Curtis' /Happiness Machines/ and Freud's /Civilization and its Discontents/ Topic # 1:the reason why it's impossible to happy for Sigmund Freud,

       Happiness for Freud  
After reading the book Civilization and its Discontents, I think that it’s impossible for us to obtain happiness.

On Freud’s opinion, “what decides the purpose of life is simply the programmer of the pleasure principle” (Freud 43). This principle shows that what people “demand of life and wish to achieve in it” is happiness. “They want to become happy and to remain so”. And they struggle not only for “an absence of pain and unpleasure” but also for “the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure”. (42)

But what does happiness come from? “We can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things”. (43) So comparing with the unhappiness from “our own body”, “the external world” and “our relation to others”, “our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution”. (44) And “under the pressure of the possibilities of suffering”(44), “the programme of becoming happy, which the pleasure imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled” (54), so we have to moderate the claims of happiness to the “more modest reality principle” that “if a man thinks himself happy merely have to escape unhappiness or to have survived his suffering, and if in general the task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background”(44). We can make choice from several paths: to get satisfaction from the external world, to make ourselves independent of it, or to alter the world to suit our wishes. However, any choice may expose us to the dangers if “a technique of living that has been chosen as an exclusive one should prove inadequate”. (55)

For protecting ourselves from unhappiness, we create civilization. However, it also seems to be the largest source of unhappiness. People become “neurotic” because they “cannot tolerate the frustration which society imposes in the service of its cultural ideals, and it was inferred from this that the abolition or reduction of those demands would result in a return to possibilities of happiness” (59). For Freud, the characteristics of civilization are order and cleanliness, “a sublimation of instincts” (74) and “a renunciation of instinct” (75). For the repression of instinct, civilization creates discontent.

        Though love, as “one of the foundations of civilization” (80), bring people satisfaction of happiness, when taboos, laws and customs appear with the development of civilization, further restrictions appears, too. “Sycho-analytic work has shown us that it is precisely these frustrations of sexual life which people known as neurotics cannot tolerate” (89) Men are “creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressive”(94) .And though love can bring people together, the aggressive instinct ,which represented the death instinct, prevent the tendency. “The evolution of civilization” presents “the struggle between Eros and Death” (111).And guilt and neurotic repression of instinct are simply the price we have to pay for not losing love. We still can’t escape from the discontent of civilization.

        As long as we cannot deny the development of civilization, we have to repress some of our instinct.Just like people today are too busy to relax, we do not have the same freedom like the people in the past. We cannot do whatever we want to do because we are civilized people. We should keep rational and clam. But to make a choice between civilization and savageness, we can never quit the present life to go back to primitive society, so happiness still is far from us.