In his book Civilization and Its Discontent, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, claims that it is a brute fact that achieving happiness is impossible. Despite this, he says people employ various, ultimately unsuccessful strategies to compensate for this fact. One of these means, and the only one that Freud seems to feel provides any sense of satisfaction as to why happiness cannot be obtained, is found in the realm of religion. For those who are not fully ingrained in the religious pursuit and even for those who are, the inability to discover happiness leads to a number of ways in which people seek to at least avoid pain. Eventually, Freud says people turn to love as the answer to this desire for happiness. When this fails, we attempt to control our social worlds through a variety of means and then finally come to accept that guilt and unhappiness are pervasive and they again seek the answers they failed to find in religion. This cycle of a fruitless search for happiness is discussed throughout Freud’s book.
In his book, Freud indicates that the question regarding the purpose of human life, a question that continues to be asked throughout the ages, is only seen to be answered satisfactorily to those individuals who believe in religion, by religion. However, a look into the ways in which men live their lives suggests a different answer. Examining the way in which people live their lives, the answer seems obvious, people seek happiness. “As we see, what decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start” (Freud, 1930: 23). Although we strive to feel pleasure in all things, Freud points out that the human being is incapable of feeling anything more than contentment in the absence of any strife. On the other hand, there are many aspects of life that are, by their nature, capable of inflicting pain or discomfort, including biological forces upon the human body, the external world in general and the actions of other men in particular.
To ensure a life full of happiness, Freud suggests people use several different means of fulfilling the pleasure principle while attempting to ignore reality. The pleasure principle refers to the demand felt by all humans to take care of needs immediately. “Just picture the hungry infant, screaming itself blue. It doesn’t ‘know’ what it wants in any adult sense; it just knows that it wants it and it wants it now” (Boeree, 2006).
This search for pleasure and escape from pain introduces various means and strategies in which the individual might seek to avoid pain and seek pleasure including isolation, inclusion and in the dulling of sensation. Sensations can be dulled through various, including intoxication, trancelike separation or sublimation of instinctual desires to other activities. “A satisfaction of this kind, such as an artist’s joy in creating, in giving his phantasies body, or a scientist’s in solving problems or discovering truths, has a special quality which we shall certainly one day be able to characterize in metapsychological terms. At present we can only say figuratively that such satisfactions seem ‘finer and higher’” (Freud, 1930: 26). Despite this, in all cases, Freud insists that the feelings of pleasure are of a much milder quality than the satisfaction of the cruder, baser, instinctual pleasures. In addition, none of these activities can provide a safeguard against the world of pain, always having some means of allowing upsetting events to come in and shatter the illusion of contentment. Tying these concepts back into the realm of religion, Freud suggests that all religions are just such illusions, alternate forms of perceiving the world around oneself as a means of recreating reality to suit one’s own wishes.
Finally, Freud introduces the concept that some people will turn to love as an answer to the pleasure principle, as a natural conclusion drawn from the experience of sexual love. “Sexual love has given us our most intense experience of an overwhelming sensation of pleasure and has thus furnished us with a pattern for our search for happiness” (Freud, 1930: 29). However, love also opens us up more than any other technique to the possibility for hurt as “we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love” (Freud, 1930: 29). Although he indicates that love and beauty come closest to fulfilling our needs for happiness, both also make us most vulnerable to pain, concluding that the pleasure principle can never be fulfilled, but neither can the pursuit of it be abandoned.
Having concluded that there is nothing that can be done to eliminate the effects of nature on our bodies, nor that there is anything that can be done to change nature itself, there remains only one area of contention in the human world we feel we might have some control, and that entails our social world. “And yet, when we consider how unsuccessful we have been in precisely this field of prevention of suffering, a suspicion dawns on us that here, too, a piece of unconquerable nature may be behind – this time a piece of our psychical constitution” (Freud, 1930: 33). Regardless of how much individuals may feel the answer to the problem of civilization is to return to an earlier, more primitive, organization, Freud indicates this reversion would not provide the solution because the basis of civilization remains at the heart of the problem. “I call this contention astonishing because, in whatever way we may define the concept of civilization, it is a certain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization” (Freud, 1930: 33).
It is a known fact that human beings cannot exist without the presence of other human beings, at least to some extent, for companionship. Even when the social group is taken down to its most basic elements, that of the immediate family unit comprised of mother, father and child or children, there remains a need for association and a built-in mechanism to re-establish that association at any time it might begin to break down.
This mechanism is identified by Freud in the emotion of guilt. “Since civilization obeys an internal erotic impulsion which causes human being to unite in a closely-knit group, it can only achieve this aim through an ever-increasing reinforcement of the sense of guilt. What began in relation to the father is completed in relation to the group” (Freud, 1930: 80). In making this argument, Freud suggests that the sense of guilt is “the most important problem in the development of civilization” and that “the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt” (Freud, 1930: 81). This pervading sense of guilt, Freud asserts, is not always recognized as such because it sinks into the unconscious. “It appears as a sort of malaise, a dissatisfaction, for which people seek other motivations” (Freud, 1930: 83). Here, too, then, it is seen how religion becomes a crutch for humanity in its recognition of this guilt, renaming it sin, and its promise to release the individual from sin, or guilt, through proper behavior as it is defined through the church.
Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. 1930.