Success Quote by Alfred Adler

Adler is yanking the rug out from under the comforting modern story that our lives are essentially forensic reports: identify the trauma, locate the culprit, explain the outcome. His claim is less about denying pain than demoting it. Experience, he argues, doesn’t automatically produce character; interpretation does. That shift is the whole point of Adler’s project in Individual Psychology: people aren’t passive containers for events, they’re active authors of meaning, steering their lives toward goals (often unconscious ones) and recruiting memories to support the plot.

The provocation sits in the phrase “so-called trauma.” In an era when Freud’s shock-and-symptom model dominated, Adler insists the psyche isn’t a billiard table where the past knocks the present into place. The past becomes usable material. “We make out of them just what suits our purposes” sounds almost cynical, and it is meant to: it exposes how neatly we can turn suffering into an alibi, or into a badge, or into fuel. The subtext is accountability. If you can choose the story your experience tells, you can’t outsource your life to it.

That doesn’t mean Adler is calling people liars or claiming injuries don’t matter. He’s pointing to the psychological function of memory and narrative: we remember selectively, emphasize certain scenes, soften others, all in service of belonging, power, safety, or avoidance. Read that way, Adler anticipates today’s arguments about victimhood and resilience without collapsing into either. He’s warning that “because of what happened to me” can be true and still be a strategy.