Nice. I also used your critique prompt and got something useful:
A smart, knowledgeable critic—likely coming from a background in neuroscience, trauma-informed care (The Body Keeps the Score), or structural/materialist analysis—would likely attack the voluntarism at the heart of Adlerian theory.
They would argue that while this framework is a powerful heuristic for high-functioning individuals, it dangerously over-rationalizes biological and systemic realities.
Here is what that comment would look like:
The Critique: “Not Everything is a Strategy; Some Things are Just Mechanics”
“This is a beautiful, compelling, and operationally useful framework for a specific subset of the population (neurotypical, materially secure, distinct sense of self). However, it commits the Teleological Fallacy: the assumption that because a behavior has a utility, it was designed for that utility.
By framing every symptom as a ‘creative tool’ of the ego, you risk collapsing three distinct categories of failure into one:
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The Hardware Problem (Biological Determinism) Adler treats the human organism as software that can be rewritten with ‘Courage.’ But neuroscience shows us that ‘Incapacity’ (Strategy 1) is often not a choice but a mechanical reality. If an individual has a dysregulated nervous system (e.g., CPTSD, POTS, Autism burnout), their ‘withdrawal’ is not a maneuver to manipulate a judge; it is a metabolic necessity. To tell someone whose amygdala is hijacking their prefrontal cortex that they are ‘using anxiety to avoid work’ is not just scientifically inaccurate; it is iatrogenic. It adds shame to injury. Sometimes a broken wing is just a broken wing, not a ‘Broken Wing Strategy.’
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The Rigged Game (Material Reality) Your critique of the ‘Scorched Earth’ strategy (Strategy 4) assumes that the ‘Game’ (Society/Work) is fundamentally fair and worth playing. For marginalized groups or those in poverty, ‘Cynicism’ is not a neurotic defense against intimacy; it is Bayesian accuracy. If the market is actually rigged, then ‘destroying the value of the outcome’ is a rational adaptation, not a neurotic defect. Adlerian theory presupposes a functioning community (Gemeinschaft) that often does not exist for the subject. Asking someone to have ‘Social Interest’ in a predatory system is asking them to be exploited.
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The Masking Trap (The Cost of ‘Acting As If’) The prescription to ‘Act As If’ and ‘fake it’ effectively encourages Dissociation. For neurodivergent people, the ‘Courage to be Imperfect’ often translates into ‘The Courage to Mask Harder.’ You describe ‘Entanglement’ (Strategy 2) as a defense, but for many, it is a survival mechanism for navigating a world they cannot process alone. Breaking these mechanisms without addressing the underlying sensory or cognitive load doesn’t lead to ‘contribution’; it leads to psychotic breaks or autistic burnout.
Conclusion Adler allows us to reclaim agency in the gray areas of life, which is valuable. But by viewing all suffering as a ‘private logic’ or a ‘lie,’ we drift into a kind of psychological neoliberalism: the idea that every structural or biological problem is actually a personal failure of courage.
Sometimes the court isn’t rigged by the ego; sometimes the courthouse is actually on fire.”
How the Critic would classify this post
The critic might even cheekily classify your Adlerian post using your own typology:
“Ironically, this entire Adlerian framework is a Strategy of Elevation (Strategy 3).
By framing all human suffering as a ‘strategic game’ that can be solved with ‘courage,’ the author places themselves in the Ivory Tower of the Stoic Observer. It feels good to believe that we are the masters of our symptoms, because the alternative—that we are biological machines subject to forces we cannot control—is too terrifying to face.”
what’s the source on this?