Problems For Happiness In Sigmund Freud : The Dangers Of Happiness

Throughout the rest of the book, Freud addresses the conflict between civilization and the individual. He starts with the fundamental paradox of civilization: we created civilization as a tool to protect ourselves from unhappiness; however it is our largest source of unhappiness. He also points out that contemporary technological advances have been a mixed blessing for human happiness. He also asks what the purpose of civilization is if it is not to satisfy the pleasure principal. He later concedes that civilization has to make compromises of happiness to fulfill its primary goal of bringing people into peaceful relationships with each other, by making them subject to a higher, communal authority.

     Another argument Freud makes is how religion is an attempt to fill in the gaps where civilization and the pursuit of life cannot make individuals happy. "The urge to rectify the shortcomings of civilization which made themselves painfully felt" is fulfilled by religion. (Freud,

Sigmund Freud and Carl Rogers are two extremely renowned individuals who have greatly contributed to the history of psychology. Their contributions are the foundation for the tools, techniques, and methodologies used by psychologist today. Although, each psychologist is from different times and developed different methods, they shared a passion for the workings of the human mind. As a result, their drive and foundation has motivated and prompted new theories and research for the future. This paper will provide a summary of two articles highlighting the processes contemporary psychologists use to develop the theories of Freud and Rogers. It also explains their views of human nature and worldviews as

In chapter 8, Freud analyses the relationship between civilization and individual further. In his view, personal fulfillment still can be achieved under the community culture. He explains, “ Here by far the most important thing is the aim of creating a unity out of the individual human beings. It is true that the aim of happiness is still there, but it is pushed into the background”(Freud 105). In other words, community formed with every single individual and forming a community is the most important objective in the process of society development. Personal satisfaction can be achieved maximize if it is assumed that personal development is independent. However, the fact is not that simple. Individuals were born in community and they grow up in the environment that surrounded by their families and friends. They developed themselves along with the improvement of community. Individual and society are inseparable. So when individual considers about achieving personal fulfillment, the community culture is the first and the most primary restriction because they live in the community and they must obey community rules first. That is why Freud writes that personal happiness is always people pursuing but it is pushed into background when it intersects with community culture. For this reason, individual

Marx and Freud are two thinkers of roughly the same time period, mostly the 19th century, into the 20th for Freud. Comparing and contrasting their theories provides for a deeper understanding of both of their philosophies. Marx’s theory of human nature stresses the idea that people are inherently social. He saw that most of an individual’s behavior is dependent on the actions of others, and noted that even the most mundane aspects of human existence are socially learned. Additionally, he believed that a person’s society determines their behavior, noting differences among cultures and the fact that there is no one, unified way of thinking that all cultures subscribe to. This ties in well with his materialist theory of history, which places tremendous

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud composes essentially to look at the relationship between the individual and society. Through Freud's examination of the relationship, a more profound comprehension of the intricacy of mental life is figured it out. Freud starts to add to the relationship ahead of schedule in the work by portraying the most primitive acknowledge of self and the most primitive acknowledge of the outside world. He further adds to this relationship through the pondering of sexual yearning and its associations with adoration, which he claims, lead to the arrangement of families and after that later gatherings of humankind that came to include development all in all. Through inquiries raised concerning society, society, history and the self, Freud has the capacity portray a kind of guide of the brain. This guide Freud delineates further empowers him to build up a comprehension of the relationship in the middle of human advancement and the person.

