., Page. 20.

Words that are capitalized refer to a cross reference to other terms in the Lexicon of Adlerian Psychology.  The page numbers that in quotations are from The Individual of Psychology of Alfred Adler by A. Adler (1946a).