Ichiro Kishimi

A Japanese philosopher who spent much of his career on Alfred Adler, the psychologist who split from Freud and is now far less read than either Freud or Jung. The Courage to Be Disliked, written with Fumitake Koga, stages Adler's ideas as an argument between a frustrated young man and an old philosopher over five evenings.

Its central claim is meant to be uncomfortable: the past does not determine the present, nearly every problem is relational, and wanting approval is itself the trap. Whether Adler really supports all of it is debatable, which is part of why the book has been argued over ever since it sold in the millions across Asia.