Freud mainly focuses on human nature and questions the desire, ideas ,and beliefs that shape a human, he then further analyses them. We see in his literature, Civilization and its Disconnect, that he questions religion and the belief in God. He himself does not believe in God, but wants to know why many people follow and trust something that they cannot see. He also questions the concept of human relationships. Knowing that a two person relationship and interaction is inevitable and that it is a part of life, but he does not know if a third relationship, and further on, is necessary. Regardless, human relationships are a part of society, and one of causes of civilizations, which Freud defines as “the whole some of achievement and the regulations which distinguish our lives” (Freud). With one of the achievements

Freud referred to the Hobbes argument that humans are naturally hostile to one another, humans depend on their own man made devices and hostile nature, leading humanity into a war where a man will be against each other (Hobbes 1906, 96). Human civilization is an effort to set up limitations for man’s aggressive

but his theories on dreams seemed to be the most popular, even to this day.Freud thinks that the agent that

In his ground-breaking book Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud postulates that society, despite ostensibly being set up to protect us from unhappiness, has a net negative impact on human happiness.  According to Freud, the three most important causes of suffering are the natural world, our own bodies, and our interactions with other people (Freud 44).  In addition to identifying these as the main causes of suffering, Freud also states that the suffering that comes from other people is the worst of the three.  Given how civilization has changed since Civilization and Its Discontents was published, however, this belief simply no longer holds true.  Freud’s belief that interaction with other people in society is the worst cause of human suffering is no longer valid in today’s world because of the net benefits of society’s protection, because of society’s benefits to the human body, and because of advances in society’s ability to satisfy human happiness.

This misery of the oppressed class arises from multiple factors. First, the people in this class are forced to submit to bourgeois greed through exploitation. Since the proletariat depend on wage labor for basic survival, they are forced into hard labor with minimal payment- no more than required to entice them to work. This system fulfills the capitalists’ greed, but subjects the proletariat to miserable living conditions, because they have no alternative. Marx is concerned with oppression, while Freud is concerned with repression. However, both reflect on the principle that this stifling of the individual creates misery and discontent in society. While Marx believes this misery can be overcome by overhauling the pattern of social order, Freud seems to believe that the maladies found in society are more or less unavoidable. In Freud’s view, suffering comes from three sources: “the superior power of nature, the feebleness of our own bodies and…family, state and society” (Freud 37). He believes that the first two causes of suffering are unavoidable. However, what he refers to as “the regulations which adjust the mutual relationships of human beings” (37) are avoidable. This is what he refers to as civilization, and we feel a “strange attitude of hostility toward civilization” (38). Citizens begin to harbor aggressive hatred

So, Freud speculates on the conjecture that our universe or our world was created in such a way, that we are not be able to live happily for a prolonged time (Farrell 11). He introduces the Principle of Reality, the negative way of achieving happiness, when man strives to avoid

Freud’s view of civilization emerges from his understanding of the struggle between Eros and Death. Freud expresses the existence of two contrary instincts, Eros and Death, via starting from the speculations on the beginning of life and biological parallels. While Eros preserves the living substance and joins it into larger units, such as societies, Death dissolves these units and brings them back to their primeval state. The death drives appear to be regressive, striving for a return to a less differentiated, less organized state of tensionlessness. In contrast, Eros (which embraces sexual and life-preserving instincts) is progressive in seeking ever more differentiated forms of organized life and even the widening of differences in it

Freud suggests in his work that all individuals live in a state of common unhappiness, reconciling their reality principle with the lack of pleasure in their everyday life. Each person moves throughout their day to day life living in general misery, hoping to reconnect with the pleasure and happiness that was removed from them in their young life. While it may seem hopeless, it is possible that this lack of happiness may not be as universalized or necessary to human development as Freud originally believed. In his pieces Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Civilizations and its Discontents, Freud outlines the human death drive, an instinct towards self-destruction that ensures humans continue on their path to mortality; there is no way to reconcile

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud writes primarily to examine the relationship between the individual and society. Through Freud's examination of the relationship, a deeper understanding of the complexity of mental life is realized. Freud begins to develop the relationship early in the work by depicting the most primitive realizations of self and the most primitive realizations of the external world. He further develops this relationship through the musing of sexual desire and its connections to love, which he claims, lead to the formation of families and then later groups of humanity that came to comprise civilization as a whole. Through questions raised concerning society, culture, history and the self, Freud is able to