The Truest Pleasure in Life

Niya here: While reading Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents I was struck mostly by how often the word pleasure was employed.  According to Freud, every person on Earth is searching for the meaning of life. This task, however, is much too big for man alone to accomplish. Instead, he explains we try to reduce the amount of pain and misery and increase the feelings of pleasure. Decreasing this pain, is not as easy as it may sound, “we are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay […] from the external world, […] and finally from our relations to other men” (26). Reading this, it sounds like pain is everywhere you turn! How then, can we manage to decrease all of these factors, some of which literally live within us, and manage to find and increase pleasure?

Ironically, throughout all of this pain, Freud cites that love is the center of everything. This love, which can come in a sexual manner or as an aesthetic appreciation can give us our highest highs and our lowest lows. Our most natural expression of love is our sexual love which he describes as giving “our most intense experience of an overwhelming sensation of pleasure” and because of this, we mirror our entire ideal of happiness to this feeling.

Photo Credits: AMC Mad Men Blog

This strong emotional power, which we receive from our need for another person, is so powerful that according to Freud it is how civilization was born. The nature of the relationship between these two people need not be sexual; many times in fact the real need was another person to help ease one’s burden. While these two forms of love, aim-inhibited and genital, form two different types of relationships, friendship and families respectively, Freud conclusively agrees that this feeling is essential to knowing the full pleasures of life.

While we can never completely fulfill the pleasure principle, we must never relent in our search. Freud’s commentary of pleasure and sex challenges each and every one of us to know our sexual side and live it in its fullest. To obstruct this need, is to deny what names us innately human. Thus the regulation of sex or the legal prohibitions of -sex acts “cuts off a fair number […] from sexual enjoyment, and so becomes the source of serious injustice” (60)!