Varea Romanenco
FLAN 257
November 24, 2007
Sr. Elena Arminio

Freud on Happiness

The everlasting question of "What is Happiness?" has been inquired since the creation of men. Unfortunately, the only agreed answer that humanity came up with is that all the creatures seek happiness, but no one has the concrete directions for achieving it. Our libraries are overwhelmed with books about happiness, but no dictionary definition explains which path men must take to be happy. No mathematician gave us the axiom which we could use to solve the problem of living in bliss. No scientist brought up the formula of fusing certain ingredients to produce the "drink of happiness". Still almost all the people consider that their ultimate purport in
Freud believes that there are three main categories of suffering in this world. "We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful than any other (Freud Quotes)."
It is no wonder then, that being under the pressure of experiencing all these sufferings, people, actually, lower their claims on happiness. Consequently we transform our Principle of Pleasure into the Principle of Reality, already being happy if we can avoid suffering. In this way our goal to avoid the sufferings supplants our desire to receive pleasure. A simple example is when a person decides to outcast himself/herself from romantic relationships in order to avoid the possible sufferings of broken love. Therefore, he/she gives up on temporary happiness in order to escape the sufferings which could be brought by being in a relationship. Of course, the person might actually achieve some type of happiness, the one of peace of mind.
Ergo, Freud argues that our world was created in such a way as to burden us with all types of sufferings and divert us form the goal of achieving pleasure (Farrell, 10). Plenty of our wishes aren't fulfilled